The term design thinking has cropped up in education journals and conference brochures more and more over the past few years, but its meaning remains a mystery to most instructors. The term comes from the business sector, where it refers to a process of learning
Instructors who teach online do not share a physical space with their students, and therefore they need to establish their presence in creative ways. One tool to effectively enhance instructors’ presence is a liquid syllabus. A liquid syllabus is published on a public website, allowing
In his excellent book on team teaching (Interdisciplinary Courses and Team Teaching), James Davis posits two extremes on the continuum of team teaching. One pole consists of “courses planned by a group of faculty and then carried out in serial segments by the individual members
It happens almost every time: I’ll be running a workshop on assignment design, or on curricular reform, or on day-to-day instruction. Someone will raise their hand and say they teach chemistry or sociology or art history. They’ll look bashful, or angry, or curmudgeonly. “I can’t
Most academic courses require learners to do some amount of reading to provide background in core concepts, to demonstrate applications and use cases, and to elaborate intriguing new applications and directions—or maybe just to navigate the various prompts and guidelines. But reading is a skill,
What do you want your students to learn? What really matters to you?
I’ll give you an example. William Carlos Williams once wrote,
It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
Student assignments and course materials turning up on the internet is an ongoing problem for instructors as it facilitates cheating. After finding our quiz questions in decks of “flash cards” on Chegg and our students’ assignments on Course Hero, we began investigating creative solutions.
As faculty we tend to chalk up students’ failure on assessments to lack of effort or lack of understanding of the material. But often that failure is due instead to the gap between instruction and performance, where misunderstandings intervene to undermine performance. Guided evaluation of
A lot of professors assign readings as follows: students read a piece of text, respond to it in some way, and come prepared to discuss it in class. Yet over half of students don’t do the assigned readings, and often it’s because professors assign too
We learn best by returning to the same content over and over, reflecting on it each time to deepen our understanding. This is because knowledge is stored as patterns of neuroconnections in the brain, and those connections are strengthened each time that pattern is activated
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