With the end of the semester looming, how often have you begun class wondering where the students have gone? Does it seem like the first day of class had every seat filled, but now there are a lot more seats open? That used
It is now well-known that good online courses should make use of the world of free, high-quality educational videos available on nearly any topic. It is also well-known that interaction with lesson content, in which students must think about the lesson material while going
“The greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor. It is the one thing that cannot be learnt from others; and it is also a sign of genius.”
—Aristotle, Poetics
“Gen Ed is crap.”
—Student, senior exit survey
Faculty often use discussion strategies to engage their students and push them into higher levels of learning. But many instructors we have talked to have noticed that discussions can often feel like busywork or small talk. Providing structure is one way to elevate discussions
The end of a term typically brings increased stress to educators. To borrow a term used by Cross and Dillon (2023), stress often “snowballs” throughout the term and then reaches a crescendo at the end. The reasons are varied: exam grading, essay grading, submission
Have you worked with students for months to create a learning community only to have the final interaction take place in a sterile room where students silently write and then slip out? An experience that is the antithesis of the relationship-rich interactions they encountered in
What if a student was having trouble understanding an assignment, and they asked a smart friend to help them? This person had not taken the class but was able to get the student started on the assignment or at least unpack the instructions a
Online courses are normally designed from an institutional template of common elements without reference to any particular subject matter. But this lack of context can get repetitive and boring. Faculty can instead design their courses with a theme that unifies the elements and pulls
There are more than 2,000 islands along the coast of Maine, 200 of which are in the Penobscot Bay. My island, one of the few that is publicly connected to the mainland, is a 20-minute ferry ride shore to shore. We also have a
Experiential learning is “the process whereby knowledge is created through transformation of experience” (Kolb, 1984, p. 38). The benefits of experiential learning include increasing student engagement, supporting various learning styles, and fostering the link between theory and practice.
Shifting from traditional educational approaches can
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