Many online faculty add at least one synchronous event to their courses to provide students with the immediacy of a full-class interaction. But a central challenge of synchronous events is finding something engaging for students to do. One solution is virtual escape rooms (VERs).
The pandemic has made web conferencing common in the professional world as distributed workforces are becoming the norm. This means that students need to develop virtual presentation skills as well as live ones. Here I will outline some of the most important virtual presentation principles
Micro-credentials and badges have become popular in education today, but there remains considerable confusion about what they mean due to differences in how the term “badging” is used in education.
As a teacher I find myself constantly making video tutorials for students, colleagues, and others. These can be steps for completing an assignment, such as posting to a Padlet board, or for processes, like setting up a Google Form. Until now, I have always used
Discussion is one of the biggest challenges for online students, and poor discussion is one of the biggest complaints among online faculty. Student responses are often perfunctory, lacking the depth the instructor desires. But rather than laziness, poor discussion often results from students not knowing
Online classes most often begin with an “introduce yourself” discussion forum for students to get comfortable working with peers in discussions and other activities. Most follow the standard model of asking each student to say something about themselves, which can lead to perfunctory comments meant
The format of face-to-face education encourages “big-block” course design. Faculty are assigned one to three classes per week, each between 50 minutes and three hours long, and those become the atom units of planning. They devote most classes to delivering learning content as lectures and
Nearly all teachers today use PowerPoint or Google Slides presentations to accompany their synchronous lessons. At the same time, students have laptops, tablets, or smartphones open during face-to-face classes. This offers teachers the option of adding interactions to their lessons by inserting slides with questions,
We learn best by returning to the same content over and over, reflecting on it each time to deepen our understanding. This is because knowledge is stored as patterns of neuroconnections in the brain, and those connections are strengthened each time that pattern is activated
As teachers, we would like to believe that when students do the assigned reading, they will understand the content it covers and so can be tested on it or given new information that builds on that understanding. When students do not demonstrate understanding of a
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