Students need to be able to make decisions about learning on their own. Are there instructional behaviors teachers can use that move students in that direction? There are, and the research highlighted here offers one very practical set of teacher behaviors that increase student autonomy.
Most would agree that the classroom is a place for discourse, reflection, and learning. But whose class is it? Who’s doing the learning? The teacher or the students? We submit it’s both—teacher and students learning from each other. Too often, faculty see themselves as the
In the article referenced below, biologist Kimberly Tanner proposes a set of strategies to ensure that “all students have opportunities to verbally participate, all students can see their personal connections to biology, all students have time to think, all students can pose ideas and construct
If you use collaborative assignments in your online course, you should assess those assignments collaboratively, said Rena Palloff, online instructor and coauthor (with Keith Pratt) of several online learning books, including Lessons from the Virtual Classroom: The Realities of Online Teaching (2013), during a recent
For the past 100 years, folks in higher education have assumed that feedback must be written. Even when the assignment itself was not in text form, such as a video, instructors usually provided written comments. But feedback can be given in a myriad of different
As the old adage goes, a picture is worth a thousand words, and information represented in pictures can be very powerful. Information graphics, or infographics, are visual representations of information, data, or knowledge. Infographics ask for an active response from the viewer, raising the questions,
Determining the effectiveness of online learning interventions is essential to continuous online course improvement. Action research offers an exciting model for instructors to meet this challenge by enabling them to quickly probe for sensible solutions to pedagogical problems.
When Washington University School of Law enlisted the help of 2U, Inc., (www.2u.com) to develop its online master of laws program, the challenge was to figure out how to make the Socratic case method work in an online environment.
On the first day of classes two years ago, I had students in my professional and technical writing course send me an email with their goals for the semester. I discovered they had no understanding of goals, expectations, or objectives. I realized there are reasons
“Get students talking about their experiences!” I heard this recommendation in a couple of sessions at the recent Teaching Professor Technology Conference, and the admonition does rest on sound premises. Students learn new material by connecting it to what they already know. If a teacher
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