ORIGINAL PAPER Instructional Strategies to Help Online Students Learn: Feedback from Online Students Firm Faith Watson 1 & Marianne Castano Bishop 2 & Debra Ferdinand-James 3 # Association for Educational Communications & Technology 2017 Abstract Increased enrollment in online programs and courses has prompted a plethora of research on instructional strategies that impact online students’ learning. Most of these strategies came from instructors, and others were solicited from students. While the literature notes that students who have more university experience tend to provide more sub- stantive responses when solicited, there seems to be limited representation of online master’ s students’ preferences on what instructional strategies work for them. There is paucity in the literature on how these preferred instructional strategies inform existing theoretical and practical frameworks that could impact online learning performance. This article dis- cusses the Top Ten Instructional Strategies preferred by mas- ter’ s students who responded to a dissertation survey question - What specific things would you like your online instructors do to help you learn successfully? - and relates these strategies to the Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education and the Quality Matters Rubric. Keywords Online learning . Online students . Master’ s students . Online courses . Online instructors . Student feedback . Instructionalstrategies . Distance education . Seven principles for good practice in undergraduate education . Quality matters rubric Introduction What strategies do online students prefer their instructors use to help them learn successfully? The answer to this question con- tinues to gain significance for online practitioners due to in- creased enrollment in online programs and courses. Notably, Allen and Seaman (2017) articulated in their report on distance education enrollment an increase in Fall 2015 enrollments by 3.9% over the previous year, with more than 6 million students taking at least one distance course. This growth rate was higher than the past two years. They found that 29.7% of all higher education students are taking at least one distance course. This percentage is broken down into 14.3% of students (2,902,756) taking only distance courses and 15.4% (3,119,349) taking a combination of distance and non-distance courses. In 2014, Dahlstrom and Bichsel reported on undergraduate students and information technology. After surveying 75,306 under- graduate students from 213 participating academic institutions regarding student technology experiences and expectations, they found that students mostly preferred and experienced courses that included online components. With this phenomenal increase in online student enroll- ment, several existing and practical frameworks have been used in studies to continually explore best practices for supporting online learning and student success (e.g., Clinefelter and Aslanian 2016; Cuthrell and Lyon 2007; Jacobi 2016). A 2015 dissertation research study that focused on factors that impacted master’ s students’ satisfaction and * Firm Faith Watson firmfaith4ever@yahoo.com Marianne Castano Bishop DrMSCBishop@yahoo.com Debra Ferdinand-James debra.ferdinand-james@sta.uwi.edu 1 Murray State University, 107 Center, Oakley Applied Science Building, Murray, KY 42071, USA 2 Indiana University South Bend, 1700 Mishawaka Avenue, South Bend, IN 46634, USA 3 School of Education, The University of the West-Indies, Room 203, Agostini Street, St. Augustine, Trinidad TechTrends DOI 10.1007/s11528-017-0216-y