Screen after screen of text is what Kevin Gumienny refers to as “crappy” learning. Gumienny, curriculum coordinator for the Texas A & M Engineering Extension Service (TEEX), says that there are some valid reasons for using this type of instructional design—it’s easy to create and
Last fall, we did a survey of our top faculty to gather their best tips for teaching online. We observed that many of our top-tier faculty led very busy professional lives—counseling a full load of clients each week, teaching several classes for Liberty University Online,
Two researchers offer data helpful in answering the assessment question. They decided to take a look at a collection of rubrics being used to assess online discussions. They analyzed 50 rubrics they found online by using various search engines and keywords. All the rubrics in
Faculty members in the business department at Brigham Young University-Idaho were skeptical about the prospect of creating a totally asynchronous online business management program. The use of case studies was the biggest sticking point. Case studies are an integral component of the business management curriculum.
Recently, it was reported that some schools’ open (read: free) online courses would give credits to students who took them—and in some cases these courses have no instructors. There are also online courses in which the participants merely follow the syllabus, take a few tests,
When Scotty Dunlap, assistant professor of safety, security, and emergency management at Eastern Kentucky University, surveyed his students about group work at the outset of an online graduate-level course on auditing, they unanimously gave it low ratings. Asked the same question at the end of
Most faculty are familiar with the strategy: students are allowed to bring into the exam a card or sheet of paper that they’ve prepared beforehand and that contains information they think might help them answer exam questions. I became convinced of the strategy’s value when
Can we reform teaching and learning throughout higher education one class at a time? I used to think so, but the pace of change has made me less optimistic. I just finished preparing an article for The Teaching Professor newsletter that reports the results of
A colleague and I have been revisiting a wide range of issues associated with classroom interaction. I am finding new articles, confronting aspects of interaction that I still don’t understand very well, having my thinking on other topics challenged, and learning once more how invaluable
The term “teaching effectiveness” had its heyday in the 80s and early 90s during that period when so much work on student ratings was being done. Its connection to evaluation activities remains and even end-of-course ratings are often thought of as measures of teaching effectiveness.
