Instructors in face-to-face courses can roughly gauge how well students understand the material by facial expressions and audience response systems. This immediate and informal feedback enables them to adjust their teaching in real-time. But this is not the case in asynchronous courses. Students have to
My mother was not your typical 1990s Beanie Babies collector. She didn’t care whether the little pellet-filled critters that she scavenged for at flea markets and rummage sales and on eBay were in mint condition or whether their heart-shaped name tags were still intact.
As educators, we’re all deeply invested in our students’ learning journeys. We’ve likely all experienced the challenges of assessing performance in ways that genuinely reflect what students know and can do. For many of us, traditional grading systems, with their reliance on letter grades, have
A common piece of teaching advice—“Teach them like they are your own children”—takes on new meaning when a close friend’s children, one of your relatives, or your own children get ready to go to college. If you have tried giving your children advice, you, like
I am a political science professor. And we are in the middle of a hotly contested presidential election campaign. My classes are going about how you’d imagine: students are excited, sometimes talking over one another, and occasionally throwing out wild hypotheticals.
Many research studies have underscored the importance of teaching presence in asynchronous online courses, with the benefits including higher student satisfaction, reduced isolation, and enhanced emotional engagement (Oyarzun et al., 2018).
This semester I am teaching an undergraduate biology course on biofeedback, self-regulation, and intergenerational resilience. One of the books we read is Robert M. Sapolsky’s Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers. The book’s thesis is that humans experience chronic stress in ways that animals like zebras
The Hyflex teaching model has been a polarizing concept since Brian Beatty introduced it at San Francisco State University. On the one hand, it offers students the flexibility to attend class in person or at a distance. On the other, many instructors who have tried
It is the first day of the semester in a junior-level preservice teacher course, and 40 students sleepily shuffle in and choose spots at a table with their safety blanket—their friends. As I announce to not get too settled, I am met with muffled groans.
It’s hard to determine just how well students understand the concepts we teach. Our usual criterion for understanding is that students give a correct answer on an exam, but that leaves much to be desired (Uminski et al., 2024). In multiple-choice exams, the student may
