Almost 70 percent of students in 10 sections of an introductory biology course reported that the instructor provided a justification for using active learning in the course. That’s encouraging. Students need to know the rationale behind what we ask them to do in the course.
Many instructors incorporate teamwork into their courses to teach skills that are critical for academic and business success. Yet many students and faculty also dread the inevitable problems that doing groupwork—face-to-face or online—creates. It can be difficult to ensure equal participation by all team members,
The Choose Your Own Nursing Adventure was created from an interest to see how technology could be integrated into the traditional case study approach to enhance student engagement. The approach is modeled on the popular children series from the 1980s and 1990s, Choose Your Own
Some students are habitual offenders while others never miss a deadline. So, what’s the best way to deal with late assignments, missed exams, and other deadline delinquencies? A tough hardnosed policy with consequences or something a bit more responsive to busy schedules and complicated lives?
Most students arrive in our classrooms without particularly strong study skills. They procrastinate and overestimate what they know or can cram into their heads before the exam. If they read, they spend lots of time haphazardly highlighting long passages. And they equate memorization with understanding.
We’ve chosen to finish up our series on assignments with information on learning logs. Like the innovative and interesting assignments we plan to continue highlighting, learning logs are versatile and can be used to accomplish a range of learning out comes.
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
