Online Teaching and Learning

ActiveFlex: An Alternative to HyFlex

The Hyflex teaching model has been a polarizing concept since Brian Beatty introduced it at San Francisco State University. On the one hand, it offers students the flexibility to attend class in person or at a distance. On the other, many instructors who have tried

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Setting a Positive Tone Early in an Online Course

There can be a certain inertia to teaching online, especially asynchronously. You and your students never see each other, don’t feel very connected, and by the middle of the semester may have unintentionally begun a slow slide toward phoning it in.

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Making Connections in Online Classes

Whether you love it or hate it, online higher education is here to stay. In the 2022–2023 academic year, more than half of all college students in the US enrolled in at least one online class (Coffey 2024). Of course, this is much lower than

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Failing Forward in Online Education: A Reflective Journey

For me, the move from in-person teaching to asynchronous online teaching took place over decades, but it still presented a challenge that threatened fundamental aspects of my identity as an educator: the dynamic exchange of energy between me and my students and the importance of

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Why Teachers Are Switching to the FigJam Whiteboard

Traditional slide decks for hosting content in live videoconferences have the major drawback that the content is static and fixed ahead of time. Students can only watch passively and respond through the chat box on the side, and their comments are easy to miss if

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Beyond Text: AI Tools for Making Images, Videos, Audio, and Study Aids

We associate artificial intelligence with text-generating systems like ChatGPT. But AI can also produce content in a variety of digital formats, including images, videos, and audio. These tools allow instructors and instructional designers to create custom content that enriches their online courses without high-level technical

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Audio and Video Content Made Easy with Descript

As widely used communications media, videos and podcasts should be at the heart of any online class. The problem is that it is nearly impossible to make mistake-free videos and podcasts—at least if you speak off the cuff, as people who make a lot of

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There Is Still a Place for Oral Exams in Education

While written assessments are the most common tool for measuring learning today, the earliest form of assessment was oral. The Socratic dialectic used by the ancient Greeks, and still used today in Oxford’s tutorial system, combined learning and assessments through a conversation with the student.

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Upgrading Your Online Syllabus

Technology has allowed online educators to upgrade their teaching material from pages of text to media formats with images, videos, and interactions. But the syllabus generally remains a text-only document. Now some educators are working to bring the syllabus in line with the rest of

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