Should You Learn Their Names?

Most teachers think they should. Almost all make an effort and feel guilty when they fail. In the literature, learning students’ names is widely advocated as a good teaching practice with claims made that it builds relationships with students and creates a positive atmosphere in

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Collaborative Course Development

Collaborative course development is a course design model where “students are asked to play more formative, active roles than in traditional models, with the intent of vesting students in their educational processes” (Aiken, Heinze, Meuter, & Chapman, 2016, p. 57). The theoretical foundation for the

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Course Redesign: A Compelling Example

Many of our course revisions happen without much planning. A new idea comes down the pike, an interesting technology option becomes available, a colleague shares a strategy that effectively deals with an issue, and we just use it! So, the course evolves and changes but

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Office Hours: In Need of Better Branding?

Getting students to take advantage of office hours remains a challenge. Most of the time only a small percentage of students show up and often not those most in need of help. When students don’t take advantage of office hours, they lose the chance to

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Classroom Discussion

Improvising Great Classroom Discussion

I was watching a video of several of my students teaching this week. I had to be away for a conference, and they were scheduled to teach that day anyway, so I asked our Center for Teaching Excellence to record it. I would evaluate them

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Conference attendees

Taking Time to Refresh, Recharge, and Recommit

I continue to worry that we devalue the affective dimensions of teaching—the emotional energy it takes to keep delivering high-quality instruction.

Most faculty are on solid ground in terms of expertise. We know and, in most cases, love our content. We don’t get tired of it—oh,

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Letting Your Personality Shine Online

While online learning provides students with accessibility, flexibility, and reflective interaction, it can also “create a sense of isolation, making it particularly difficult for a community of inquiry to thrive” (Borup, West, & Graham, 2012, p. 195). In these contexts, it can be difficult to

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Using Feed-Based Social Media

Social media fundamentally transformed the web by making everyone a content producer. But this move from web 1.0 to 2.0 also exploded the number of websites that people wanted to monitor. Now we want to see what is going on with our hundreds of Facebook

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A Three-Tiered Discussion Format for Online and Blended Courses

One of the central challenges to structuring meaningful discussion in courses with online components is to identify what shared learning experiences students are able to accomplish on their own, what learning experiences require dynamic support, and what kind of dynamic support would be best (e.g.,

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