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 ...

Videos in the online space are now more important than ever. With the move to teaching remotely, many instructors have started wondering how to implement videos in their course or revisit the ones they have created that are already there. In this TeachT@lk, Kena Ray and Sam Miquirray from The College Dean’s Office touch on using videos to maximize lecturing and learning. Why do we use videos? What makes them effective and, once we have them, how do we reach our student audience? Why we use them Videos create connection and, as social creatures, humans look for those connections. Students feel more connected to their instructor(s) when they know a real human is behind the screen looking at the work that they are submitting. They can pick up on social cues through videos and interaction and, in turn, are able to meet and enhance the learning outcomes of a course. How we make them effective When instructor-made videos are aligned with learning objectives, students learn exact...