An Elluminate
Success Story

University of Illinois at Springfield English Professor’s Online Sessions Are All About the Students

Recently featured on NPR’s Morning Edition with Larry Abramson, Sara Cordell is an English professor at the University of Illinois Springfield. A self-proclaimed “medium-tech” person, Cordell found herself a bit overwhelmed when she experienced the Elluminate virtual classroom for the first time. With some encouragement from her husband and fellow instructor, Cordell now uses Elluminate Live! to teach one course per semester to fully engaged and enthusiastic students. What’s more, rather than simply lecturing, she holds more open-ended, interactive sessions that are focused on meeting student needs and building an online community.

For Cordell, the virtual classroom is not just about lecturing while students listen passively. “I’m the sort of teacher that has to get a sense of how my students are responding, so I found myself letting go of the lecture method with Elluminate Live! and started to ask questions,” she says. “I found that the students were wonderfully responsive online, even more so than students on ground. I’ve come to regard the sessions as the students’ opportunity to ask me questions in real time and let me know where they need help. I make time for students to engage with me and with each other. There’s that community bonding thing going on.”

"One of the things we’re committed to at the university is that our online programs should replicate our on-ground programs,” continues Cordell. “Elluminate Live! enables me to feel like I’m in the physical classroom. It’s interactive just like a classroom. The students feel very free to interject their own thoughts and ideas. If you leave yourself open to go with the flow, it can be pretty creative online. I think students enjoy it more and get more out of it. The students respond to the technology, and I know them just as well as my on-ground students.”

Elluminate Live! Activities

• Holding real-time question and answer sessions
• Modeling student analyses of work
• Discussing asynchronous forum topics
• Close reading of short stories
• Understanding and explicating poetry
• Viewing archived session recordings
• Conducting exam reviews
• Building online community

About University of Illinois at Springfield

A small liberal arts campus of the University of Illinois, UIS serves almost 5000 students with 170 full-time faculty. The university’s commitment to celebrating technological advances has made it one of Illinois' largest providers of online education, with online learners one of the fastest growing enrollment segments. Hundreds of students take many online courses, earning a degree entirely online or mixing classroom and online coursework.