I’m on a quest for ways to get students using those study strategies that make them better learners. When the strategy goes by the label “test-enhanced learning” it isn’t an easy sell, and it’s even harder when students find out that means asking and answering
While most faculty think of assessments as used to measure learning after the fact, formative assessment classroom techniques (FACTs) give an instructor a snapshot of where students are in their learning so as to address any gaps in their understanding. Online instructors have a variety
Long careers provide opportunities to look back, and I found myself doing a bit of that of late. It’s not so much to reflect on what I’ve learned as what I still don’t know. What still puzzles me about teaching and learning? What remains unanswered,
One of the challenges that an online program faces is how to keep courses up-to-date. Links break, articles become outdated, new material appears, and so on. In essence, an online course starts deteriorating as soon as it is built. New programs are often unprepared for
It is time to bid farewell to a career I have loved for so long that it now seems entirely too short. Reflecting on 42 years of teaching and some of my missteps, I share here a few of the major lessons I’ve learned.
Our March installment in the collection of materials on assignments included an assignment template we proposed could be used as part of the assignment design process. We used the template to describe an assignment in which students read the syllabus and responded to it in
Do you teach one of those courses that promotes lots of student anxiety? Nowadays that seems to apply to all sorts of courses. Student are convinced they can’t learn what we’re teaching, worry they won’t do well on the tests, and become filled with anxiety
Educational research has established that learning is more effective when it combines visual and audio, known as the Modality Effect (Reiser & Dempsey, 2012). This combination reduces cognitive load, which allows the learner to retain information more effectively. We decided to create educational videos for
I just read a review of the literature on class discussion. It’s from 2013 so there’s more that could be included in the review, but there’s one feature of the literature that I don’t think has changed. Like so many other common teaching and learning
This research was motivated by the persistent belief that use of active learning approaches engenders student resistance. Despite the well-documented benefits of active learning, students don’t always endorse these approaches with enthusiasm and that makes faculty reluctant to use these approaches. Up to this point
