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creating better online videos to boost student learning

Transforming Your Lectures into Online Videos

When I was asked to create an online course 20 years ago, I simply transcribed my face-to-face lectures into 10–15 page Word documents that I posted in our LMS. Don’t ask me how my students managed to get through them.

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surviving negative course evaluations

Surviving Student (dis)Satisfaction Surveys

Just in time to thwart any attempts at starting to unwind and enjoy a well-deserved break from another brutal academic year, automated results of the Student Course Satisfaction Surveys (aka evaluations) arrive in my inbox demanding attention.

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getting students to do the reading

Students Aren’t Doing the Reading

That’s not going to come as a big surprise. What leaves most of us a bit breathless and depressed are the numbers. The study referenced below cites four other studies in which more than 70 percent of the students reported not doing assigned reading. In

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digital literacy skills

Helping Students Develop Digital Content Curation Skills

In our 24/7, always-connected world where we are inundated with information from all sides, the ability to identify quality resources to inform our research and actions has become a major focus in higher education. Digital Content Curation, as it is called, is something that many

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making connections in teaching

Making Connections in Teaching

As teaching professors, we know first-hand how complex an endeavor teaching is. The sheer number of instructional interactions, decisions, and processes can be overwhelming to enact, much less to master. To streamline such complexity, I have adopted what I consider a beneficial perspective. In its

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study strategy research

Study Strategies: What the Research Tells Us

We know a lot about study strategies—how they can be used to improve exam performance and promote a deeper understanding of the material. We also know that many students are attempting to learn course content without particularly strong study skills. They procrastinate and have short

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Appreciative close: creating classroom community

The Appreciative Close: A Strategy for Creating a Classroom Community

“What you appreciate appreciates” (Twist, n.d.). One of the practices I have employed in most of my classes during the past several years is “the appreciative close,” which is an offshoot of “the appreciative pause” recommended by Stephen Brookfield (Brookfield, 2015, pp.95-96). Brookfield suggests using

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building transparency into assignments

Building Transparency into Our Assignments

In education, transparency is typically described as making teaching and learning visible. “Transparent teaching involves making the implicit explicit for students so they understand why they are engaged in certain tasks and what role the course plays in their learning journey,” according to a recent

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using examples to improve learning

Let Me Give You an Example

A conversation with Stephen Chew (who keynoted the 2018 Teaching Professor Conference) got me thinking about examples, mostly how I haven’t read or thought much about them. I wonder if that’s true of a lot of faculty. I’m coming up with a number of questions

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