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
Podcasts are an easy way to liven up an online course. Podcasts are nothing more than audio files, and have been found to enhance student learning, satisfaction, and feelings of connectedness in online courses. One use of podcasts is to deliver course content. Instead of
It’s a practice that’s used by a number of faculty, across a range of disciplines, and in a variety of forms. Sometimes the lowest exam score is simply dropped. In other cases, there’s a replacement exam and the score on that exam can be used
More than 200 upper-division undergraduate students (students with experience in nearly 20 college-level courses) were asked to describe two incidents involving other students that negatively influenced their classroom experience. In addition, the students were asked to rate the frequency of the behavior, how seriously it
When final projects are submitted, no one likes to believe that their students haven’t “tried,” but sometimes it’s hard to draw any other conclusion. Most of us work with at least a few (sometimes more) students whose papers are littered with errors. When we are
Individual courses and degree programs give us the opportunity to move students along a developmental continuum. Content complexity grows across course sequences, as does student understanding of it. But are students growing as learners in the same way? Are we designing learning experiences so that
It has never been more evident that we live in a global society. Upon graduation or even sooner, our students will be working with people from other countries and cultures, which means they must learn to become globally competent if they are to enter the
Faculty are urged to turn classrooms into activity centers where lively discussion serves as an antidote to bored students zoning out of class lectures and zoning into images and words appearing on their screens of various sorts. Eliminating boredom in my classrooms is welcomed, but
“Online classes are often intimidating for first-time students,” writes David St Clair. “They wrestle with the gnawing fear that their class has no anchor in the physical world and that there will be no one there to address their fears and concerns.” (p. 129) His
It seems that everywhere online faculty turn, they are being told about the importance of making their courses “mobile friendly.” This is because nearly all students are on mobile devices, which gives faculty a couple of reasons to design for such devices.
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