The pandemic’s effects on higher education are giving us the chance to rethink, reexamine, and redesign our teaching efforts. From objectives to tech use to assignment choices, opportunities abound. I want to include the time factor in this process—not the time we put into course
The HyFlex teaching model has drawn considerable attention recently as an alternative to the online, face-to-face, and hybrid teaching models. A HyFlex course is offered both face-to-face and online at once. But instead of dividing course activities between the two modes, as a hybrid course
Open educational resources (OER) are gaining traction as a way to address the high cost of textbooks and students’ subsequent reluctance to purchase them. But there are still relatively few OER textbooks in many subject areas, possibly due to the lack of incentive for producing
Even after almost 25 years of teaching, one task I still approach with new-teacher determination is finding an effective icebreaker to kick off a semester. Every summer, I scour the internet with the goal of finding a non-cliched, community-building, invigorating activity that I can wow
As teachers and instructional designers, one of the biggest challenges we face is trying to come up with multiple creative and appropriately challenging activities for our courses. We have to consider the diverse needs of our learners and the goals of the course and then
In recent weeks, faculty members and their institutions across the nation and around the world have embraced the necessity of transitioning their courses to various remote delivery modes. While most faculty members have had to make some accommodations in their current courses, the necessity of
Asperger’s syndrome is a high-functioning autism spectrum condition in which individuals tend to lack empathy with others, appear unengaged in discussions, speak in a monotone, limit eye contact, fail to connect names with faces, display some clumsiness, and maintain an excessive focus on favorite topics.
Sometimes we are asked to step in during an emergency situation when a colleague cannot finish teaching a course. Sometimes enrollment or structural changes mean we are unexpectedly assigned to take on a new course just days before the semester starts. And sometimes, beyond our
I often wonder what students think about the assignments we create. In my experience, they frequently see assignments as having a limited and somewhat task-oriented relationship with their course work. Their concern about what counts for a grade is frequently one-dimensional and often usurps the
I’m a big fan of syllabi used well. On the crassest level—and it’s important—syllabi are contracts between faculty and students, contracts that administration holds us to. When a student makes a complaint, administrators want to be able to pull out the course syllabus and use
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