Teaching Strategies and Techniques

Jump-Start Online Discussion with Unconventional Prompts

Discussion forums are ubiquitous in online education despite getting mixed reviews from students and teachers. Faculty complain of students giving only perfunctory responses, while students lament discussion questions that allow only cursory answers.

The problem is the prompt is often written in language requesting a mini-academic

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Another Year, Another New Normal

This fall, faculty will face an increased range of preparation in their students. If you’ve been teaching awhile, you have a sense of the degree to which your students are differently prepared: some know the conventions of citation better than others; some have greater spatial

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Strategies for Using Flipgrid to Engage Students

Flipgrid is becoming increasingly popular for use in the classroom due to its interactive nature and similarity to widely used social media platforms. Faculty first create groups or classes on the site for students to join. They then create topic cards that provide prompts to

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Why Students Won’t Read—and What to Do about It

One of the most frustrating things that can happen in higher education is that we assign students a reading that is really interesting and important for an upcoming class discussion. We then go on to design the day’s activities around the reading so that students

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The Mission to Mars Project: A Virtual Reality Learning Experience

Many institutions are experimenting with virtual reality (VR) to provide students with simulations that apply their theoretical learning to practice. We developed a VR experience, adapted from Joyner and Allen’s (2015) case study “Farming in Space? Developing a Sustainable Food Supply on Mars” and inspired

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Getting Realistic about Group Work

It’s no wonder employers highly value college grads that are already good team players (Finley, 2021), not only because the ability to collaborate is key to professional success but also because developing this skill set is no easy task. As faculty, we know this all

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Reducing Student Resistance to Active Learning: Some Encouraging Research

Why don’t more college instructors use active learning? Research shows that active learning increases student achievement and retention and can enhance diversity in STEM programs by narrowing the achievement gap for traditionally underrepresented students (Theobald et al., 2020). While active learning use among college instructors

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