The pandemic’s effects on higher education are giving us the chance to rethink, reexamine, and redesign our teaching efforts. From objectives to tech use to assignment choices, opportunities abound. I want to include the time factor in this process—not the time we put into course
Any list of best practices has great appeal—sometimes immense popularity. And for good reason. Like prepackaged food, they’re ready to go. For busy faculty who aspire to teach well, they provide time-saving instructional sustenance. There’s no need to search through the literature, which is widely
Most faculty live in a world of words, whether it be lecturing, writing, or reading, and for this reason think in terms of text when creating learning modules. But images capture our attention in ways that words cannot. The video of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge
I’d like to begin with the main reason I offer extra credit. I offer it because I am an imperfect grader when it comes to assessing what is impossible to grade.
Have you ever wondered how to structure or strengthen a requirement for students in your online courses to interact with each other in meaningful ways? Perhaps you assigned discussion forum posts and responses or assigned team work only to notice that interactions devolve into superficial
Getting a handle on the effectiveness of widely used instructional strategies is a challenge. They’re used in different fields and with broadly divergent design details. Moreover, studying the effects of strategy as it’s being used in a classroom presents research challenges and an array of
Where do you stand on extra credit? All but one of the more than 20 faculty who shared their views with us endorsed it. By contrast, in a 1989 survey of faculty across a range of disciplines, only 28 percent believed that extra credit should
Guest speakers can be powerful mechanisms to promote student learning and provide additional perspectives on course material. They can help students grasp topics that require more expertise than the instructor may possess and offer insight into the day-to-day workings of a particular career path. Still,
Cases have a long tradition in business education, with a robust body of scholarship supporting their use. They been used for years as part of medical education’s problem-based learning approaches and more recently in undergraduate science education. The National Center for Case Study Use in
These extra credit assignments were submitted in response to our request for samples. We’ve organized them by the goals they seek to advance. In some cases, they are condensed versions of the assignment descriptions submitted, but we’ve worked with the authors to make sure the
Magna Publications © 2024 All rights reserved