Most would agree that the classroom is a place for discourse, reflection, and learning. But whose class is it? Who’s doing the learning? The teacher or the students? We submit it’s both—teacher and students learning from each other. Too often, faculty see themselves as the
When Washington University School of Law enlisted the help of 2U, Inc., (www.2u.com) to develop its online master of laws program, the challenge was to figure out how to make the Socratic case method work in an online environment.
If you use collaborative assignments in your online course, you should assess those assignments collaboratively, said Rena Palloff, online instructor and coauthor (with Keith Pratt) of several online learning books, including Lessons from the Virtual Classroom: The Realities of Online Teaching (2013), during a recent
For the past 100 years, folks in higher education have assumed that feedback must be written. Even when the assignment itself was not in text form, such as a video, instructors usually provided written comments. But feedback can be given in a myriad of different
As the old adage goes, a picture is worth a thousand words, and information represented in pictures can be very powerful. Information graphics, or infographics, are visual representations of information, data, or knowledge. Infographics ask for an active response from the viewer, raising the questions,
Determining the effectiveness of online learning interventions is essential to continuous online course improvement. Action research offers an exciting model for instructors to meet this challenge by enabling them to quickly probe for sensible solutions to pedagogical problems.
“Get students talking about their experiences!” I heard this recommendation in a couple of sessions at the recent Teaching Professor Technology Conference, and the admonition does rest on sound premises. Students learn new material by connecting it to what they already know. If a teacher
Is there a way to motivate and improve student participation without grading it? I raise the question because I think grading contributions gets students talking for points, not talking to make points. Verbal students make sure they say something, but often without listening to or
How much can we learn from each other’s experiences? A lot, but there are reasons to be cautious. Sometimes what’s been learned from an experience, or set of experiences, is wrong. That’s true whether the learning is about teaching or life.
How we teach begins and ends with behaviors. It’s good to remind ourselves of that every so often. Most of the ingredients identified as the components of effective instruction—things like clarity, organization, and enthusiasm—are abstractions. They’re intangible, without physical form. Their presence or absence is
