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...

Today more than ever we are competing for our students' attention within the world of unfolding events. We are instructing across a variety of platforms both asynchronous fully online, and synchronous, hybrid, virtual face-to-face. It can be difficult to establish our course as paramount in our students minds. However, with a little planning we can help students see the intersection of their studies within the world around them, rather than just in an academic silo disconnected from their daily life. We’ve all heard students whisper that the first day of school in any course is “syllabus day”, a day in which an instructor reads over their syllabus document and points out any pertinent information and answers students questions about the workload for the term. It’s no secret that some students admit to skipping what they believe will be a “syllabus day”, because after all, they can read the syllabus at home. Although fully online students will not have this synchronous meeting to di...

Cheating is nothing new, and with internet access and the move to online learning, the opportunities to act without academic integrity have become more readily available. The discussion about academic integrity is often seen as a student-based issue, and thus tends to focus on dishonesty, cheating, and plagiarism and how we might reduce these behaviors by students.  As an instructor, you must decide how you choose to approach and address academic integrity in your classes. Research supports that instructors might increase academic integrity among their students by creating an environment that promotes honesty, responsibility, and fairness, instead of focusing on penalties.  Instructors are facilitators of their class and as such can work to create positive relationships and an atmosphere that supports academic integrity ( Boehm, 2009 ;  Stearns, 2001 ).  One of the first steps we can take is to ensure that students understand what academic integrity entails in g...

joomag example from Dr. Michael Angilletta In this week's TeachT@lk Webinar we discussed the benefits of redesigning your syllabus to get students interested in the course from the first day. We shared the requirements of the traditional syllabus, and what Syllabus "Bloat" is. We showed how to create interactive elements with hyperlinks, videos, images and visual layouts that highlight important information to students. We demoed examples in technologies ranging from the simple PDF file, to the more complex Joomag. We shared templates from CLAS and Digication that help make the transition a bit easier for busy faculty. We even spent some time sharing syllabi and giving input on how to make them better! Below are the links to the resources shared during the webinar: Adobe Connect Recording : https://connect.asu.edu/p9n0ypybjdj/ PowerPoints : https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/12594701/Final_IS_Slides.pdf Populr Example : http://page.teachingwithoutwalls.com/sy...