There are lots of reasons and research that support students taking their own notes as opposed to relying on teacher-provided notes and/or slides. What’s changed of late is how today’s students take notes. Research from 2012 (cited in the reference below) reported that almost a
Many, if not most, college students work part- or full-time jobs while going to school. They often find it difficult to be at a specific place at a specific time a number of times a week to attend their courses, and as a result often
YouTube videos, TED Talks, blogs, and journal articles. As faculty we have all these electronic resources and more available to us to share with our online students. But, what copyright policies should we consider before we post an electronic resource to our LMS? This article
In his essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” H. P. Lovecraft famously declares that “the oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is the fear of the unknown.” It’s the experience of this sort of fear that
Low-stakes assignments include work we have students do that doesn’t count for a large part of the course grade. There’s a strong set of reasons to use these kinds of assignments, but also some challenges. Let’s take stock.
For our next installment in this series on assignments, we’d like to share an assignment template that we think can be helpful to teachers and students. Let’s start with how it can help teachers. It’s no surprise that we think many teachers could do a
I sometimes worry that we don’t think about the syllabus as expansively and creatively as we could. We focus, almost exclusively it seems to me, on what should be on it—the information and details it should contain. We do much less thinking about the role
Students arrive in our courses with a variety strengths and weaknesses. In a writing course, some students may struggle with grammar, while others are ready to practice alternative styles of discourse or more sophisticated rhetorical techniques.
How many of us teachers have had this experience? You spend an afternoon reading student work and providing detailed feedback. You return the work convinced that your notes will help students deepen their learning and meet the course objectives. Then you see students glancing at
Call me crazy, but undergraduate courses should be qualitatively different from their high school antecedents. One key change? At the college level, students should be moving toward understanding things instead of just knowing them. How can we introduce and reinforce the difference?
