I’d like to begin with the main reason I offer extra credit. I offer it because I am an imperfect grader when it comes to assessing what is impossible to grade.
Have you ever wondered how to structure or strengthen a requirement for students in your online courses to interact with each other in meaningful ways? Perhaps you assigned discussion forum posts and responses or assigned team work only to notice that interactions devolve into superficial
Getting a handle on the effectiveness of widely used instructional strategies is a challenge. They’re used in different fields and with broadly divergent design details. Moreover, studying the effects of strategy as it’s being used in a classroom presents research challenges and an array of
Where do you stand on extra credit? All but one of the more than 20 faculty who shared their views with us endorsed it. By contrast, in a 1989 survey of faculty across a range of disciplines, only 28 percent believed that extra credit should
Guest speakers can be powerful mechanisms to promote student learning and provide additional perspectives on course material. They can help students grasp topics that require more expertise than the instructor may possess and offer insight into the day-to-day workings of a particular career path. Still,
Cases have a long tradition in business education, with a robust body of scholarship supporting their use. They been used for years as part of medical education’s problem-based learning approaches and more recently in undergraduate science education. The National Center for Case Study Use in
These extra credit assignments were submitted in response to our request for samples. We’ve organized them by the goals they seek to advance. In some cases, they are condensed versions of the assignment descriptions submitted, but we’ve worked with the authors to make sure the
It’s not often I write a column and then continue to wonder about the arguments it sets forth, but that’s been happening with my recent “Fair Grading Policies” column. Author Daryl Close, a philosophy professor, makes the case that fair grades should be based solely
It’s well known that group work benefits the learning process but also that learners can dread the idea of doing group projects. So, as online instructors, what can we do about this situation? Research shows that group projects in online courses are fraught with mixed
Extra credit can be an overused classroom tool. As a learner, I always viewed extra credit as teachers bribing students to work for points instead of cash. And as a new teacher, I thought the same and acted accordingly. We’ve all done it! You need
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