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
Virtual reality (VR) has evolved from a technology of the future into a practical educational tool for students to interact with the world in ways previously not possible. Many K–12 and college courses use free, off-the-shelf VR apps, such as Google Expeditions and Google Earth
In most disciplines, students learn how to communicate using a mix of text, tables, and figures—how their instructors were taught to communicate. But today, complex infographics are among the most powerful means of communicating the significance of information. They take brute data, distill it down
As educators, we are bombarded with new teaching and technology ideas from Twitter, blogs, news articles, podcasts, emails, videos, and other sources. But without a way of storing and organizing this information, it quickly gets lost. How often do we vaguely remember an interesting article
In 2019 we were tasked with building an online graduate-level survey design course. We wanted students to make decisions about survey design and experience the consequences of those decisions in a low-stakes, self-paced environment. The solution was Twine, a free, open-source game-development platform that allows
I recently had an instructor ask whether the feedback he was about to provide to a student was too harsh. He said the student’s writing was a mess and that there was no way that the student would make it through their program without writing
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