When designed and implemented effectively, online learning holds huge potential for education, but many online courses that we see nowadays are not designed based on sound instructional design and adult learning principles. Simply providing students with online content and expecting them to learn on their
For a while in my online teaching career, I’d been reluctant to use group learning techniques with my students. My students are primarily undergraduate majors who have been out of school for a while and generally need more hand-holding (or so I thought). What I’ve
Most faculty require students to present the results of their research and thinking in text form—the ubiquitous “paper” assignment. But in the real world, information is often presented in visual form. Reports are loaded with graphics to represent information. A mutual fund does not demonstrate
An effective online learning environment cannot be sustained without the development of a learning community. Students must be engaged and feel that their voices are not only being heard, but are a key component of the instruction. In an online grammar classroom, students must also
Classroom Assessment Techniques (CATs) are valuable tools for helping faculty find out what students are learning and how well they’re learning it. Since the 1988 release of Classroom Assessment Techniques: A Handbook for College Teachers by Thomas Angelo and Patricia Cross, college teachers have been
The famous baseball player Cal Ripkin Jr. was known to hit 500 balls in practice per day. If he was working on the traditional model of higher education, his coach would watch him swing once, proclaim that he has the right technique, and have him
“The New Cheating Economy,” an article published in The Chronicle of Higher Education (2016), tells the story of two Western Carolina University professors who set up a fake online class to see what forms of cheating they could detect. Their story shows that cheating is
As professors, we work hard to create the perfect syllabus for our courses. We outline our expectations, students’ responsibilities, and important policies. Ideally, we do all of this with a learner-centered approach. We are told that the more information we provide, the more successful our
Many years ago, a higher-education publication ran a commentary from a faculty member who complained that students were bored by her lectures because she was not entertaining them enough, but that she should not have to entertain them; however, she was wrong.
The Learning Management System (LMS) was developed to allow faculty to create online courses without having to learn HTML. It provided even the least technologically sophisticated faculty member with an opportunity to teach online by centralizing all course functions in one “mothership.”
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