Sometimes a teachable moment occurs when a student is stuck, other times it’s when a topic has sparked her interest. In an email interview, Eric Frierson, an instructional technology librarian at the University of Texas–Arlington, shares strategies for online instructors to capitalize on both types of teachable moments.

Think about how you teach. Now think about how students learn. What are some things you can do to ensure that there is congruence between your teaching style and students’ preferred way of retrieving and processing information?

In “Social Dynamics of Online Learning: Pedagogical Imperatives and Practical Applications” (reference below) the authors write that “Failure to address the social and relational dynamics within online courses may result in greater feelings of isolation among the distance learners, reduced levels of student satisfaction, peer academic performance, and ultimately increased attrition. … More often than not, most students wait for the professor to ‘do’ something that magically knits or binds them with others in meaningful ways.”

Have you heard that advice about chunking content in 10- to 15-minute blocks because that’s about as long as students can attend to material in class? It’s a widely touted statistic and given the behaviors indicative of inattentiveness observed in class, most faculty haven’t questioned it. But Karen Wilson and James H. Korn did. They got to wondering how researchers made that determination. “What was the dependent measure, and how did researchers measure attention during a lecture without influencing the lecture itself as well as students’ attention?” (p. 85)

It was August 26, 2009. That evening I receive a phone call from someone in Japan looking to create free online math and science courses on mobile devices for youth in India using existing shared online video. The following day, I get an email from a colleague at a university in Canada who had just read my new book, The World Is Open: How Web Technology Is Revolutionizing Education. Many points made in the book seemed to resonate with him except for my advocacy of YouTube videos in teaching. Like most faculty members, he was very reluctant to show the YouTube homepage to his class because an offensive video might be featured.

The use of PowerPoint is widespread now in college classrooms. Compared with the old transparencies of overhead projector days, it gets all sorts of points for legibility and glitz. But a lot of the problems with the way faculty used overheads still prevail. So please take these gentle do and don’t reminders in the spirit they are given. PowerPoint slides can enhance learning, but that benefit doesn’t accrue automatically. And if the PowerPoints aren’t enhancing learning, they may be doing the opposite.

Writing assignments, particularly for first- and second-year college students, are probably one of those items in the syllabus that some professors dread almost as much as their students do. While no one's doubting that essays, research papers, and other types of writing assignments are an important part of the academic experience and vital to furthering student learning, they also are time consuming and, at times, frustrating to grade.

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?

Not all disengaged students fall into the stereotype of the slacker who comes late to class (if at all), or is as easy to spot as Jeff Spicoli from Fast Times at Ridgemont High. In fact there are a number of students who are masters at playing the game … doing just enough to get by … attending class but not really participating, much less engaging with the content.