The learning management system (LMS) has long been the unified platform for hosting all content and activities in an online class. While it has served its purpose well, the advent of social media has exposed its limitations. Students find the multiple steps required to log
Over the past half century, colleges and universities have prioritized students’ global awareness and intercultural communication skills as institutional outcomes. The goal is that graduates will be prepared to contribute to diverse workplaces and be able to communicate with people from different cultures. Historically, these
Employers love collaborators. Communities needs collaborators. Democracy requires collaboration.
Students hate collaboration.
And faculty feel . . . well . . . meh?
We know that collaboration is powerful. We know that it both provides students with skills they need and deepens their learning by
Flipgrid is a popular video-based discussion tool that has many advantages over an LMS discussion forum. For one, it arranges student postings on a single page rather than in a threaded forum. This makes it good for collecting a variety of independent responses to a
I teach at a college for working adults. Most of our students work at least one job and have many family obligations. In short, they are busy people looking to learn in the most efficient and effective way possible. To meet these needs, we offer
Active learning in small groups has, at best, a mixed reputation. Instructors voice concerns about unequal levels of participation, students rushing through activities to leave or log off early, difficulties in assessing effort and learning, and the fact that many students arrive in class not
Contract cheating is a relatively new phenomenon that is gaining attention in higher education because it is particularly difficult to detect. Instead of purchasing a paper from an outside source, contract cheating involves hiring someone specifically to create that work for the student. The problem
Discussion forums are ubiquitous in online education despite getting mixed reviews from students and teachers. Faculty complain of students giving only perfunctory responses, while students lament discussion questions that allow only cursory answers.
The problem is the prompt is often written in language requesting a
Many of us know by now that didactic lecture is incongruent with student learning: receiving information passively tends to disengage students, which is likely to result in undesirable learning outcomes. Even though lecture remains the predominant form of teaching, collaborative learning has been a popular
This fall, faculty will face an increased range of preparation in their students. If you’ve been teaching awhile, you have a sense of the degree to which your students are differently prepared: some know the conventions of citation better than others; some have greater spatial
