In a former job as a program director for two online master’s degrees, I was required to write a weekly blog post for students on a topic related to the program or school. These postings were designed to create a sense of attachment to the
Universal Design for Learning (UDL), developed by CAST, is an international framework for educators to design content for all learners. The UDL framework guides the design of instructional goals, assessment, methods, and materials that can be customized and adjusted to meet individual needs.
Experience shows that online courses naturally lend themselves to more self-disclosure on the part of faculty and students than face-to-face courses do, possibly due to the increased quantity of discussion. Most large lecture courses have little if any discussion, and while smaller classes may have
A virtual escape room is a learning experience that challenges students to use their knowledge to solve riddles and puzzles with the goal of escaping multiple “rooms.” Each room is a webpage, with students starting on the first page; the riddles and puzzles yield information,
Online courses present unique challenges for both students and faculty. We’ve been teaching and learning in person for millennia, and we know a lot about how to do it well. The same is not true for online education. This modality has existed in its current
The LMS discussion forum was once the only real option for hosting discussion in an online course. But today there are a variety of options, from videoconferencing to social media to online post-it boards. The choices can leave faculty perplexed as to which to use.
Online faculty tend to assume that all student communication needs to go through the learning management system (LMS). But the LMS is not designed for the more spontaneous synchronous chat that you might get in a campus hallway or coffee shop, where someone might say,
Due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, many institutions have restructured their study abroad programs to make them virtual. Students stay “in country” but do a variety of activities to learn about their country of study, such as view expert speakers, engage in virtual
Labs are a common component in nursing courses. In our health assessment course at York University, students attend a two-hour lecture followed a two-hour lab, where they put into practice the concepts covered in the lecture. The lab rooms are set up like healthcare facilities,
At heart, teaching is about explaining something in a way that another understands. But it’s easy to forget this simple fact and fall into a “covering content” mentality rather than a “producing understanding” mindset. This is where we walk through information like reading a textbook
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