Have you ever experienced the eerie, but familiar, sensation that your students have not done the required reading and are not prepared for class? We all know that our class sessions would be a lot more enjoyable—for us and for our students—if our students were
1. Do you ask discussion questions that promote critical thinking?
2. Do you engage students in different types of discussion activities?
3. Do you clearly explain your expectations?
4. Do you provide exemplary and poor discussion post examples to students?
5. Do
In an online learning environment, the discussion board is the heart and soul of the course. The posts, queries, responses, and exchanges aren’t just about learning the course content—they also help to humanize the course. The trouble is, of course, that it’s not always easy
When designed and implemented effectively, online learning holds huge potential for education, but many online courses that we see nowadays are not designed based on sound instructional design and adult learning principles. Simply providing students with online content and expecting them to learn on their
For a while in my online teaching career, I’d been reluctant to use group learning techniques with my students. My students are primarily undergraduate majors who have been out of school for a while and generally need more hand-holding (or so I thought). What I’ve
Most faculty require students to present the results of their research and thinking in text form—the ubiquitous “paper” assignment. But in the real world, information is often presented in visual form. Reports are loaded with graphics to represent information. A mutual fund does not demonstrate
An effective online learning environment cannot be sustained without the development of a learning community. Students must be engaged and feel that their voices are not only being heard, but are a key component of the instruction. In an online grammar classroom, students must also
Classroom Assessment Techniques (CATs) are valuable tools for helping faculty find out what students are learning and how well they’re learning it. Since the 1988 release of Classroom Assessment Techniques: A Handbook for College Teachers by Thomas Angelo and Patricia Cross, college teachers have been
The famous baseball player Cal Ripkin Jr. was known to hit 500 balls in practice per day. If he was working on the traditional model of higher education, his coach would watch him swing once, proclaim that he has the right technique, and have him
“The New Cheating Economy,” an article published in The Chronicle of Higher Education (2016), tells the story of two Western Carolina University professors who set up a fake online class to see what forms of cheating they could detect. Their story shows that cheating is
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