As the semester is upon us, being prepared to teach on Zoom is essential. The synchronous time you spend in Zoom with your students should be reconsidered to provide the best learning experience possible. We encourage you to do so! This week we hosted our first Teach Talk webinar for the Fall 2020 semester, presented by School of Life Sciences Instructional Designers, Lenora Ott and Sarah Prosory .  We discussed the process of teaching using Zoom, by focusing more specifically on using Google Slides and its features, live captioning, as well as creating activities for students to do during the synchronous session within breakout rooms in Zoom. The key take-away is to plan for what the students need to do before , during , and after the synchronous sessions, and that will guide you in the preparation for your class meetings too.  The Process Before Class: Share on Canvas any links that students will need for the sync session. Pre-assign breakout rooms if needed, otherwise ro...

Imagine students sitting in a college classroom where attendance is required. The instructor is describing how the body works to maintain homeostasis and then the instructor tells a joke. How would you respond? Well, studies indicate that your response may depend on who you are. Humor as a powerful classroom tool A major objective of educators and instructors is to get students motivated and engaged in their classrooms. One way that instructors can create more engaging spaces for students is through the use of humor. Humor may be particularly helpful for science instructors to engage with students since they have been previously described by students as uninteresting and unfriendly. Humor can help instructors appear to be more relatable and like a “real person” to their students, potentially driving student motivation. However, humor has to be taken as funny for it to be an effective way to actually foster student engagement. A previous study conducted by our lab found that ...

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...

Our last webinar focused on tips and strategies that were seen at the International Forum for Active Learning at the University of Minnesota. ASU was fortunate enough to have Dale Johnson from EdPlus lead a group of faculty and instructional professionals on this great opportunity to learn more about teaching in active learning classrooms. Peter van Leusen shared research and information about what "active learning" actually is, and why we believe it works.  Characteristics of active learning include more than students engaged in activities, but also there is greater emphasis on student exploration and extending and applying student skills and ideas. He shared an article, "Does Active Learning Work? A Review of the Research" as a great resource for more information. Aaron W. Johnson, Ph.D., Postdoctoral Research Fellow University of Michigan Matthew Robinson shared his insights into typical "myths" about active learning. He showed the ...

Today's guest blog is by Anna Krieg, an undergraduate researcher in Sara Brownell’s Biology Education Research Lab. She is a senior Barrett honors student who is pursuing an honors thesis that examines student academic self-concept in physiology. Learning student names is often promoted as a good teaching practice. Although learning student names has been linked to positive course evaluations and positive impacts on the students themselves, such as increased student participation and even student learning, there have been no studies specifically looking at the impact of learning student names. Researchers from Arizona State University have set out to fill this gap and explore the impact of this instructional practice. Do students even care? In short, yes. 85% of students thought that instructors using student names was important in a large class. Nine specific reasons as to why this was the case were identified that could fall into three broad categories: an instruct...