Leading a Community in Online Learning Research

Cynthia Ris teaches both online  courses and hybrid ones, a blend of online and face to face, and she studies the benefits and challenges of each class format to develop the best course design.

“I’m looking to see how I can help students’ facility with working online and especially improve their communication and critical thinking skills,” Ris, an English professor in the McMicken College of Arts & Sciences, said.  

Ris believes improving communication in an online environment and quality in online classes is crucial, as most careers require online work.

Ris uses research from courses that she taught in the past to learn how she can improve her courses now and in the future. She uses the course modules on Blackboard to distinguish how communication varied across different courses, and then she evaluates which aspects of the course were most helpful for students and which were the most challenging. 

“What’s best for one discipline may not be for another, but thinking through what makes the optimal online environment is crucial,” Ris said.

Her research with online learning has led her to team up with other faculty and staff to improve online learning for the entire university. As chair of a task force focused on eLearning, Ris reached out to department heads and surveyed faculty from every college to evaluate what policies and practices existed and created a set of recommendations to benefit the community. 

“I became aware of how important it is for faculty to be involved,” Ris said. “If everyone works together, it will provide a better learning experience for students.”

Ris is also a member of the Learning Management System Subcommittee, part of IT governance, which is focused on identifying university needs related to UC’s learning management system, Blackboard. As a faculty representative, Ris has voiced her opinion on a variety of issues, especially around Blackboard course retention policies.

“We all need to learn how we can make this the best learning and teaching experience possible,” Ris said. 

Ris tries to balance her one-on-one communication with students with their communication with each other. She said she sometimes asks her students to be the teacher, such as assigning them to find texts that relate to the class material and present a passage to the class to start a discussion. She wants her students not only to learn how to answer questions, but also to learn how to ask the right questions. 

“Students’ ability to see the interconnectedness of subjects, ideas and even solutions is an exciting potential for online education,” Ris said.