Authors

  1. Nurse-Clarke, Natasha PhD, RN

Article Content

The purpose of this article is to provide an overview of the Innovative Online Teaching Toolkit and share how educators can create a similar organizational tool for their own online teaching. After teaching online for more than 10 years, I had amassed a large collection of activities that I used in my courses. When teaching a new course, I often had trouble finding what I needed when I needed it and wasted a lot of time reinventing new assignments for courses. I wanted to find a way to make it easier to store and locate some of my best assignments that students responded well to. I created an online repository for storing and organizing some of my most innovative and engaging online assignments. I applied an organizational method using rows and columns to easily locate assignments that matched my pedagogical objectives, moving from lower- to higher-order thinking skills. The biggest asset was the ability to add a hyperlink that takes me directly to the assignment or resource. The Innovative Online Teaching Toolkit has been a huge time-saver for me and has allowed me to focus on my teaching rather than searching for assignments. I highly recommend that other online educators create a similar organizational tool for their own innovative and engaging online assignments. An example of the toolkit that I use can be found in the Supplemental Digital Content (available at: http://links.lww.com/NE/B237). (Contact the author for a template educators can use to create their own toolkit.)