The motivation to find alternatives to online lecture is pretty obvious. Lecture alone does not work very well as an instructional strategy for a variety of reasons. This is true in the traditional classroom but is especially apparent in online courses where onscreen reading can be very tedious and recorded lecture hogs bandwidth without necessarily adding any value. In any case, recent views of  instructional "best practice" focus on a more student centered and participatory model of teaching and learning. 

In a recent workshop at the SUNY Conference on Instructional Technologies (CIT) called "50 Alternatives to Lecture for Your Online Course"  participants  discussed, fleshed out and  implemented some of these alternatives in their online courses. In the best spirit of a student centered approach the workshop did not have "known answer questions" and we  depended on participants to articulate strategies for implementing these in collaboration with ourselves and each other. Here are the 50 alternatives we discussed: