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Striking a Balance Between Standardized and Flexible Online Course Content

How much of an online course should be standardized? It’s a question that has important implications for institutions, instructors, and students in the online space. In an interview with Online Classroom, Melanie Kasparian, Online Experiential Learning Developer/Instructional Designer at Northeastern University, offered advice on what

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Online Learning 2.0: Add Blogging to Your Classroom

More and more instructors are turning to blogging as an alternative to LMS-based discussion. The instructor assigns each student a blog where they are expected to make postings. This shift fundamentally changes the dynamics of discussion.

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Why Students Don’t Attend Office Hours

More than 600 students answered 17 survey items about one of their courses in order to help researchers explore factors that influence students’ use of office hours. The research goal was to identify ways instructors could increase the use of office hours because so many

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Effective Ways to Structure Discussion

The use of online discussion in both blended and fully online courses has made clear that those exchanges are more productive if they are structured, if there’s a protocol that guides the interaction. This kind of structure is more important in the online environment because

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Writing Good Assignment Descriptions

Concern about the quality of student writing is ongoing and not without justification. Faculty are addressing the problem with more writing assignments and a concerted faculty effort to improve student writing across the curriculum. Authors Allison Rank and Heather Pool, who during their graduate work

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Lasting Effects of Inquiry-Based Learning

The research methods being used to study active learning are improving. They are looking at outcomes beyond a single course at one institution. Here’s a summary of a study that explored some larger impacts.

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Jigsaw Puzzles for Visually Reviewing Material

A group of science faculty describes using a commercially available, inexpensive puzzle maker (Sizzix Puzzle Maker Die No. 2) to make figures (drawings and diagrams) into puzzles. Students got six puzzles with six pieces per puzzle in each package. The figures in the puzzle pack

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