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All the suggestions and guidelines listed in this article are the result of years of hands-on experience in design, deployment, and administration of online courses and programs delivered to active-duty military personnel, deployed and with frequent travel. Although the situations can be challenging, the rewards of putting together effective courses and programs are real. In many cases, the military student regards his or her online educational experience with a fervency that may be difficult to understand until one realizes that the course represents tangible hope for the future, and it reintroduces sanity and structure in often overwhelming and discouraging circumstances.

Relevant content and required work: Design lessons and required work to take advantage of real-life needs and situations.

- Encourage connections to students’ lives, and provide meaningful ways to incorporate real-life situations and/or dilemmas into the course content and work. For example, the graduate-level course, “Creative Problem-Solving,” provided strategies that allowed students to take the course content out of the realm of the purely theoretical and into the practical.
- Provide concrete guidance for required work. For example, sample journals, required homework, and solved sample problems are very helpful. It can also be useful to provide worksheets with guiding questions and space for responses. Providing support of this kind helps relieve anxiety and removes confusion.
- Encourage the application of course content to the individual’s life. It may even be appropriate and/or useful to be specific and to allow the student to incorporate their day-to-day life, their activities, setting and context. Not only does this approach alleviate a sense of isolation, it can also provide a practical grounding for the student, it allows the professor to have insight into the individual’s life and to provide relevant guidance.
- Encourage team-building through collaborative thinking: Even if collaborative work is difficult, it is still important to encourage individuals to think of themselves as a part of learning community, with support and guidance. Instead of rote memorization and formulaic responses, students should be encouraged to contribute to a joint project. This requires very special guidance and the development of a building-block approach to collaborations. Perhaps the best design is to do the following:

–Develop a template or worksheet with space for individual contributors
–Ask students to contribute their parts within the worksheet
–Blend the student work by incorporating revision phases
–Each student will be responsible for one revision phase. Each revision phase is unique because each will have separate guidelines. Thus each student will be contributing unique elements to the revision.

- Make support available, both in terms of content and guidance (faculty/library/writing services), and technical/access (information technology desk, etc.)

Resources: Assure access to informational resources via online reserve, or in cases of intermittent access, develop a CD-ROM. The library portal should include support that explains to students how to use the databases, and how to do effective searches. There should also be guides on avoiding plagiarism. In addition, a subscription to a writing service such as MY Access! is very useful, particularly in helping individuals understand the mechanical issues they need to improve in their writing. MY Access! can also help students as they revise and edit their programs.

If students do not have consistent access to the Internet, then sending out a CD with a small library of course-related readings and resources could be a good alternative.

Research and writing support: Although most graduate and undergraduate programs seem to believe in the “inoculation” approach to conducting a literature search and developing writing skills, the reality is that no one can become a fully realized writer after one or two courses. What is required is ongoing support and guidance. Perhaps one of the best ways to bring this about is to adopt a modification of the portfolio. One could call this approach the “Guided Portfolio,” which would allow students to obtain ongoing writing feedback and guidance from writing specialists as well as from automated writing assessment tools such as MY Access!.

In the “Guided Portfolio,” the student gains experience and confidence as he or she makes constant improvements in the writing and revision process. Each course will require the student to complete a major writing project, which would include expository writing as well as an extensive literature search. The student will receive content-related feedback from the professor of record. In addition, a separate faculty member will focus on the writing and give students guidance in writing. Following a checklist of points ranging from mechanics to argumentation, the faculty member will make comments and suggestions, and then return the paper to the student and to the department. Finally, the paper will be submitted to a service such as MY Access! that will give the student copy-editing tips and guidance on the mechanics of writing an expository paper. If the student needs assistance in grammar, then appropriate exercises will be assigned. The paper will become a part of a degree-spanning file, eventually to be the student’s writing portfolio. By the time the student is required to write a major capstone paper or thesis, a great deal of confidence and competence will have been achieved.

Information Literacy: Because military students are working at a distance, most often via online programs, it is more important than ever to be fully competent in the access, use, and manipulation of digital resources, particularly those made available through web-based information repositories. All degree programs should require students to pass a course that demonstrates facility with the basic skills needed in a distance program, including attaching files, uploading and downloading information, netiquette, plagiarism, and using virtual libraries.

Online Advising: Deployed military students are studying in harsh, uncertain conditions, where 24-7 access to a fast connection is not always possible. Nevertheless, they need to be able to determine where they are with respect to their degree program, obtain advising and academic guidance, enroll in courses, check on their status, etc. This is not an easy task, and the online advisor must counter the student’s sense of isolation, the seeming non-responsiveness of advising staff (often due simply to time differences), an interface-mediated learning space, ambiguity, a creeping sense of irrelevancy of one’s coursework when faced with the very real dangers of being in harm’s way, and the student’s slow disengagement of affect when encountering demotivating real-world impediments to online learning. Effective online advising needs to be very high priority in the online program, and advisors need to be supportive, knowledgeable, responsive, and accurate.

Procedural Issues: Some of the items bulleted below may seem obvious, but it is surprising how often they are disregarded or ignored.

- Don’t change the course once the syllabus has been posted, and, above all, don’t change it after the first day of class! In many cases, to do so is to violate the terms of the contract with respect to offering courses. Of course, this does not mean that it is not acceptable to add lecture notes, discussion board postings, etc. But, to change texts, required work, course structure and content is tremendously disruptive, particularly to deployed military who are often working in advance or ahead in anticipation of missions, TDYs, etc.
- Plan carefully before the course begins. Like it or not, the e-learning space is what the student sees and how the student gets information, interacts with students and the professor. It is important to recognize that, like it or not, the web presence drives the course and, unlike in face-to-face instruction, the professor cannot improvise or adjust if things are going badly or if the material is confusing. Thus, the course must be planned carefully and the instructional design/strategies should be solid. Perhaps most importantly, the professor should review the course space carefully before teaching the course.
- Provide feedback in more than way. The student should be able to contact the professor in more than one way. E-mail is one way (with perhaps a back-up mailbox), as well as discussion board postings. If communication breaks down, an emergency phone number or other e-mail addresses can be made available. A web interface help desk is a good idea, too.

Assessment: Taking online tests or quizzes in a combat zone sounds like an impossibility, but it happens every day. Needless to say, the conditions are not as favorable as for a student who is seated at home in the comfort of climate-control and cable-modem access.

- Avoid problems due to power interruptions. Allow a “reset” function for timed quizzes.
- Avoid an over-reliance on java applets and Flash-driven applications. These are often disabled by networks with hefty firewalls, or they time out if one is accessing over a slow telephone modem.
- Upload to a digital drop box in the course management software when possible. This provides more than one access and assures the individual that the assignment has truly been delivered.
- Attachments can be problematic when an aggressive spam-guard or e-mail virus protection program strips off attachments.

Discussion Boards: Many students complain when discussion boards are unstructured and student postings start to resemble a free-for-all blog. While the comments may be entertaining, the time involved in sifting through a hundred or so postings per day makes participation impossible for military students who are accessing their courses through the “morale computers” available for thirty minutes per person. Here are a few points to make discussion boards effective in a course delivered to deployed military:

- Make sure that topics are set by the professor and/or course developer. They should relate to the course content and provide guidance.
- Limit and carefully focus student remarks to keep from clogging the board and to assure that there is substance to the response. Ask for one response to the topic question, and then one response to a student response.
- Make sure that guided questions are open-ended and that there is more than one right answer. Nothing is more boring and unproductive than reading the same right answer repeated twenty times. Instead, ask for examples. For example, one could ask students to provide one example of a film or work of literature that illustrates the leadership principles discussed in the unit on “Followership in Leadership Theory.” This is just one example – the key is to provide students with an opportunity to provide substantive comments, as well as to incorporate their own lives into the material.
- Encourage students to e-mail each other or to set up their own weblogs if they wish to explore a topic in a depthful and/or idiosyncratic way.
- Use the discussion board as a point of departure and/or inspiring force for peer review and/or collaborations.