Assignments are one of those ever-present but not-often-thought-about aspects of teaching and learning. Pretty much every course has them, and teachers grade them. The grade indicates how much the student learned by doing them. But is this learning something that students recognize? Too often students
This article is not a Luddite’s rejection of digital technology. Even though I feel some intellectual kinship with Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau in regard to how some tools affect people constitutionally, I readily admit that digital technology has made my job as a teacher much
Twitter’s greatest contribution to information management is the humble hashtag. Previously, most social media information was organized by source. Think of how Facebook is organized around the content contributors rather than content category. But hashtags introduced a method for organizing information by type. I can
The power of games as learning devices is well established, but transforming course content into an actual game is a huge undertaking. After all, gaming companies spend millions of dollars developing each game. A better approach is to incorporate gaming elements into regular course activities.
Over the past 10 years in my online courses, I’ve used scavenger hunting as a fun way for students to investigate a topic, find answers to questions, and create a final project. A scavenger hunt requires students to actively search for a variety of types
Many faculty members express concern that discussion in their online courses is shallow or sparse. What is it that makes meaningful dialogue so elusive in online courses? Some practices in online course design and discussion facilitation can actually encourage superficial dialogue. Faculty grading and feedback
Although online education has been around for nearly 20 years, I still see a number of common mistakes among online course developers. Here are the top course design mistakes in online education and how to avoid them in your courses.
Brief—that pretty much describes exam debriefs in many courses. The teacher goes over the most commonly missed questions, and the students can ask about answers but generally don’t. These kinds of debriefs don’t take up a lot of class time, but that’s about all that
We know students are afraid of making mistakes, often dreadfully so. And so we talk a good line about the learning potential inherent in mistakes.
But are we afraid to let students make mistakes? Is it just a problem with students not wanting to be
We’re at that time of the academic year when the daily details begin to pile up. Teach a class, grade assignments, schedule advisees, and prep for tomorrow. It may not feel like a grind just yet, but it does require lots of focused energy, which
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