Online Teaching and Learning

Modeling Postings to Improve Online Discussion

Discussions in online courses are both an opportunity and a problem. They are an opportunity for students to think more deeply about topics and respond to opposing views without the pressure of having to come up with a response on the spot in front of

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The Value of Undergraduate Teaching Assistants in Synchronous Online Learning Environments: 10 Steps That Can Make a Positive Change

Transforming an in-person course to an online teaching and learning environment is always challenging, especially if the course has a laboratory or studio component. As two co-instructors of a large introductory inquiry-based biology laboratory course with nearly 400 students enrolled, we faced such a challenge

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Strategies for Conducting Online Student-Teacher Writing Conferences

Conferences between student writers and their writing teachers are a time-honored staple of process-oriented writing instruction. Online classes, while they may incorporate many of the other elements of the writing process model, frequently omit writing conferences since the face-to-face, real-time format that is typical of

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Microsoft OneNote and Teams: Alternatives to the LMS

Since the closure of schools and universities this spring, Microsoft has been producing a wealth of remote learning resources in support of its educational tools, most notably Microsoft OneNote Class Notebook and Teams. OneNote Class Notebook, launched in 2014 and built on Microsoft’s note-taking tool,

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Tips for Facilitating Live Online Events

The global pandemic has caused emergency shifts in how we teach. Online learning is nothing new, but transitioning a once-dynamic in-person class to a screen in a synchronous format poses some challenges for “new to synchronous” teaching faculty. As two department chairs at a mid-size

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Creating Open Educational Resources with Book Sprints

Open educational resources (OER) are gaining traction as a way to address the high cost of textbooks and students’ subsequent reluctance to purchase them. But there are still relatively few OER textbooks in many subject areas, possibly due to the lack of incentive for producing

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Building an Activity Catalog to Improve Course Design

As teachers and instructional designers, one of the biggest challenges we face is trying to come up with multiple creative and appropriately challenging activities for our courses. We have to consider the diverse needs of our learners and the goals of the course and then

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Games as Study Aids

Studies show that many students do a poor job of studying (Miller, 2017). Quite a few just scan the readings again or cram the night before a test in hopes that the information will last until the next day. But neither strategy is especially effective.

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Writing for Wikipedia

The traditional college assignment is seen by the instructor and nobody else. But having students contribute to Wikipedia gives them the pride of knowing that what they are creating will benefit others who use the information. For this reason I assign my upper-division courses to

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