Swapna Kumar, Florence Martin, Kiran Budhrani, and Albert Ritzhaupt (2019) recently released the results of a study of the practices of online teachers who had won awards from one of three professional organizations. These practices, summarized below, can serve as guides for all online teachers.
Educators have long praised the value of simulations and role-playing exercises and the impact of those experiential activities on student learning. As Bjorn Billhardt (2005) explains, “Simulations offer huge advantages over lectures, handbooks, or on-site trainers. They engage students while helping them retain and apply
Student discussions have long been both thorn and rose of online courses. When online learning was first introduced to academia, skeptical face-to-face instructors believed that the courses must lack any discussion, likening them to a television broadcast. But online educators immediately recognized that the format
In my years as an instructional designer at Indiana University, I’ve heard the same complaint again and again across wholly disparate courses and programs: “I would like more and better student interaction in my online courses.” These teachers have used traditional online discussion boards and
As educators, we need to recognize the difference between the Gen Z students of today and the millennial students of a few years ago. The Pew Research Center designated the last birth year for millennials as 1996. The oldest members of Gen Z, born in
An engineer once told me that he needed to teach himself engineering in college. By that he meant that his professors would go through sample problems in lectures, demonstrating solution processes for different examples, but that didn’t teach him the underlying thinking that they were
Most higher education institutions have put their classes online for the remainder of the term. Higher education is well positioned to take classes online because so much of teaching in higher education is lecture driven rather than reliant on one-on-one interactions as in the K–12
We observed a new level of interest and excitement among participants during a recent faculty-teaching workshop. We attribute most of this energy to an innovative course design tool that we have been piloting at our university. Course design cards help faculty to brainstorm new approaches
A national survey found that Generation Z students (defined as those born between 1995 and 2012) ranked YouTube as their favorite learning tool (Overland, 2018). Yet many instructors think to themselves, “There is no way I could create videos like the professionals.” The good news
It is mid-semester, and you are excited as you have spent a lot of time creating content for your course and designing online activities to engage students. You are wondering whether and how students are using these materials. Below, I highlight six types of readily
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