Teaching Strategies and Techniques

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Improve Learning with Student Interviews

Interviews are a powerful yet underutilized learning device in higher education. There are thousands of experts available who would be more than willing to add interesting material to your courses. While it is not very practical to fly those people in to speak in a

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Course Netiquette Expectations

All students pay tuition and deserve a positive and courteous learning environment. Students should be aware that their behavior impacts other people, even when interacting online. I hope that we will all strive to develop a positive and supportive environment and will be courteous to

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Hashtag Concept Organization for Better Learning

Twitter’s greatest contribution to information management is the humble hashtag. Previously, most social media information was organized by source. Think of how Facebook is organized around the content contributors rather than content category. But hashtags introduced a method for organizing information by type. I can

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Incorporating Gamification into Your Courses

The power of games as learning devices is well established, but transforming course content into an actual game is a huge undertaking. After all, gaming companies spend millions of dollars developing each game. A better approach is to incorporate gaming elements into regular course activities.

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Promoting Deeper Learning with Online Scavenger Hunting

Over the past 10 years in my online courses, I’ve used scavenger hunting as a fun way for students to investigate a topic, find answers to questions, and create a final project. A scavenger hunt requires students to actively search for a variety of types

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Tips from the Pros: How to Deepen Online Dialogue

Many faculty members express concern that discussion in their online courses is shallow or sparse. What is it that makes meaningful dialogue so elusive in online courses? Some practices in online course design and discussion facilitation can actually encourage superficial dialogue. Faculty grading and feedback

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Making Use of the Internet of Benevolence

One widespread misconception is that the Internet is a place for people to express malevolence toward one another, but that’s not true. People are generalizing from a handful of social media forums. Flaming is actually a situation-dependent activity and is isolated to places such as

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Teaching Skill Based Courses Online

One of the classes that I teach is Keyboard Skills, often referred to as “group piano.” In a face-to-face (F2F) classroom, there can be anywhere from 12-36 students, each seated at a digital keyboard. Keyboard Skills classes typically meet on the usual MWF or TR

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Shaping the learning experience The Pew Research Center reports that: These two statistics suggest that social networking through a cell phone can be an effective tool to support the learner's experience. There are numerous options for incorporating social networking into your online courses. Instagram Instagram is a free, mobile, online photo and video sharing social networking service. Users have the ability to share videos and photos through the Instagram website, email, or other social media websites. Students can download the Instagram app onto their phones and share information while they are involved in their daily activities. One possibility is to have students take pictures of how course concepts apply to the world around them. Marketing students could take pictures of effective marketing in the environment, or an education student could take pictures of an effective classroom setup. In this way sharing pictures of course content in real-world settings supports student reflection and application of course material. YouTube YouTube is the largest and best-known video sharing site. Since the YouTube app allows students to view videos from their phones, faculty can use it to host mini-lectures. Students can watch one- to three-minute lecture segments as their schedules allow, such as during a work break or while eating, riding a bus, or walking on campus between classes. The ease of access and easily digestible size of content will allow students to rewatch lectures a number of times to get the point, which will help in retention. Facebook Students access Facebook from their cell phones all day long. One way to keep students reflecting on course content throughout their day is to ask them to follow updates on course-relevant pages, such as those of politicians, businesses, news agencies, or organizations. Each update provides students with a real-world connection to the course content. Another option is to create a class Facebook page on which the instructor and students share videos, photos, and other content with the entire class. Students who see some application of course content in real life can snap a picture or create a video of it on the spot to post to Facebook rather than try to remember it for the next class meeting. Yoono Yoono manages all of your social network accounts at once, such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Foursquare, GoogleBuzz, Yammer, and Flickr. Yoono also has a share feature that allows users to easily share content across various platforms and a group feature that allows groups to be created from any of the software platforms. The value of Yoono is that it allows you to organize content by category rather than by source. So students can pull together content from different social networks on a particular course subject and get into groups with other students to share that content. Ask students to draw together social media references to the topics covered in your course to demonstrate the real-life application of those topics. Tweetcaster Tweetcaster, unique from other Twitter apps, allows users to organize their Twitter stream into topics by making and monitoring tweets and retweets. Users can also post to Facebook and Twitter simultaneously. Through Tweetcaster, tweets can be streamed in real-time, be longer than the traditional 140 words, and be put into customized notifications to allow classmates to know when new content appears. Students can use Tweetcaster to watch for course-relevant Twitter content or post new content for students, thus again connecting the course to real life as they encounter applications of the material. By monitoring tweets from around the world, students will also gain a global view of current issues. Technology is a powerful tool that can connect instructor and student in the learning experience. The fact that nearly 100 percent of college students have one common technology, the cell phone, presents an undeniable learning opportunity. Shaping course content so it can be accessible through a cell phone can also enhance students' learning experience by utilizing their preferred communication method. References Carter, D. (Feb. 2012). “Facebook Pages for College Classes? Students Say Yes, Please.” eCampus News. Retrieved on Sept 12, 2016 from http://www.ecampusnews.com/technologies/facebook-pages-for-college-classes-students-say-yes-please/ Pew Research Center Internet, Science & Tech. Retrieved on September 14, 2016 from http://www.pewinternet.org/2011/07/19/college-students-and-technology/ Dr. Jillian R. Yarbrough is an instructor of human resource development at Texas Tech University.