Online instructors focus most of their teaching on curricular issues—what they will teach, how they will teach it, etc. But studies have found that differences in curriculum have little, if any, effect on student outcomes. John Hattie compared more than 100 factors related to student
Flawed pedagogy, lack of learner preparation, and reliance on extrinsic motivation can detract from the learning potential of discussion boards. In an interview with Online Classroom, Naomi Jeffery Petersen, associate professor of education at Central Washington University, discussed these problems and offered advice on getting students
We have this tendency in higher education to throw babies out with bath water. It derives from dualistic thinking. Either something is right or wrong, it’s in or out, up or down. As mature thinkers, we disavow these dichotomous perspectives, but then
Issue 1: The classroom discussion is going pretty well. Students are offering some good comments and more than one hand is in the air. Then a student makes a really excellent observation that opens up a whole avenue of relevant possibilities.
That was the question, followed by, “Are they students who want to take over the classroom?” “No,” I replied, “it’s about how students approach learning—motivated, confident, and ready to tackle the task.”
The March 12, 2014 post raised issues about those students who really don’t want to work with others in groups … “lone wolves” as they’re called in the literature. Your responses raised a number of issues. I thought it might be worth exploring some
The Effective Lifelong Learning Inventory, developed by a research group at the University of Bristol in the UK, is a self-assessment tool that helps learners develop an awareness of how they learn and encourages them to take responsibility for their learning. It contains seven
We, as instructors, often discuss our teaching philosophies but rarely consider our learning philosophies and those of our students. I believe that a learning philosophy is different from a learning style, which is often described as an innate student quality. In contrast, a learning philosophy
There are three articles in this issue that deal with student assessment and learning. One offers an interesting approach that has students writing and answering their own exam questions; another introduces the idea of feedforward, which provides feedback before rather than after learning; and a
Having students write their own exams is an interesting idea that arose out of the authors’ desires to increase student involvement in learning and self-evaluation, minimize cheating, decrease exam stress, and make exam experiences more meaningful, among other goals. It’s an approach that can be
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