My friend Bob Boiko, Senior Lecturer at the Information School at the University of Washington is a master online/virtual instructor. One of his techniques is to use students to "crowd-source" relevant and credible sources for learning specific topics.

The topics can be on anything. In information science, this might be "the join command in a SQL database," or "animals of the Galapagos Islands," or "the Krebs cycle in biology."

Instead of the teacher lecturing (or in addition to), the students seek out quality videos, slide shows, readings, lessons on the topic and post them to the course website - explaining why they chose and recommend that source. If other students use the recommended source, they rate it (on a typical 5 star system). Over time, the better sources rise to the top and the bottom ones drop out.

Yes, you need to coordinate and manage this, for example, dividing the class up so that only 5 or so students choose and post content for each topic or limiting the number of sources each student can post, but you get the idea.

This is one highly motivating technique to engage students in learning and to energize virtual learning. Students are also exercising their Big6 information problem-solving skills - particularly Task Definition, Information Seeking Strategies, and Evaluation.

-Mike Eisenberg