This weekend I discovered a “memo to students who are disappointed with their last test grade.” What a great idea! I wasn’t surprised when I found out it was more of Rich Felder’s good work.
Students are terribly optimistic about their grades, especially at
Clearly we are not always accurate in predicting students’ learning. Of equal concern, though, is the certainty of our belief that students are learning. The roots of these cognitive errors may lie in the common phenomenon of overconfidence bias that social psychologists have written about
Countless studies document that many instructors are quick to intervene when they see students struggling with the material. Most instructors perceive wrong answers as something they should correct. When students misunderstand, teachers perceive it as signaling the need for greater instructor involvement. But what else
What about letting students make some choices about learning the content in our courses? Most of us already do at least a bit of that. We let them decide on paper topics, what they want to create or perform, or whether they will do optional
Although team teaching is often seen as too expensive these days, the benefits of this kind of teacher collaboration are unparalleled. Team teaching takes the idea of on-the-job practice to a different level by blurring the lines between our roles as teachers and learners. Team
Recent interest in using group work to promote learning and develop important interpersonal skills began in the late ’80s, and since then various types of group work have been promoted, researched, and implemented. Among the most widely used and best known “brands” are collaborative learning,
The worst time for me in a workshop or presentation are those five or 10 minutes before the start time when the faculty participants are arriving. My stomach is in knots. I’m wishing I were at home. I know I haven’t prepared enough. Somebody is
A common approach to generating discussion in an online course is to have students post a response to a prompt and then respond to the posts of several of their classmates. While this approach can generate a substantial amount of participation, the quality of that
Central Washington University offers an information technology administrative management program in an online format aimed at place- and time-bound working adults. The following are three ways the program works to improve student retention.
How much of an online course should be standardized? It’s a question that has important implications for institutions, instructors, and students in the online space. In an interview with Online Classroom, Melanie Kasparian, Online Experiential Learning Developer/Instructional Designer at Northeastern University, offered advice on what
