American University’s online MS in Nutrition Education Professors recently shared their perspectives and their experience teaching in the online learning environment. Suzanne Carmack and Allison Marco discuss benefits of online learning, tips on how to be successful online and how they integrate their learnings from their online classes into their campus classes.
Integrating Learnings from Online Discussions
Suzanne Carmack: The best times I find when I’m teaching whether it’s in a face-to-face classroom or an online portal is when I can step back and I can see the students nudging, challenging, and questioning each other. Of course it’s all done in a respectful way and that’s part of my role as a teacher too is to ensure we have a diverse, culturally represented, supportive environment where people feel they can share their voice whether that is in person or online.
In fact, in my face-to-face classes, I’m bringing a lot of what I’m finding in my online teaching to my face-to-face class environments. What I’m finding is we have more of an ability to share our perspectives and the way we are all living now, we tend to be a lot more open when we are in that mediated environment.
Benefits of Online
Allison Marco: I think that the online program is at the forefront of new technology, especially in the nutrition field and I’m really excited to be a part of that. Nutrition information is available everywhere – internet, movies, television, commercials - everywhere you can imagine. So having this opportunity to teach online and learn new techniques and technology for the nutrition field is really beneficial.
How to Be Successful in an Online Program
Allison Marco: For online courses especially, but also courses in general, being self-sufficient and doing well with time management is important to being successful in the class. Also, be open and reach out to classmates and your professor to get any information needed, such as more detail regarding the class or nutrition in general to get a broader learning experience. Utilize your resources.
More Resources
Adjunct Professor Elizabeth Eilender was recently featured in Food & Nutrition and wrote a post on How Online Learning is Changing Classroom Discussion.
To learn more about American University’s online Master of Science in Nutrition Education, request more information or call us toll free at 855-725-7614.
