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iorad: A Game Changer for Tutorials

As a teacher I find myself constantly making video tutorials for students, colleagues, and others. These can be steps for completing an assignment, such as posting to a Padlet board, or for processes, like setting up a Google Form. Until now, I have always used

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Learning Something New: Always a Challenge

I’m the midst of trying to learn a knitting technique and discovering how easily I forget what I know about learning. Perhaps you’ve had similar experiences, but what I really want us to remember is how new learning experiences challenge students more intensely than they

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Modeling Discussion Board Posts with Discussion Labs

Discussion is one of the biggest challenges for online students, and poor discussion is one of the biggest complaints among online faculty. Student responses are often perfunctory, lacking the depth the instructor desires. But rather than laziness, poor discussion often results from students not knowing

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Examining the Quiz

We’re ready to share responses to our call for insights, experiences, and opinions on quizzes. You can expect to see them over the course of the next several weeks. I’ll start here with an overview of the issues to consider if you want to start

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Balancing the Teaching-Learning Equation

When I first started working on teaching and learning, I focused on teaching. The instructional development program I headed at Penn State had as its mission “to support faculty efforts to maintain and improve instructional quality.” I read, thought, and wrote about characteristics known to

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The Continued Tyranny of Content

“Facts are stubborn things,” John Adams wrote over 250 years ago. He was right in more ways than one—for our field of history and probably for yours too.

Despite all the manufactured uproar over the teaching of “divisive concepts” like critical race theory (Waxman 2021),

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Small-Block Online Course Design: What We Can Learn from MOOCs

The format of face-to-face education encourages “big-block” course design. Faculty are assigned one to three classes per week, each between 50 minutes and three hours long, and those become the atom units of planning. They devote most classes to delivering learning content as lectures and

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What Do We Mean by Student Success?

I hadn’t given any thought to what student success means because like other widely used descriptors, its meaning appears obvious. And then I read Weatherton and Schussle’s (2021) essay. They point out that we think we know we’re talking about but in fact success has

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