Faculty know that today’s students require different levels of support to be successful. Not all college students have experience planning a research paper, taking lecture notes, or creating a class presentation from scratch. A student’s weak executive functioning or time management skills may prohibit them
An abundance of literature exists indicating that students are disengaged, unmotivated, and potentially downright bored in classes. Part of this disengagement may come from the seemingly unending essays and presentations students must complete to demonstrate their achievement of course and program learning outcomes. Incorporating fun
While many academics are still focused on keeping students away from artificial intelligence, others are preparing students to use AI in their current and future work. This means thinking about how IA is and will be used by our students, and crafting assignments that teach
Large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT and Google Bard, are in our classrooms whether we are aware of them or not—whether we like it or not. Unless we adapt to this reality, a large number of learning and assessment activities traditionally used in college
The first summer job I ever had was mowing lawns. Back then (this was the ’70s), I would start the power mower, and the blade kept spinning until I turned the mower off. I learned quickly to pull the mower up a slope and not
As students, I think we all had moments when we questioned the point of certain assignments. They might’ve been simple ones—posters, diagrams, or short stories meant to be completed quickly, graded, and never discussed again. You may have even told yourself that you didn’t have
We all do it. The semester is drawing to a close, the students are tired, we’re tired. There’s one more assignment to hand out, that major project that’s supposed to somehow capture from the entirety of students’ learning from the past semester. Back in week
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
In most disciplines, students learn how to communicate using a mix of text, tables, and figures—how their instructors were taught to communicate. But today, complex infographics are among the most powerful means of communicating the significance of information. They take brute data, distill it down
I give students in my literature courses a lot of weird assignments: I have them make and post films about why people should read Dickens. I tell them these films should show careful analysis of the text but should also entertain and have good music
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