It’s a favorite refrain: “The best teaching is teaching that is a genuine, authentic representation of who you are.” Yes, in the classroom we are obligated to be professional, but being professional should not prevent students from seeing their teacher as a real person.
It’s a favorite assignment in upper-division major courses—have students collaborate on a research project. The rationale is straightforward. Students learn how to do research by doing it. Of course it depends, but in most fields, students new to research find it a daunting process that
When creating course materials, it is important to be as inclusive as possible. A common way of working to ensure that materials respond to different approaches to learning is to use Universal Design for Learning (UDL), which proposes inclusive course design. It is a framework
How good are your students at assessing the quality of their work? Do they understand and act on the feedback you provide? I’ll wager that some students do. But the rest—they don’t know if what they’re turning in is good, not so good, or what
Online courses and degree programs continue to be popular with both students and instructors. Many online instructors use discussion forums in their online courses with varying levels of success. This article shares three ideas instructors can use to enhance their online course discussions. Idea 1:
I discovered some good literature on the student entitlement topic while preparing for the Magna Online Seminar program I’m presenting later today. Among the content areas addressed in the literature are: what entitlement is, what attitudes and beliefs are indicative of it,
The scenarios here can be used to explore the salient issues, starting with a deeper understanding of what entitlement involves. Most of the definitions are clear, but pretty generic. The conversation gets interesting when it focuses on what entitlement looks like when students have it
I continue to be concerned that we don’t design learning experiences as developmentally as we should. What happens to students across a course (and the collection of courses that make up a degree program) ought to advance their knowledge and skills. Generally, we do a
Do your writing assignment focus on the product or the process? How about your students? Where do you think their focus is?
At the end of the day, our students aren’t going to take from our courses the products they developed and use them in
I teach online at an open enrollment institution, which means I get students at all levels of writing ability. Many of them are solid writers with a good understanding of the different steps of the writing process. But I also have students who are just
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