Who here feels a bit drained when it comes to how this year or semester is progressing? My hand is raised! Often when I feel this way, I find that attending a workshop, conference, or even reading a book and discussing with colleagues, reignites my excitement for education and all things learning. This fall our reading group continues (for those counting, this is the 6th book we have read, having started in Spring of 2019)! We selected the book by Sarah Rose Cavanagh called, The Spark of Learning: Energizing the College Classroom with the Science of Emotion . This book was calling to us because with the return to in-person learning and consideration of various digital modalities, we felt there was a need for conversations around questions such as: What have we learned this past year about our students? How can we engage and find connections with our students, after all that we have been through? What have we learned this past year about our teaching methods? What can be kept, and what...

Are you looking for ways to mix up your video lectures or announcements? Do you want to streamline and enhance your step-by-step instructions? Loom is an asynchronous presentation and video tool that is easy to use and offers a variety of sharing options that can help enhance your presence and levels of instruction online. From demo GIFs to content lectures, there are many ways to “show it, say it, and send it” with Loom! What is Loom? Loom is a recording tool that can capture your desktop, camera, and microphone to create interactive videos and presentations. In addition to HD video and sound recording, other recording features include an emphasized mouse cursor to highlight areas of the screen, a drawing tool to emphasize content, pop-up buttons that call viewers to action, and emoji reactions to take your screencasting videos to the next level. You have the option to turn any of these features on or off to customize your preferred recording experience. There are multiple ways to get...

When it comes to online course design and facilitation, course announcements are often treated as a “nice to have” supplement to instruction, taking a backseat to things like the syllabus, module overviews, and learning pages. Those pages contain valuable information, but announcements offer an opportunity to share content while making personalized connections. However, students often overlook pages that do not appear to contain value to them, including announcements. There's an art and science to crafting valuable announcements that students will want to view. Planning, organization, and frequency play a role in leveraging announcements to be more than unappealing check-ins that students ignore. Here are some effective ways to use announcements to weave student success and a culture of learning into the narrative of your course. Increase Your Presence One of the most common criticisms of online education is the lack of instructor presence. Particularly in large-scale courses, stud...

The opportunity to attend a university online is an attractive option for many students because of the flexibility in scheduling, the lack of commuting, and the ability to work from wherever. This is a particularly enticing option for individuals working full-time in any capacity such as a 9-5 office job or for taking care of children or other family members. So, as universities begin to develop more of these programs, these online programs open access to college degrees for a larger slice of society. However, who is enrolling in these programs, and are there grade differences for different groups of students in online courses? We know that, on average, students from backgrounds that are historically underrepresented in STEM tend to do worse in the classroom compared to their overrepresented counterparts. This group broadly includes BLNP (Black, Latinx, Native American, and Pacific Islander) people, women, people of lower socioeconomic status, and first-generation to college students. ...

Flipgrid as a discussion-based educational technology has taken the K-12 world by storm, but beyond its stickers, filters, and fancy fonts, the tool has a lot to offer to higher education as well. One such use is as an audio visual dictionary or demonstration tool. Think of it as Audio/Visual flashcards for important terms and concepts in class. What is Flipgrid? Flipgrid is a free, Microsoft-owned and powered educational tool for creating video-based discussions in the classroom. Instructors create “Groups” similar to a message board for their classes which can include one or more “Topic” threads. Typically, Instructors supply a prompt and students respond to the prompt and to each other within a “Topic”. It’s an asynchronous video discussion. Flipgrid allows instructors to link from several applications to support their prompts and responses including: Microsoft products, Google, YouTube, Vimeo, Kahoot!, Adobe Spark and more. But the system’s built-in audio and video editor should n...

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...

One of the beautiful things about a semester is that we are banded together in a learning experience for a specified period of time. Every class we teach has a unique makeup of students from all across the university. Many will be from different majors and all of them will have different backgrounds, cultures, and ways of seeing the world. It, therefore, becomes important to establish a community where students know their peers and are comfortable speaking to them. We also want them to see the instructors as part of this community, not just as wizened sage, but as a guide for their learning and experiences. This poses the question “How DO we establish a supportive community of learning in our courses?”. This can be largely based upon our introduction activities that pave the way for all other interactions in a course. We need to “ break the ice ”. In both online and face-to-face teaching modalities establishing community is important for creating space for discussions, as well as effec...

Learning is a journey. As we head into an unknown future for education, we cannot forget to include everyone along the way. Luckily, there are research-backed teaching methods we can turn to, for reminders on how to support our students as they continue on their learning pathways. One way is to differentiate your teaching practices, and consider using adaptive systems to further enhance learning adventures for students.  Last week we hosted our first virtual lunch and learn. Despite the new environment, we kept to our format of having a faculty colleague give a lightning talk about their teaching experiences, followed by a small group discussion about the topic, which also included an activity to practice what we had shared.  Differentiated Instruction Is Not What You Think We began the hour with Amy Pate , Assistant Director of Faculty Support for the School of Life Sciences, who set the stage for the topic of differentiated and adaptive learning. She explained that fo...