When as a college sophomore I first encountered Benedict de Spinoza, I was fascinated by both his philosophy, which emphasizes intellectual freedom and pursuit of virtue, and the fact that by trade or profession he was a grinder of lenses.
The pandemic has made web conferencing common in the professional world as distributed workforces are becoming the norm. This means that students need to develop virtual presentation skills as well as live ones. Here I will outline some of the most important virtual presentation principles
Last week I happened onto something I’d written years ago about study buddies—two students who agree to study together in a course. I was describing a community college first-year seminar program that partnered students in the seminar and a general education course linked to it.
Because so much depends upon the evaluation of a student’s learning and the resulting grade, it is in everyone’s interest to try to make the evaluation system as free from irrelevant errors as possible. Borrowing from the evaluation literature, I propose the four R’s of
Before March 2020, I believed firmly that frequent, in-class quizzes were a way to ensure students had prepared for class and had some understanding of the material. In fact, I was notorious for pop quizzes, although I did make it a practice of dropping the
1. I call my quizzes “knowledge checks.” The name emphasizes the primary purpose of the quiz—to discover what the student has not mastered in the assigned material. Students do not associate the word “quiz” with my formative intentions so I avoid using it.
2. Both
Micro-credentials and badges have become popular in education today, but there remains considerable confusion about what they mean due to differences in how the term “badging” is used in education.
We hear a lot about the unseemly influence of liberal professors and their inappropriate use of courses to promulgate left-leaning ideas. Some go so far as to claim that liberal teachers brainwash students. We can counter with evidence; a recent study offers plenty of it
How can you infuse your classes with lively, productive experiences that nurture awake and alert minds in your students? What sort of instructional practices prime students to be cognitively active “learners on the go”?
Discussing controversial topics in courses has never been easy—for teachers or students—but in the past few years, it’s become even harder. Controversy surrounds an increasing number of topics, and the intensity of feelings associated with contested issues continues to grow. Many topics now feel so
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