Technology makes it easy to record and distribute lecture material presented in class. What concerns many faculty is whether having the recorded lectures available gives students the excuse they need to skip class. Moreover, recorded lectures don’t give students the opportunity to ask questions. True,
Videos are the ideal way to deliver content in an online course because the web is a fundamentally audiovisual medium. But while many faculty assume that videos require high-level technical skills to produce, they are actually not beyond the means of the ordinary instructor. They
If the term “social media” conjures up images of Facebook, then you’re two or three years behind the millennial curve. Facebook has been called “your mother’s social media site”; kids post to Facebook to throw their parents off the scent. Today’s students have moved to
Online discussion has become another strategy faculty use to engage students with each other and with course content. This method offers a safer way for students to participate, as they are able to prepare responses ahead of time and deliver them in writing. But online
Student portfolios have become popular in higher education due to their variety of uses. They can document a student process, such as how an engineering class built a robot (Gallagher and Poklop, 2014). They can document a student’s work across a program, such as an
Instructors today seek creative ways to use technologies with which students are familiar as a means of improving student engagement. One good technology is Pinterest. Pinterest is a social media tool that has been described as a “virtual bulletin board.” It allows students to group
A number of faculty are now using Twitter in their classrooms, with positive effects. Here are two examples using different approaches.
Screencasting is one of the most important tools in my inventory as an online teacher. I am constantly making screencast tutorials to teach students processes, such as how to send large files, how to develop course content, and the like. It takes as little as
In-class activities can be a great way to foster student engagement in the classroom. Depending on the activity, the results can vary greatly. Sometimes they can fall flat, but every so often an activity manages to hold the students’ undivided attention.
The traditional online course structure violates a fundamental principle of learning by separating the process of getting information from the process of engaging it. The student is asked to go through some sort of resource in its entirety—be it a video, website, or reading—and then
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