Strong Student Relationships in Online Courses

The Digital Backpack: Your Resource for Online Learning

In this episode, Jeff chatted with Kevin Santer, Lead instructor with the Career & Technology department at Michigan Virtual. Kevin shared his story about coming to education after a successful career in the computer science industry and how he’s been able to build meaningful relationships with students as a fully online instructor.

Here are some notes about the episode:

• CatCat is a web app that Jeff reviewed in the episode. It offers learning pathways and the means to curate learning pathways, which feel like short courses. It can be used to curate pathways for teachers or students as learners. Jeff concludes that its biggest plus might be for professional learning.
  
• Shortly after his interview for this episode was recorded, Kevin Santer was named 2019 Michigan Virtual Online Teacher of the Year.
  
• Much of our discussion this episode centered around what it’s like to teach secondary students online. The Teacher Guide to Online Learning might be a good read if you have little or no familiarity with online learning and have an interest in helping online learners be more successful.
  
• Kevin discussed developing his own chrome extensions to support his team and, eventually, all educators. Chrome extensions are small software programs that customize your browser’s abilities in some way. To get thinking about how you might use chrome extensions, House of #EdTech podcast episode 15 Must-Have Chrome Extensions for Educators 2019 offers a good intro to using chrome extensions for education.
  
• Have thoughts about something you heard on this episode? Leave a voice message to tell us about it! Your voice message could appear on a future episode.
  
• If you like listening to this podcast and want to apply and explore the concepts a little more deeply, consider joining us in Podcast PD (Screencasting, the Future of Education or Google Forms, Failure-Free Failing & CBE).
  

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