Do you have any students who participate too much? The ones who would answer every question and happily dominate every classroom discussion if we let them?

The past couple of days I’ve been wading through a fairly dense article on “dialogic pedagogy” as applied to team teaching. The authors, who have been collaborators since the early 1990s, team teach a 400-student introductory sociology course. They don’t team teach like most faculty do—they do what they describe as “joint” rather than “sequential” lectures. I’ll probably end up writing about their approach in the newsletter.

It’s no secret that undergraduates are especially prone to procrastination. A wide array of studies link procrastination to a lack of motivation, deficiencies in self-regulation, external locus of control, perfectionism, trait and state anxiety, fear of failure, low self-efficacy, and low self-confidence. But short of therapeutic intervention, is there anything teachers do control that influences how much students procrastinate in their courses?

Part of being an online educator is teaching students how to conduct themselves in the online classroom. A survey of successful adult online learners provides an excellent resource for this advice.

I have been struggling all morning to rewrite a chapter in my new book that has organizational problems. I was hoping the reviewers wouldn’t notice, but they did. I’m okay with the ideas. I think they make sense and put the right kind of frame around the rest of the book, but they don’t hang together like a frame. The chapter seems more like a mobile of free hanging ideas that loosely associate and occasionally bang into each other.

Did you know that college librarians can be a partner throughout the semester to not only plan and update research assignments but also to help you assess them upon completion?

Even the most experienced educators can feel overwhelmed when they teach their first hybrid or fully online course. On top of dealing with the time and space constraints of asynchronous learning, there are so many different tools to learn. Tools, it seems, that all of their students either know how to use or master very quickly.

As online education moves into the mainstream of the higher education ecosystem, one question still persists: “How do I know what my online students have learned?” There are no easy answers, just as there aren't in face-to-face courses, but with a little creativity and flexibility, you soon discover that the online learning environment opens up a host of new educational assessment possibilities.

Multiple-choice tests are commonly used to assess achievement of learning objectives because they can be efficient. Despite their widespread use, they’re often poorly designed. Poorly written multiple-choice tests are equally damaging in classroom-based and online courses, but in online courses learners often have to contend with more challenges, and poor assessments can add insult to injury.