Traditional academic papers often undermine motivation by failing to show students the real-life applications of their subject. But with a little thought, you can craft assignments that add pizzazz across multiple areas of study. These activities provide students with opportunities to think more critically, analyze
As faculty, it is easy for us to fall into the trap of “The Expert’s Blind Spot.” This is the well-established tendency of experts to not be able to understand the troubles of novices because the expert either never encountered the problem or has long
Faculty are increasingly looking for ways for students to collaborate, not only to improve learning, but to teach collaboration skills. Teachers generally do this with in-class collaborations, but the Internet opens up a wider world of collaboration possibilities between classes. Kristin Novotny, a core division
Consider the following two ways to introduce an online lesson:1. In this module we will learn how gender differences are expressed in the traits of birds.2. Here are two photos of a robin, one male and one female. Tell me which you think is male,
“When we teach online, technology is a mediator between us and the students. Because of this intervention, the way in which we understand and experience the phenomenon of student engagement changes.” (p. 211) Claire Howell Major makes that observation in her new book, Teaching Online:
One of the fundamental causes of poor student performance is not knowing how to read academic work. They read for facts rather than underlying themes. It has been proven that the best note-taking method is one that forces active reading by having readers summarize positions
Students will naturally start losing motivation in a college course over time. This is an even bigger problem in online courses, where students can easily feel distanced from the instructor and each other. As an instructor, I notice this as a steadily deteriorating quality of
Some faculty go into online education under the impression that it will take less time than face-to-face teaching because lecturing is eliminated. But we know that online teaching takes as much, if not more, time than face-to-face teaching because of the added engagement with students
Social media is one of the hottest topics in education. Look at any teaching conference program, and you will find that a large percentage of the sessions are on how to incorporate social media into your teaching. This can lead instructors who do not use
Many of us in online education preach that instructors should be active in discussion, but not monopolize it, but we do not have any real research that says how instructor involvement affects student participation in discussion. Cheryl Murphy, associate professor of educational technology at the
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