The recent decades have seen growing faculty interest in learning. Increasingly, teaching is being understood in terms of how well it promotes and facilitates learning. Faculty are more familiar than ever with the evidence that favors active learning over lecture. And although many still lecture,
A recent issue of Outside magazine recounts Charles Bethea’s attempt to run a sub-five-minute mile. At age 35 and fit, though not an elite athlete, Bethea’s goal is far short of the world record of 3:43. And although many runners break the five-minute barrier, it’s
“We are very good at teaching students how to solve problems for which we already know the answers. The challenge is to teach them strategies for tackling problems we’ve yet to solve.”
Today I had an interesting experience while teaching my biochemistry class. I had students write the Krebs cycle on their digital whiteboards while keeping track of the specific carbons in the cycle intermediates. The point of this exercise was to have students understand how biochemists
“What has held me, and what I think hold many who teach basic writing, are the hidden veins of possibility running through students who don’t know—and who strongly doubt—that this is what they were born for, but who may find it out to their own
Most faculty require students to present the results of their research and thinking in text form—the ubiquitous “paper” assignment. But in the real world, information is often presented in visual form. Reports are loaded with graphics to represent information. A mutual fund does not demonstrate
Any teacher will tell you that they could use more time. One way to save time is with the Google Drive suite of tools. These free apps are not only powerful in themselves, but a host of add-ons have been developed around them that increase
When designed and implemented effectively, online learning holds huge potential for education, but many online courses that we see nowadays are not designed based on sound instructional design and adult learning principles. Simply providing students with online content and expecting them to learn on their
An effective online learning environment cannot be sustained without the development of a learning community. Students must be engaged and feel that their voices are not only being heard, but are a key component of the instruction. In an online grammar classroom, students must also
For a while in my online teaching career, I’d been reluctant to use group learning techniques with my students. My students are primarily undergraduate majors who have been out of school for a while and generally need more hand-holding (or so I thought). What I’ve
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