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Google Hangouts, Meet, and Duo as Alternatives to Zoom

Zoom has become ubiquitous during the COVID-19 crisis to the point of even becoming the butt of a Saturday Night Live skit (NBC, April 11, 2020). But while it replaced the equally ubiquitous GoToMeeting seemingly overnight as the go-to app for hosting meetings, it is

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Graphic Organizers: Strategies to Support Students

earning is a dynamic, complex, and nonlinear process, and graphic organizers can help support this across a wide variety of learners and disciplines. “A graphic organizer is a visual and graphic display that depicts the relationships between facts, terms, and/or ideas” (Strangman et al., 2004,

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Understanding Students’ Experiences of Failure

Failure is a regular column topic—specifically, the need for students and their teachers to reorient to it as an opportunity for learning. Our natural inclination makes us want to run from it. We don’t need to intentionally fail; plenty of it happens without intention, and

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A Framework for Video Discussions

I have never used videoconferencing in my online courses on grounds that they undermine the “anywhere, anytime” convenience of online learning. But with Zoom now becoming ubiquitous in the working world due to the COVID-19 pandemic, I have come to see that videoconferencing skills are

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An Incentive for Note-Taking

Students take notes on an assigned chapter—one page front and back. In addition to these notes that preview the content, students prepare reflective notes that connect the current reading with other content and generate questions about it. Both sets of notes are turned in and

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Online Tools for Durable Learning

In our previous article, we explored retrieval practice, spaced practice, and metacognition as strategies that provide more durable learning experiences for students. In our work as learning designers in the Colleges of Earth and Mineral Sciences and Business at Penn State University, we incorporate all

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“Why Do I Need to Learn This?”

It always takes me longer than I plan when I do anything with my books. I look for one book and see another I haven’t looked at for a while. I look for something in a book and find something else of interest. Case in

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It’s OK to Be Angry, but Work to Bring About Change

While most springs terms are done, our past and current students still have to face their emotions in response to George Floyd’s death, the national and international riots, and what this all says about race relationships. This customizable letter to students is meant to help.

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Using Learning Science to Make Learning Durable

Have you done all you can do to design learning that will truly stick? In this article, we’ll share tips for how we implement three primary learning strategies—retrieval practice, spaced practice, and metacognition—in the courses we support in our roles as learning designers in the

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