I recently had an instructor ask whether the feedback he was about to provide to a student was too harsh. He said the student’s writing was a mess and that there was no way that ...
While most faculty think of assessments as used to measure learning after the fact, formative assessment classroom techniques (FACTs) give an instructor a snapshot of where students are in their learning so as to address ...
There is an unfortunate tendency among higher education publications to measure the quality of online education by surveying faculty on whether they think online education is as good as face-to-face learning. But do these surveys ...
As instructors, we often assume that students must learn from us and no others. But feedback on performance is one of the most important factors to learning, and peer feedback can fill in the gaps ...
A lot of students are terribly optimistic about the grade they'll be getting in a course. They start out imagining that they're going to do very well, especially if they've decided it's an easy course. ...
Working well collaboratively is an important skill to teach, but simply putting students together in groups and asking them to work together online doesn't necessarily result in learning. A good way to ensure learning is ...
Have you ever thought, “There has to be a better way!” while grading your online learners' discussions? It is no secret that grading student discussions is time consuming, laborious, and tedious, considering the disproportionate amount ...
“Good job” “Vague” “Grammar” Do they look familiar? Students are used to getting the bulk of their feedback as these sorts of “margin comments” running down the side of their papers. Unfortunately, such comments are of almost ...
Classroom Assessment Techniques (CATs) are valuable tools for helping faculty find out what students are learning and how well they’re learning it. Since the 1988 release of Classroom Assessment Techniques: A Handbook for College Teachers by ...
In winter 2015, I was given the opportunity to design and teach my department's first fully online course, in calculus. Some design challenges emerged in the process, not least of which was the question of ...