Do you teach the way you learn? That’s the question Harold White asks in a short essay in which he recounts how he decided that he should. The catalyst was a faculty development workshop (more than 20 years ago) that featured an interesting activity. Participants were challenged to think about the most important lessons they had learned in life. They named six of these learning events, writing one on the front of six index cards. On the back of each card they wrote as much as they could remember about the circumstances that surrounded the events. Then they looked for patterns—things those learning events had in common. Where did they happen? In school or in less formal settings? How many involved teachers? What kind of feelings accompanied the learning? Was the learning hard? Was it planned or did it evolve out of unexpected circumstances? How often was the learning about correcting a misunderstanding, gaining a new insight, or deepening a current understanding?
Read more ›
The first day of class is critical. What happens on the first day, even in the first moments, sets the tone for the entire course. The impression you make will last the entire semester, and today’s students are not shy about sharing their opinions. Most students will make up their minds about the course and the instructor during that first class period.
One of the big challenges of teaching an online course is managing workload while providing the support and feedback that is essential to student success. A good way to become more efficient is to build an archive of grading comments to reduce the time it takes to provide feedback on assignments. By creating an archive, an instructor could insert a comment such as the following with a single keystroke:
Read More ›
“My students act so unprofessional,” a faculty member complained. “Two of them were all but making out before class started and they never stopped touching each other during class.” Heads nodded and more examples followed.
The Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education (WICHE) and its partners have been awarded a $2.3 million grant from Lumina Foundation for a national initiative that will make distance education courses more accessible to students across state lines, as well as making it easier for states to regulate and institutions to participate in interstate distance education. WICHE and its regional partners – the Midwestern Higher Education Compact (MHEC), the New England Board of Higher Education (NEBHE), and the Southern Regional Education Board (SREB) – along with the Presidents’ Forum, the Council of State Governments (CSG), and the Commission on Regulation of Postsecondary Distance Education, created by the State Higher Education Executive Officers (SHEEO) and the Association of Public Land-grant Universities (APLU), worked together to forge a national initiative, the State Authorization Reciprocity Agreement (SARA), that will create interstate reciprocity in the regulation of postsecondary distance education.
Read More ›
During the final meeting with one of my speech classes, I asked each student to give a few parting words to the class. I found a similar message resonating from many who spoke. Soon after, I received an email from an advisor at our school asking me to share some tips on fostering learning in the classroom. Since I had recorded that final speech class, I decided to use my students’ comments as the basis for my advice.
A sociology professor in an undergraduate introductory social problems course used a blog to “enhance student participation, engagement and skill building.” (p. 207) In the article referenced below, this professor shares her experiences of using this assignment with 263 students across four semesters.
Read More ›Like many matters regarding teaching and learning, there isn’t one best way to put students into groups. The best way is related to what you want students to learn from their group experience. Here’s a brief discussion of how that works for three common ways of forming groups.
MediaCore, the cloud-based video education platform, is announcing at Campus Technology 2013 a new plug-in for Moodle the most widely-used Learning Management System in the world. Visit MediaCore at Booth 1211 to see how universities and colleges are using video to engage students, encourage peer-to-peer learning and support learning beyond the lecture hall.
Read More ›The State University of New York (SUNY) Information Technology Exchange Center (ITEC) today announced its acquisition of the Ensemble Video platform. Ensemble Video will provide streamlined video content management and publishing capabilities throughout the nation’s largest comprehensive system of higher education.
Read More ›
