Nearly everyone has heard of virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR), and while these terms tend to be used in different ways, all involve creating a digital world. In VR, the user enters a wholly digital world, as in Second Life or World of
Educators have long praised the value of simulations and role-playing exercises and the impact of those experiential activities on student learning. As Bjorn Billhardt (2005) explains, “Simulations offer huge advantages over lectures, handbooks, or on-site trainers. They engage students while helping them retain and apply
Student discussions have long been both thorn and rose of online courses. When online learning was first introduced to academia, skeptical face-to-face instructors believed that the courses must lack any discussion, likening them to a television broadcast. But online educators immediately recognized that the format
In my years as an instructional designer at Indiana University, I’ve heard the same complaint again and again across wholly disparate courses and programs: “I would like more and better student interaction in my online courses.” These teachers have used traditional online discussion boards and
An engineer once told me that he needed to teach himself engineering in college. By that he meant that his professors would go through sample problems in lectures, demonstrating solution processes for different examples, but that didn’t teach him the underlying thinking that they were
I think I killed my yeast.
It has been years, nay, decades, since I last baked bread without using a bread machine. It has even been years since I used a bread machine. I once regularly made a delicious honey graham bread. It always turned
A national survey found that Generation Z students (defined as those born between 1995 and 2012) ranked YouTube as their favorite learning tool (Overland, 2018). Yet many instructors think to themselves, “There is no way I could create videos like the professionals.” The good news
Virtual reality (VR) has evolved from a technology of the future into a practical educational tool for students to interact with the world in ways previously not possible. Many K–12 and college courses use free, off-the-shelf VR apps, such as Google Expeditions and Google Earth
As educators, we are bombarded with new teaching and technology ideas from Twitter, blogs, news articles, podcasts, emails, videos, and other sources. But without a way of storing and organizing this information, it quickly gets lost. How often do we vaguely remember an interesting article
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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