Teaching

In Fall 2020, at the height of the pandemic, I was required to teach in person. Although quite uncomfortable, I improvised. On my first day back, after months secluded in my apartment, I noticed large wedding tents pitched around campus. Inside were tables, chairs, and heaters. Immediately, I started meeting there, seeking to offer engaging,…

Professors are still struggling to get students to come to class. An expert reminds them that they can do only so much.

Sources of Cognitive Load -- from learningscientists.org Excerpt: Cognitive Load Theory is an influential theory from educational psychology that describes how various factors affect our ability to use our working memory resources. We’ve done a digest about cognitive load theory here and talked about it here and here, but haven’t provided an overview of the

We get all kinds of questions about teaching and learning online. We collected the most common questions we get from instructors new to teaching online and created short, vibrant, and dead practical guides to addressing those questions and called them Design Studio: Jump Starts. This [...]

Published in Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning (Vol. 52, No. 5, 2020)

Free Technology for Teachers

Sheet1 David Gooblar,The Missing Course Joshua Eyler,How Humans Learn John Warner,Why They Can't Write Sarah Goldrick-Rab,Paying the Price Cathy Davidson,The New Education Sean Michael Morris & Jesse Stommel,An Urgency of Teachers Paul Handstedt,Creating Wicked Students Jane McGonigal,Reality is...

Sheet1 Author,Title Thomas Newkirk,Embarrassment: And the Emotional Underlife of Learning Rebecca Solnit,Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities Bell Hooks,Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom Richard M. Ryan,Self-Determination Theory James Carse,Finite and...

At Belmont University assessment practices exist to measure our students' progress toward our University Learning Goals and to foster a meaningful and sustainable campus conversation.

Many professors are struggling to connect with their students these days. First the pandemic forced emergency remote learning, where professors had ...

Postdigital Science and Education - ‘Pedagogy first’ has become a mantra for educators, supported by the metaphor of the ‘pedagogical horse’ driving the ‘technological...

It takes a village... Reflections on sustainable learning design - from educationalist.substack.com; The Educationalist by Alexandra Mihai Excerpt: For the purpose of this article I want to look at learning design in a more holistic way, as a practice that takes place at institutional level. Because we are actually not designing the learning, we are designing for learning. It’s

Dave makes the point that we do all this stuff before we ever meet the students... My point? In addition to his... How hard it is to do all the stuff beforehand, particularly if there's nothing to go from in existence. Course design the way I learned... a flowchart. It's for week three of our introduction of Humanizing Digital Learning course we're teaching this week. Draft ver. 1. pic.twitter.com/zRnBjLjCLR— dave cormier (@davecormier) May 22, 2023

by Derek Bruff, visiting associate director This spring CETL hosted a faculty learning community on the topic of active learning in large STEM courses. Over a dozen faculty from biology, chemistry, mathematics, physics, and other departments met every other week, mostly on Zoom, to share and discuss shared challenges teaching large courses, particularly introductory courses. […]

Read about the most important research into how we learn conducted in the last 50 years, what it found, and what that means in the classroom for teachers.

What do students say about alternative grading?

Also, what are you reading this summer?

Free Technology for Teachers

Going Gameful Home Go Gameful Ready to implement a gameful learning approach into your course? Use the resources below to help guide you through! Getting Started Example Syllabi Planning Resources …

Canva for Education is the world’s largest free, online design platform that enables teachers and students to easily create beautiful and engaging designs. Bring your ideas to life with over 60,000 ready-to-use educational templates including: worksheets, lesson plans, presentations, posters, newsletters, class schedules, book reports, infographics and more. In this session, Jason Wilmot, Head of Canva for Education, will share how to get Canva set-up through your Canvas LMS. Then, George Lee, Master Educator, will share examples of how teachers and students are using Canva to transform learning in both face-to-face and virtual environments. For more Videos & Insights, visit the Instructure Study Hall: https://www.instructure.com/canvas/resources Get Canvas for Dummies: Everything You Need to Know! https://www.instructure.com/canvas/resources/articles/canvas-lms-for-dummies Interested in Canvas LMS? Get more info here: https://www.instructure.com/canvas/higher-education/platform/products/canvas-lms Check out the Canvas Community for more tips! https://community.canvaslms.com/ Listen to the Canvascasters wherever you get your podcasts! https://anchor.fm/canvascasters Follow us on Social Media! Twitter: https://twitter.com/CanvasLMS Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CanvasLMS Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/canvaslms/ #Canvas #EdTEch

Remote teaching created a unique opportunity to study the experiences of faculty participating in a course design institute. Hundreds enrolled in our online institute, where technologies (e.g., Zoom, Canvas, Google Docs) facilitated interactions among participants and preserved their ideas and perspectives throughout the program. Using a grounded theory analysis approach attentive to the participants’ words, the authors uncovered participants’ experiences and their perspectives on the structures that shaped those experiences. The data ultimately revealed five themes (pedagogical knowledge, student perspective, community and connection, technology, and emotion) that relate to changes in participant attitudes, perceptions, and/or pedagogical approaches. Drawing on these themes, we identify implications for future professional development programming design that align with other results from the literature, including the importance of modeling the student experience, deliberately addressing community and connection, building in time for synthesis and commitment, and prompting faculty to identify and reflect on their emotions. Though some of the identified themes may have been more visible because data were captured in the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, these themes are aligned with prior research and existing learning theories and will apply to the design of course design institutes beyond the context of crisis situations.

Robert Talbert is a math professor, so numbers are his thing. And the way the grading system in education works has long bothered him.That became clear ...

h/t Josh Eyler Grading refers to the symbols assigned to individual pieces of student work or to composite measures of student performance on report cards. This review of over 100 years of research on grading considers five types of studies: (a) early studies of the reliability of grades, (b) quantitative studies of the composition of K-12 report card grades, (c) survey and interview studies of teachers’ perceptions of grades, (d) studies of standards-based grading, and (e) grading in higher education. Early 20th century studies generally condemned teachers’ grades as unreliable. More recent studies of the relationships of grades to tested achievement and survey studies of teachers’ grading practices and beliefs suggest that grades assess a multidimensional construct containing both cognitive and non-cognitive factors reflecting what teachers value in student work. Implications for future research and for grading practices are discussed.

If you insist on using tools to detect AI-generated text in student work at least do so in an open and transparent way.

Sitting with this. Curious what others are thinking and feeling. #HigherEd #FacDev #Belonging https://t.co/TnaxjbngCA— Karen Costa (she/her) (@karenraycosta) May 5, 2023

h/t Ludmila - the article she likes the most regarding the science of learning