School of Life Sciences is a wonderful community focused on improving teaching, sharing new ideas, and working together to find solutions for our students. Join us for a minute to reflect back and lift up the many voices in this community. Here are some of the key ideas and popular posts shared last year from our SOLS Community: Faculty Contributions: Our blogs covered a number of different ideas generated by the strong relationship between instructional designers and faculty. Often new ideas are tested and written about from courses. Some of the highlights this year were seen here: In How Active Learning is Implemented , Sara Brownell, shared various questions about how instructors help or hinder students when implementing active learning strategies. Gillian Clark shared her experiences with using specifications learning and shared the benefits and challenges in Adventures in Specifications Gradin g Reimagining classroom collaboration activities and teams became a topic for both bl...

Everyone is on Slack right now. Including me, as I write this blog! Oh, you aren’t? I’ll do my best to help you make the leap! What is Slack anyway, and what makes it different from, say, the AOL Chatrooms of yore? And even if it is special, how can you effectively use it in classrooms? It’s time to Level Up Immersive Conversation Using Slack! In Part 1 of this series, we talked about Yellowdig as an online social media platform that lives in your Canvas course fully equipped for online asynchronous discussion and immersion synchronous discussion. It has auto-grading capabilities and can help learners organize thoughts about the course around major themes. Its gamification features ensure learners stay on topic and contribute consistent and quality posts and replies. Slack is different from Yellowdig, but can also be used to enhance your classes. Here are some of the major features of Slack. Independent workspace , Slack is not a Canvas embedded tool. It’s an independent workspace for...

When I work with faculty that teach immersion (students in the classroom) many of them are worried that if they teach online or hybrid they will lose what they feel is the cornerstone of the classroom experience: collaborative discussion. And it’s true, for many years we’ve been constrained by a model created in old-style internet forums using threads and responses. At first, they were exciting (maybe), but for many of us they’ve grown stale and the conversations contrived….or non-existent. But we shouldn’t abandon hope that online asynchronous discussion is possible and important. If anything, the rise of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Whatsapp, and Discord have shown us that not only are many of our students capable of meaningful asynchronous interaction, but a large part of their social existence depends on it. So why don’t we have meaningful conversations in our own asynchronous classroom discussions? Why do students “go behind our backs” to create a Discord? (Will they please let...

Active learning has been recommended as a more effective way to teach when compared to traditional lecturing, yet active learning can be implemented in many different ways. One common approach in active learning is to ask students to share out their thoughts either with other students or in front of the whole class. These social interactions can be fruitful for hearing different perspectives and building classroom community, but they also can present challenges because they create a larger number of opportunities for a student to feel judged based on their answers. This worry of being judged, or fear of negative evaluation, has been shown to be a problem in active learning, particularly for students with anxiety . Implementation of Active Learning In two interview studies, one with students from a research institution and a second with community college students , students reported that how active learning is implemented matters. Answering a question that is timed based on accuracy...

What is active learning? Active learning has been proven to show an increase in student learning and a decrease in student failure compared to passive learning. As a result, many institutions have adopted various active learning pedagogies. Evidence also shows that active learning may decrease achievement gaps between students in traditionally underserved groups, such as women and underrepresented minority students. While active learning has been dubbed as inclusive teaching, it is still unclear if active learning is inclusive for all students. It has now been established that students from certain demographic backgrounds such as students with anxiety and the LGBTQ+ community have encountered barriers in an active learning setting. In a recent study , we interviewed 37 Disability Resource Centers (DRC) Directors from various U.S. Institutions to identify “To what extent is active learning inclusive for science undergraduates with disabilities” What is the DRC and who does it serve? Dis...

Group work whether online or in-person almost always begets one or more emails that read “I’d really rather not do group work. Can I complete this project alone?”. Students, limited on time and juggling a number of courses and responsibilities rarely get a thrill at the thought of a “group project”. Despite our best efforts as instructors it can be difficult to inspire in students the notion that life and work in general are often group projects, and one can rarely go at it alone. We want our students to experience collaborative and active learning, and group work is often one way of doing this on a smaller, more intimate scale ( Hesterman, 2016 ). How can we relieve the pressure and the fear that one group member feels will become their solo burden under the name “group project”? Group contracts and reflections may be a good place to start. What is a Group Contract? In several of our courses we begin group projects with a Group Contract, a collaborative document signed by all group m...

Some students roll out of bed for early morning classes, bleary-eyed, hair a mess, thankful for coffee, and still wondering if their socks match as they stroll into their 7am lecture. Other students impatiently sigh through stomach rumblings as learning stretches into the evening hours. Does research literature suggest a perfect class time where professors can avoid all the trappings of boredom, hunger, and sleep for maximum learning? What can it tell us about adaptive teaching styles? A Tale as Old as Time….of day. Picture me, the typical college sophomore: I am flip-flopping between these two student roles. I want to be as successful as I can be, but my schedule seems to work against me. I’m often late despite my best efforts as I stumble into my 7am biochemistry class. I force my brain to care about hydrophobicity but wonder why I didn’t sign up for an evening section. Oddly by the end of class, my brain is awake, peppy, excited to learn. Other nights, I go to bed late. My only clas...