After the coronavirus pandemic hit the US, our institution quickly moved to virtual learning. As faculty developers and instructors, we felt that the Teaching and Learning Center was set up to effectively mobilize our faculty and staff, offer direct instruction and guidance, and provide everyone
The digital revolution has given faculty far more tools for assessment than the traditional paper or worksheet. Now students can better exercise their creativity in presenting their learning through a combination of text, images, videos, and other media in a portfolio-like format. Book Creator, a
The traditional college assignment is seen by the instructor and nobody else. But having students contribute to Wikipedia gives them the pride of knowing that what they are creating will benefit others who use the information. For this reason I assign my upper-division courses to
Microlearning is gaining popularity in education as an alternative to the traditional 45–75-minute lecture because it better matches the neurology of learning. When we encounter new information, it starts in our working memory, which is the memory we use for immediate tasks—a bit like computer
Recently, the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE) and Mursion, a well-known commercial vendor for virtual reality training, forged a new partnership in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic (AACTE, 2020). The pandemic has driven this kind of mixed-reality virtual simulation into the
Escape rooms have become a cultural phenomenon over the past few years. Groups of people pay to be put into “locked” rooms they can escape only by solving a series of clues. But now education is starting to use escape rooms in both face-to-face and
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
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,
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
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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