I often tell faculty interested in online teaching that it requires a fundamental change in mindset from content creator to content curator. Faculty are used to creating their lectures from scratch for face-to-face courses, but the wealth of good educational content on the web makes
One major attraction of social media is that we are using trusted sources to curate interesting content. Friends post funny videos and the like that appear on our Facebook timelines. With millions of new items appearing on the web daily, we could not possibly scan
Last year my dean informed me that I needed to offer our public speaking course online. This was not a course that naturally lent itself to an online format. In fact, I could not think of a course more poorly suited for an online format
Massively open online courses (MOOCs) have become a major part of online learning, with numerous universities offering courses that draw upwards of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of participants. These courses help fulfill higher education’s mandate of serving the public good by making university
Some of the best-known theories about how adults learn have been put forward by Malcolm Knowles, but how might his theories apply to online courses? We’ve been considering this question in light of two of Knowles’s theories—the value of life experiences and the significance of
Interest in and use of peer assessment has grown in recent years. Teachers are using it for a variety of reasons. It’s an activity that can be designed so that it engages students, and if it’s well designed, it can also be an approach that
A recent survey of 175 economics professors who teach basic principles of economics courses revealed a widely diverse set of grading practices for the course. These instructors taught at 118 different institutions, including doctoral degree-granting universities, two-year colleges, and everything in between. The findings are
Video material is now an important instructional component of face-to-face, blended, and online courses. Research supports its potential to promote learning, but those benefits aren’t automatic—it’s not just the video, but how that video material is designed and integrated into the course. Selecting the videos
Running undergraduate tutorials and labs is a component of graduate students’ training at most departments in North American universities. The experience is meant to prepare graduate students for the transition into academia, if they wish (and are fortunate enough to land a position), and to
Last summer, I reached the point of eligibility for early retirement. I thought about taking the leap but did not. I decided to keep teaching, asking myself, how hard could it be to teach for another few years? Harder than I imagined, as it turned
Magna Publications © 2023 All rights reserved
