Andy Stanfield, director of the Center for Teaching and Learning Excellence at Florida Institute of Technology, is a proponent of using Mayer’s Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning to improve instructional design.
Like many matters regarding teaching and learning, there isn’t one best way to put students into groups. The best way is related to what you want students to learn from their group experience. Here’s a brief discussion of how that works for three common ways
The July 2013 issue of Teaching of Psychology (40, 3) includes an “objective analysis” of the specifications and content coverage of 13 full-length introductory psychology textbooks. In six pages, teachers get a well-organized overview of introductory texts and a good feel for what those in
Every now and again I come across a quote that follows me around for the rest of the day, if not several days. That happened this week and here’s the quote, “I see myself as a learner first, thus I create my classes with learners,
Tests and quizzes are often the primary means of assessing online learner performance; however, as Rena Palloff and Keith Pratt, online instructors and coauthors of numerous online learning books, including Lessons from the Virtual Classroom: The Realities of Online Teaching (2013), point out, there are
One of the challenges of preventing student plagiarism is that students often are not entirely clear on what constitutes plagiarism, so educating them about plagiarism is an important step.
The most important lesson we can teach our students is that college is just part of their lifelong learning journey, and most of their intellectual growth will happen after college. This means forming a “personal learning environment” (PLE) that will preserve, organize, and harness the
The dynamics involved in each online student group working toward its goal of an A-worthy project are complex. So many components must mesh smoothly, and because of this each group is ripe for any number of problems. If the instructor does not address these problems
There are three types of interaction in online courses: learner-to-content, learner-to-instructor, and learner-to-learner. Each contributes to student retention and motivation. This article elaborates on these types of interaction and suggests which technologies can facilitate each type of interaction.
Dead ideas that limit teaching and learning—that was the topic of Professor Diane Pike’s plenary session at the recent Teaching Professor Conference. There’s a tyranny associated with dead ideas. They limit and constrain our thinking, and can lead us in the wrong direction. An idea
