Today's blog is written by Virginia Downing, Academic Success Manager and member of Sara Brownell's Biology Education Research Lab, Arizona State University When it comes to increasing student learning in college classes, active learning practices have been strongly recommended as a way to build students’ content knowledge. One common instructional practice in active learning classrooms is having students use clickers – handheld response devices – to answer instructor posed questions. Clickers allow all students in the class to be able to answer a question and the instructors can see how the class as a whole answered the question. By having students actively engage with the subject matter by answering questions, studies have shown that on average students learn more and fail less in these active learning courses compared to traditional lecture courses. However, what has yet to be explored in detail is how active learning practices like clickers may increase feelings of an...

Today's blog is written by Sara Brownell , PhD, Associate Professor School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University. We all know the reputation of science instructors as unapproachable and boring. Yet they don’t have to be. One easy way for science instructors to connect better to students is to tell a joke – or two- in the classroom! A new study published by our research group in PLOS ONE explored student perceptions of college science instructor’s use of humor by surveying over 1600 students from 25 different college science classes. Overwhelmingly, students appreciated when instructors tried to be funny; in fact, 99% of students appreciated instructor use of humor! However, the type of humor seemed to matter for students. If the instructor told a joke that was perceived as offensive, then students related less to the instructor and felt as though they did not belong as much in class. However, when an instructor tells jokes that students think are funny, they be...

This week's TeachT@lk Webinar focused on a challenge that many of our faculty are focused on this summer. Change ! As ASU begins to convert BlackBoard courses to Canvas, there are many opportunities to improve all our courses in ways to benefit both faculty and students. Most materials CAN be moved into Canvas, but the question is SHOULD you move all your materials? Peter van Leusen , from EdPlus, talked about strategies to determine whether materials in your Blackboard course were valuable and important enough to import to Canvas. He suggested spending time looking at course evaluations, talking with TAs and your instructional designers to determine if content should be kept, modified or "dumped" before moving to Canvas. Jason Neenos , from UTO, then went over tips regarding file structure in BlackBoard and how it would import into Canvas. Showing that each folder became a "module". He shared a quick "Cheat Sheet" to help faculty remember how ...

image link Traditionally, active learning has been associated with the face-to-face classroom, and many online courses focus on more traditional activities like watching videos and taking online quizzes. However, with the push for an online biology degree at the ASU School of Life Sciences , it is vital that techniques that focus on student-centered learning and collaborative/peer engagement be integrated into our new online courses. This webinar focused on taking activities that are used in a traditional classroom, and translating them into online activities with the use of web apps and some restructuring.  One of the examples shared included changing a typical minute paper written before students left a class, into an interactive video post, asking students to answer a prompt with their own videos using FlipGrid. Another example showed participants how Google slides and Padlet could replace post-it note activities that allow students to group, categorize and make conn...

This week's TeachT@lk webinar focused on a common issue at ASU, our large classes. Often faculty have 100+ students, and are overwhelmed at the end of the semester with grading. Our objective with this webinar was to share some different ideas about assessment that might make it a bit easier. I was joined by Lynda Mae from Psychology and Jason Neenos from the University Technology Office. We started with some tips to use online exams, even for face-to-face classes, that build on Bloom's taxonomy, and some sample questions. We also shared ideas about protecting integrity by randomizing questions, limiting times, browser lockdown and passwords. One interesting tip for multiple choice exams is that research shows that 30 seconds per item prevents cheating and does not tend to lower  performance. Of course, instructors may need to modify that number depending on the type of question. We also discussed an often controversial topic of group exams. We focused on a few differe...