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
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
As instructors, we want our students to be self-directed learners. We want them to be able to evaluate their submissions and think through their learning process. In fact, thinking about one’s thinking improves understanding of content and assignment submissions (Bowen, 2013). But the challenge is
It is well-known that reflection is a key to learning and retention. Our minds are not computer programs that can simply download information with complete fidelity. Rather, they build knowledge by blending prior content with new information. This process requires a pause in the delivery
Students who transition to online learning often feel apprehensive about and frustrated with the unfamiliar format. To better support these students, I created a “letters to successors” intervention akin to the presidential tradition of an outgoing president’s leaving a letter for the incoming one. My
Many instructors incorporate teamwork into their courses to teach skills that are critical for academic and business success. Yet many students and faculty also dread the inevitable problems that doing groupwork—face-to-face or online—creates. It can be difficult to ensure equal participation by all team members,
The Choose Your Own Nursing Adventure was created from an interest to see how technology could be integrated into the traditional case study approach to enhance student engagement. The approach is modeled on the popular children series from the 1980s and 1990s, Choose Your Own
Educational research has established that learning is more effective when it combines visual and audio, known as the Modality Effect (Reiser & Dempsey, 2012). This combination reduces cognitive load, which allows the learner to retain information more effectively. We decided to create educational videos for
Nearly all dedicated NPR listeners have had the experience of sitting in their car with the radio on after arriving at their destination simply because they could not tear themselves away from a fascinating segment. By contrast, most online students have had the experience of
