Teaching in Troubling Times

In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, as we deal with closed campuses and everything going online, we find ourselves teaching in the face of an array of circumstances that make learning difficult. The undercurrents of the unknown run deep. There are our own health

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Student Attitudes about Group Work

“Students don’t like group work, especially the bright students.” You hear that a lot from faculty; it’s a widely held opinion. But how much do we actually know about student attitudes toward working with others? I thought it might be useful to explore what the

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A Memo to Students on Punching through the Pandemic

Dear Students,

Confused by remote learning? Uncertain? Anxious? Worried? Stressed? Unclear what next week will bring? For many of us faculty, the answer to all these is yes. I am guessing that many of you are experiencing this as well. We are all in this together.

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Taking Your Classes Online in a Flash

Most higher education institutions have put their classes online for the remainder of the term. Higher education is well positioned to take classes online because so much of teaching in higher education is lecture driven rather than reliant on one-on-one interactions as in the K–12

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Teaching for Embodied Learning

I think I killed my yeast.

It has been years, nay, decades, since I last baked bread without using a bread machine. It has even been years since I used a bread machine. I once regularly made a delicious honey graham bread. It always turned out

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Getting More Useful Written Comments from Students

Many faculty don’t expect to learn a lot from those end-of-course student comments. Students don’t write much, don’t always think carefully about what they write, and have been known to make ugly comments. Low expectations would seem to be justified, and that’s unfortunate. Because they’ve

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Developing Online Courses with Course Design Cards

We observed a new level of interest and excitement among participants during a recent faculty-teaching workshop. We attribute most of this energy to an innovative course design tool that we have been piloting at our university. Course design cards help faculty to brainstorm new approaches

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Assignments Don’t Just Happen

I often wonder what students think about the assignments we create. In my experience, they frequently see assignments as having a limited and somewhat task-oriented relationship with their course work. Their concern about what counts for a grade is frequently one-dimensional and often usurps the

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An Active Learning Exploration: Two-Stage Exams

Research on active learning is moving beyond the “does it work better than lecture?” question to explore how particular kinds of active learning experiences influence learning. How appropriate and welcome! Do some of its many techniques promote learning better than others? Which ones? And what

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What Can YouTube Teach You about Creating Videos for Students?

A national survey found that Generation Z students (defined as those born between 1995 and 2012) ranked YouTube as their favorite learning tool (Overland, 2018). Yet many instructors think to themselves, “There is no way I could create videos like the professionals.” The good news

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