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Don’t Water Down Feedback to Your Students

I recently had an instructor ask whether the feedback he was about to provide to a student was too harsh. He said the student’s writing was a mess and that there was no way that the student would make it through their program without writing

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Sample Syllabi: Some Observations

More than 20 of you responded to our call for sample syllabi by sending yours. Thank you! It may not be a stratified random sample, but your collection represents many different disciplines and courses as well as differences in content, format, style, and tone. I’ve

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Three Effective Ways to Start a Class

All communication begins with grabbing your listener’s attention, something that everyone instinctively understands. A marriage proposal does not begin with the speaker opening a PowerPoint presentation, providing an outline of topics to be covered, and a schedule with time for each topic—including time at the

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A Potpourri of Syllabus Ideas (Courtesy of Our Readers)

Our reader-submitted collection of syllabi and ideas about them contains any number of interesting ways of handling the small syllabus details and larger ways of dealing with the whole document. Here’s an assembled group of those small and large ideas, listed in no particular order

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Listen More, Talk Less

The academic year begins again—new courses and new collections of students in them. One of the best parts of our profession is this regular opportunity to start over, to begin with a clean slate. And what might make the courses we are about to begin

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Light Student Engagement with Adobe Spark

Online faculty have numerous options for creating graphic, video, and website content. But Adobe Spark stands out as a single system that can create all three types of content. Spark is really three systems in one—Spark Post for graphics, Spark Video for videos, and Spark

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Flip the First Day

It’s almost impossible to read blogs, articles, even books on teaching without seeing a multitude of suggestions for not “wasting” the first day of class by covering the syllabus, course schedule, class rules and routines, and the like. I’ve even written one myself (Brown, 2009).

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Revisiting the Syllabus

For a variety of reasons, we’re starting this year with a series on the syllabus. Most of us consider it an important course resource. We devote time and energy into its development; it’s frequently the tool we use to plan and revise our courses. But

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Identifying Goals Helps Online Learners Sustain Self-Motivation

One of the challenges online learners face is sustaining motivation over the duration of the course. In face-to-face classrooms, teachers can personalize motivational strategies to meet the needs of individual students, and the social presence of teachers and fellow learners provides its own motivational incentives.

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