Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, relatively few instructors had used web-based conferencing for teaching and learning. With the shift in the spring of 2020, many instructors suddenly found themselves teaching online courses, and many others ...
Online teachers generally assume that student discussion and collaboration should occur in a learning management system’s (LMS’s) discussion forum. But for certain uses, online whiteboards work better than the LMS due to their fundamentally different ...
A learning contract is a negotiated agreement in which a student develops an individualized learning plan with their instructor’s support. Learning contracts provide students with choice about how to complete class assignments within the framework ...
Nearly all online faculty use discussion in their courses, often simply because everyone else does or their institution’s course development model assumes they do. But like any course content or activity, we need to ask ...
It has been said that experience is the best teacher, and for this reason, many instructors and educational programs are adding experiential components to their curriculum. One form of experiential learning is service learning, where ...
Too often, faculty make content coverage the focus of lesson planning. They plan their courses around the topics they need to cover, which usually leads to them motoring through information that their students are supposed ...
When my institution closed because of the pandemic, I was asked to teach an entirely virtual organic chemistry course (class and lab) in the 2020 summer semester. This was the first entirely virtual organic course ...
As educators, we assume that students are learning what we teach. But students often do not learn as much as we expect, and high-stakes assessments reveal their knowledge gaps when it is too late to ...
Google Earth is a powerful tool for linking curriculum to the real world. It can add a sense of place to historical events, and by creating customized maps, teachers and students can add pins to ...
Most faculty live in a world of words, whether it be lecturing, writing, or reading, and for this reason think in terms of text when creating learning modules. But images capture our attention in ways ...