Nearly all online faculty use discussion in their courses, often simply because everyone else does or their institution’s course development model assumes they do. But like any course content or activity, we need to ask about its purpose. There is no law that all online
“Learning Outcomes for Instructors, Not Just Students.” That was the title—and message—of an earlier article I wrote for The Teaching Professor. Writing it set me on an important path (or perhaps reminded me of the path I was already on): I am a learner alongside
There’s advice and there are activities that can help develop students’ abilities to offer constructive feedback and use the feedback they receive from peers to more accurately self-assess and improve their work. Those aren’t skills that college students today widely possess, but they’re skills that
It has been said that experience is the best teacher, and for this reason, many instructors and educational programs are adding experiential components to their curriculum. One form of experiential learning is service learning, where students apply what they are studying to improving their local
How can a popular party game help students become better evaluators of the credibility of the information they find on the internet?
Two Truths and a Lie involves making three statements about yourself, one of them a lie; the challenge for the rest of the
Exemplars are “carefully chosen samples of student work which are used to illustrate dimensions of quality and clarify assessment expectations” (p. 1315). In addition to offering this definition, Carless and Chan (2017) provide a rationale for using them: “Unless students have a conception of what
Pete Burkholder recently published an interesting article in this newsletter questioning the widespread push in higher education for “engaging” student activities. He first adopts Jose Eos Trinidad et al.’s (2020) definition of engagement as “enjoyment” and then notes that student enjoyment does not automatically mean
Teachers can’t monitor what’s happening in multiple groups. Students, on the other hand, know exactly what’s happening in their group—who’s contributing what in the group as well as what they’re doing. From that position they can make judgments and offer peers feedback. The potential benefits
Too often, faculty make content coverage the focus of lesson planning. They plan their courses around the topics they need to cover, which usually leads to them motoring through information that their students are supposed to write down and retain. When students do not retain
In last week’s column I highlighted work that proposes ways of increasing the impact of the feedback teachers provide students. Doing so requires more feedback opportunities and activities—bottom line: more work for teachers. That got me thinking about how much of what I write in
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