Massively open online courses (MOOCs) have become a major part of online learning, with numerous universities offering courses that draw upwards of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of participants. These courses help fulfill higher education’s mandate of serving the public good by making university
Some of the best-known theories about how adults learn have been put forward by Malcolm Knowles, but how might his theories apply to online courses? We’ve been considering this question in light of two of Knowles’s theories—the value of life experiences and the significance of
Interest in and use of peer assessment has grown in recent years. Teachers are using it for a variety of reasons. It’s an activity that can be designed so that it engages students, and if it’s well designed, it can also be an approach that
A recent survey of 175 economics professors who teach basic principles of economics courses revealed a widely diverse set of grading practices for the course. These instructors taught at 118 different institutions, including doctoral degree-granting universities, two-year colleges, and everything in between. The findings are
Video material is now an important instructional component of face-to-face, blended, and online courses. Research supports its potential to promote learning, but those benefits aren’t automatic—it’s not just the video, but how that video material is designed and integrated into the course. Selecting the videos
Running undergraduate tutorials and labs is a component of graduate students’ training at most departments in North American universities. The experience is meant to prepare graduate students for the transition into academia, if they wish (and are fortunate enough to land a position), and to
Last summer, I reached the point of eligibility for early retirement. I thought about taking the leap but did not. I decided to keep teaching, asking myself, how hard could it be to teach for another few years? Harder than I imagined, as it turned
How much will students remember from your course tomorrow, next week, next month, next semester, or next year? Let’s be honest, in most cases, not as much as we would hope or as much as they should. What’s at the root of this problem? Students
The reasons we should be letting students learn from and with each other continue to accumulate. Here are highlights from a large cross-disciplinary and cross-institutional study that explored the relationship between psychological well-being and peer learning experiences.
Two articles in this issue explore students learning from and with each other—one deals with peer feedback on writing and the other with the relationship between peer learning experiences and psychological well-being. Both contribute to the now voluminous literature on how and why students can
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