There’s always a course students don’t want to take. Most likely it’s a required course, maybe a general education option, probably dealing with content students are convinced they don’t like (even though their exposure to it may be minimal) and requiring skills they’re certain they
College textbooks are expensive, and prices continue to rise. The Bureau of Labor reported a 600 percent increase in textbook costs between 1980 and 2012. The average 2015 American college student graduated with over $35,000 of student debt, a portion of which came from textbook
I’ve been retired, as in not teaching undergraduates, for almost a decade now. I miss the students. I miss some of my colleagues. But what I miss most is the beginning of the school year. It’s a new start—new students, sometimes new content, a few
Typically, when students review each other’s work, it’s a formative process. They offer feedback that ostensibly helps with production of the final product, which is then submitted and graded by the teacher. But that’s not the only option.
Teachers don’t always have the best attitudes about student rating results, and for reasons that are clearly understandable. Institutions often don’t evaluate teaching in the most constructive and useful ways. However, feedback from students is an essential part of any effort to grow and develop
Last week’s post encouraged us to reconsider what student engagement means and entails. Today I’d like to explore just some of the things teachers can do to better promote it. I’m offering six ideas here and encourage you to add to the list.
Videos are the ideal way to deliver content in an online course because the web is a fundamentally audiovisual medium. But while many faculty assume that videos require high-level technical skills to produce, they are actually not beyond the means of the ordinary instructor. They
Cultivating student creativity is more and more being touted as a fundamental objective of education. We are also hearing more and more about the benefits of peer review activities for student learning. However, some have claimed that peer review of student work dampens creativity (Hurlburt,
I recently took a canoe paddle-making course with my son from an instructor who guaranteed that all participants would come away with a result that they could be proud of. One of the ways he ensured this was by giving us various “scaffolds” at different
I am often asked what software I would suggest for student collaboration on files, such as group projects. Not surprisingly, my go-to systems are Google Drive and Dropbox. Google Drive is ideal for shared document editing, while Dropbox is ideal for transferring files between people.
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