Connectedness and relationships are important for students’ learning experiences. But online instructors may be tempted to think it is too challenging to fully engage all of their students. How can instructors whet their students’ appetites and keep them coming back for more? In this article,
A couple of months ago we posted a series of questions about teacher questions—the ones they ask students—and asked for your answers. Here’s a compilation of those responses with a few of my comments sprinkled throughout.
Course planning for the coming academic year is either underway or about to start. It offers a chance to look at how learning experiences—exams, assignments, and activities—are sequenced in a course and what they add up to collectively. Assembling learning experiences so that they effectively
Universal Design for Learning (UDL), developed by CAST, is an international framework for educators to design content for all learners. The UDL framework guides the design of instructional goals, assessment, methods, and materials that can be customized and adjusted to meet individual needs.
Teachers employ a vast array of instructional methods, but one universal element is the use of examples. No teaching approach eschews examples. On the contrary, guides for effective teaching embrace the value of using good examples (e.g., Rosenshine, 2012). Given their importance, teachers should design
Experience shows that online courses naturally lend themselves to more self-disclosure on the part of faculty and students than face-to-face courses do, possibly due to the increased quantity of discussion. Most large lecture courses have little if any discussion, and while smaller classes may have
Should students change their answers on multiple choice questions? Believe it or not, that question has been explored empirically rather at length. Is it an important enough query to merit quantitative analysis? In and of itself, maybe not, but I wonder whether it isn’t related
A virtual escape room is a learning experience that challenges students to use their knowledge to solve riddles and puzzles with the goal of escaping multiple “rooms.” Each room is a webpage, with students starting on the first page; the riddles and puzzles yield information,
Paul Feigenbaum’s article (2021) on failure changed how I think about it. I’ve written a lot about failure—advocating for it and what it contributes to learning—and Feigenbaum agrees: failure plays a powerful role in learning. He calls it “generative failure” and describes it as an
Online courses present unique challenges for both students and faculty. We’ve been teaching and learning in person for millennia, and we know a lot about how to do it well. The same is not true for online education. This modality has existed in its current
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