blog posts

• Engaging a Village: Effective Strategies to Reach Every Corner of the Lecture Hall

  Jun 10, 2020 12:00 pm

  (from Faculty Focus). Engaging a Village: Effective Strategies to Reach Every Corner of the Lecture Hall. As educators, we often struggle to provide an effective learning environment for the students who are easily distracted and clamoring for more support. Technology in the classroom has the potential to engage students and allow us to be more hands-on with hundreds of students at a time, making students feel supported while engaging them in the classroom community. Some approaches are to flip the classroom, use problem-based learning, use teaching assistants to lead neighbors within the village and more.

• Online and Hybrid Courses

  May 19, 2020 2:30 pm

  (from Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching) Online and Hybrid Courses.  As we consider these two methods of delivery, here are some helpful strategies. Online courses are those in which at least 80 percent of course content is delivered online. Blended (sometimes called hybrid) instruction has between 30 and 80 percent of the course content delivered online with some face-to-face interaction. Blended and online courses not only change how content is delivered, they also redefine traditional educational roles and provide different opportunities for learning. Making the shift to online learning can increase the potential for learners to take charge of their own learning process and facilitate the development of a sense of community among them. 

   

• Six Things Faculty Can Do to Promote Student Engagement

  May 19, 2020 2:15 pm

  (from Faculty Focus). Six Things Faculty Can Do to Promote Student Engagement.  Start with redefining participation. For example, let it include more than verbal comments. Invite students to contribute electronically—with an email or post on the course website—with a question they didn’t ask in class, a comment they didn’t get to make, or a thought that came to them after class. Remind students that listening is also part of participation! Model and promote good listening skills. For example: “Did you hear wht Fredric just said? That’s an explanation also belongs in your notes.” Other strategies to promote student engagement include defining what learning is and designing authentic assignments and learning experiences.

• Equitable Exams During COVID-19

  May 6, 2020 2:30 pm

  (from Inside Higher Ed) Equitable Exams During COVID-19. The equitability of online learning was called into question in March when institutions ceased classroom instruction. Educational institutions had to face the disparity of technological access needed to transition students to an online environment. Though recent data from the Pew Research Center show that 73 percent of adults have home broadband internet, the disaggregated data by household income paints a different picture. To mitigate some of the inequity, some institutions moved to pass/fail rather than letter grades, offering more flexibility to students. Now, institutions must consider equitable final exams. Even under normal circumstances, instructors must consider the purpose of an exam. Is it formative or summative? Are we testing for skill acquisition or memorization of knowledge? What is the purpose of the time limit? What is an acceptable deadline? As final exams draw near, instructors must consider how to create, administer and score final exams that are fair and equitable during this pivotal time.

• Creating and Using Rubrics

  May 6, 2020 2:30 pm

  (from Carnegie Mellon University - The Eberly Center) Creating and Using Rubrics. A rubric is a scoring tool that explicitly describes the instructor’s performance expectations for an assignment or piece of work. A rubric identifies: criteria - the aspects of performance (e.g., argument, evidence, clarity) that will be assessed, descriptor - the characteristics associated with each dimension (e.g., argument is demonstrable and original, evidence is diverse and compelling), and the performance levels - a rating scale that identifies students’ level of mastery within each criterion. In addition, rubrics can be used to provide feedback to students on diverse types of assignments, from papers, projects, and oral presentations to artistic performances and group projects. Rubrics provide many benefits for both the instructor and the students.

• Considerations About Exams When Teaching Remotely

  Apr 21, 2020 2:45 pm

  (from The Derek Bok Center for Teaching & Learning). Considerations About Exams When Teaching Remotely. Exams remain a popular form of capstone assessment. There are a number of reasons for this, not least of which is their efficiency— for students to review large swaths of the material covered over the entire semester with an eye to synthesis and distillation. By comparison with a research paper or other common forms of end-of-term assessment, final exams ordinarily have the distinct advantage of standing "outside" the term, giving students the impetus to reflect back on the totality of their learning without consuming significant amounts of in- or out-of-class time during the semester itself. With the move to remote teaching the ordinary boundaries between synchronous, in-class work and asynchronous, out of class assessment are already changing, and the extrinsic motivation of grades—on which, admittedly, final exams depend rather more than other, more generative forms of capstone assessment—has decreased significantly. Given these facts, how might you modify your plans for testing students? 

• Transforming Your Online Teaching From Crisis to Community

  Apr 21, 2020 2:45 pm

  (from Inside Higher Ed) Transforming Your Online Teaching From Crisis to Community. In this current time, it is important to remember that “going online” is not the same as teaching or learning. We must eschew the technocratic utopianism that implies that, simply by teaching remotely, professors are doing their jobs. We need to learn -- quickly -- from the extensive research and experience of professors all over who have done the teaching, research and publishing in this area, and who can advise us on what is most effective.The biggest takeaway from the research on effective teaching online is that we cannot teach the same way online that we would in person: we need to innovate and use the tools available to us to build our class periods differently. Of importance is “engaged” learning: understanding the condition of our students’ lives and finding the best ways of teaching within (rather than in spite of) those conditions.  Here is a simple way to create an engaged learning experience online.

• Online Teaching: KIS (Keep it Simple)

  Apr 9, 2020 11:15 am

  (from Alison Yang, Online Teaching@KIS) Online Teaching: KIS (Keep it Simple).  As many of us had to quickly transform our scheduled face-to-face course to unscheduled online courses, we were suddenly faced with a myriad of decisions. Should I teach synchronously or asynchronously? What assignments and quizzes can I keep? And in what format? Here is a handy chart (Do this – Not that) that will help you to make effective, realistic decisions that will benefit both you and your students.

• What is Using Media to Enhance Teaching and Learning?

  Apr 8, 2020 3:00 pm

  (From SERC at Carlton College). What is Using Media to Enhance Teaching and Learning? The term media was first used to describe newspapers more than two centuries ago. Today media has many different connotations. For instance, there are mass media, print media, visual media and social media. While media can take on many different forms, the purpose of all media is universally the same -- media is a channel of communication. Media can be used in direct instruction, active learning teaching strategies and student projects.  Media can be used in almost any discipline to enhance learning, both in class, and also for out-of-class assignments. Short film and television clips, written articles, and blog postings can be viewed to reinforce concepts and spark discussion. Songs and music videos, especially when the lyrics are made available, can be used to the same effect. 

• Going Multimodal: 5 Tips for Making the Switch to Multimodal Assignments

  Apr 8, 2020 2:00 pm

  (From Faculty Focus) Going Multimodal: 5 Tips for Making the Switch to Multimodal Assignments. With written communication becoming increasingly multimodal—from newspaper websites to your social media feed to your learning management system’s announcements page—researchers and practitioners alike have made the case for the value of multimodal assignments. While much of this work focuses on the theoretical changes, this article offers practical suggestions for faculty members with limited experience designing multimodal assignments who’d like to convert some of their traditional assignments to multimodal ones. An assignment is multimodal if it invites students to engage in more than one medium of communication, or if it gives students the opportunity to select from several potential media.