Online faculty often default to an essay assignment mindset when establishing the parameters for an online discussion. They require posts to be up to 500 words and to include several citations and other academic writing components, such as introductions, conclusions, and references.
Despite the challenges of remote teaching and learning during the pandemic, student surveys in 2021 indicate that students want to continue having the option to learn online. Many instructors are willing to accommodate these students. But colleagues at several institutions are experiencing institutional hesitation, with
As the number of neurodivergent students continues to rise nationwide, the student population filling our classrooms reflects this increase. As college professors we often find ourselves unprepared for the challenges of teaching these students. We might even confuse a student’s disruptive or uncooperative behavior for
Too often, asynchronous online discussions morph into students making only perfunctory postings to fulfill the bare minimum requirements. We blame students, but the deeper issue is that the discussion forum is foreign to students because real conversations aren’t planned. How often have you sat with
Connectedness and relationships are important for students’ learning experiences. But online instructors may be tempted to think it is too challenging to fully engage all of their students. How can instructors whet their students’ appetites and keep them coming back for more? In this article,
A couple of months ago we posted a series of questions about teacher questions—the ones they ask students—and asked for your answers. Here’s a compilation of those responses with a few of my comments sprinkled throughout.
Teachers employ a vast array of instructional methods, but one universal element is the use of examples. No teaching approach eschews examples. On the contrary, guides for effective teaching embrace the value of using good examples (e.g., Rosenshine, 2012). Given their importance, teachers should design
Online faculty tend to assume that all student communication needs to go through the learning management system (LMS). But the LMS is not designed for the more spontaneous synchronous chat that you might get in a campus hallway or coffee shop, where someone might say,
At heart, teaching is about explaining something in a way that another understands. But it’s easy to forget this simple fact and fall into a “covering content” mentality rather than a “producing understanding” mindset. This is where we walk through information like reading a textbook
Millions of years of human evolution have molded our minds to learn through sight and sound, as written language is a relatively new means of human communication. When trying to figure out a process we often go to YouTube first to find a video tutorial
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