With no natural starts and stops in the online learning experience and a nearly infinite number of online resources, it can be overwhelming for faculty to teach effectively while balancing their overall workload. The reality is that more time investment does not equate to more effectiveness; rather, effectiveness is directly linked to investing teaching time in instructional activities that have the greatest impact on student learning, satisfaction, and engagement.

This Magna 20-Minute Mentor demonstrates how to create a teaching calendar that allows faculty to focus their time, attention, and priorities on instructional activities that have the greatest impact on the student learning experience while simultaneously ensuring a reasonable workload. A teaching calendar helps faculty teaching online stay focused on the key activities by providing structure and guidance to ensure that only the right things are being focused on in the online classroom.

Learning Goals

After viewing this Magna 20-Minute Mentor, participants will be able to:

• Understand the need to create more structure and boundaries to manage online teaching time
• Identify a time-based distribution of instructional activities within the online classroom
• Create a teaching calendar
• Manage online instructional time with respect to activities that have the greatest impact on student learning

Topics Covered

• Time challenges in the online classroom
• Appropriate distribution of teaching time for effective instruction
• Online instructional activities with the greatest impact on student learning
• Creation of a teaching calendar to prioritize and focus time