Many of our course revisions happen without much planning. A new idea comes down the pike, an interesting technology option becomes available, a colleague shares a strategy that effectively deals with an issue, and we just use it! So, the course evolves and changes but
Getting students to take advantage of office hours remains a challenge. Most of the time only a small percentage of students show up and often not those most in need of help. When students don’t take advantage of office hours, they lose the chance to
I was watching a video of several of my students teaching this week. I had to be away for a conference, and they were scheduled to teach that day anyway, so I asked our Center for Teaching Excellence to record it. I would evaluate them
I continue to worry that we devalue the affective dimensions of teaching—the emotional energy it takes to keep delivering high-quality instruction.
Most faculty are on solid ground in terms of expertise. We know and, in most cases, love our content. We don’t get tired of
One of the best ways to build rapport with students is through a video welcome or bio. Videos capture our attention. Videos also humanize us to others and help kick off the teaching relationship.
While online learning provides students with accessibility, flexibility, and reflective interaction, it can also “create a sense of isolation, making it particularly difficult for a community of inquiry to thrive” (Borup, West, & Graham, 2012, p. 195). In these contexts, it can be difficult to
Social media fundamentally transformed the web by making everyone a content producer. But this move from web 1.0 to 2.0 also exploded the number of websites that people wanted to monitor. Now we want to see what is going on with our hundreds of Facebook
One of the central challenges to structuring meaningful discussion in courses with online components is to identify what shared learning experiences students are able to accomplish on their own, what learning experiences require dynamic support, and what kind of dynamic support would be best (e.g.,
One of the best things about online education is the ease with which we can incorporate retrieval practice, also known as the testing effect, into our teaching. This is the well-established cognitive principle that attempting to get information out of memory, as we do when
Have you ever experienced the eerie, but familiar, sensation that your students have not done the required reading and are not prepared for class? We all know that our class sessions would be a lot more enjoyable—for us and for our students—if our students were
