A teacher must grab the student’s attention right away to motivate the learning, and nothing grabs interest as quickly and easily as animation. It may sound exotic, but new (and cheap) software has made animation simple to produce.
Teddi Fishman, director of the International Center for Academic Integrity at Clemson University, advocates an instructional design/community-building approach to academic integrity rather than an adversarial approach. Her stint as a police officer informs this stance. As radar gun companies introduced improved speed enforcement tools, the
The group or collaborative project is becoming de rigueur in many online courses. Its purpose is not simply to have students work together for a joint grade and end project but also to develop essential skills that will serve them in the professional world. Yet
As an instructor new to the online environment, I carefully reviewed the syllabus and the requirements for the course discussions and assignments and incorporated the following ideas from Myers-Wylie, Mangieri & Hardy: a “what you need to know” document that includes policies about late work,
Education has traditionally gone from teacher to student. This is partly a leftover from the age when the university was a vault of information not available elsewhere. Teachers were truly walking repositories of knowledge. But all that has changed. Now, nearly everything I teach is
This article presents online instructional strategies that address career management objectives in science and engineering courses that may improve student interest in STEM occupations and participation in science-related careers.
Whether teaching MOOCs (massive open online courses), a class whose enrollment has unexpectedly peaked, or courses where schools have upped the enrollment caps, it’s crucial there be as much a connection as possible between the students and instructor. Sure, students can still learn from a
According to self-determination theory, a theory developed by Deci and Ryan, three basic psychological needs affect motivation: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Susan Epps, associate professor of Allied Health Sciences, and Alison Barton, associate professor of Teaching and Learning, both at East Tennessee State University, have
When I was first asked to teach an online ethics class way back in 1998, I cleverly built my online lectures the semester prior by transcribing what I said in the face-to-face classroom into text after each lecture. The result was eight-to-10-page documents (single-spaced!) for
It would be great if the material offered in the online classroom—posted lectures, textbooks, other course resources, and our feedback on assignments—were enough to give each student the information necessary to understand and embrace all that is being taught. But we know this rarely happens.
