Students learn just as much in a course that’s taught partly online as they would in a traditional classroom, but such courses won’t reach their potential until they are both easier for faculty members to customize and more fun for students, according to a report released today. Given the daily grind of teaching, it is easy to forget that little practices can make a big difference when the goals are more learning and better teaching. Here is a reminder of five easy habits to practice mindfully. Failure in the classroom is frequently a very private affair. The norm in collegial conversation and in published pedagogical scholarship is to share success stories. We do need to learn about what does work, but often there is more learning potential when we try something and it doesn’t work. The problem, of course, is that learning from failure is rarely a pleasant experience. It doesn’t make us feel good about ourselves. 
It’s that time of the year when students leave us. Some graduate and we celebrate their growth and intellectual accomplishments. We are sorry to see them go. Others cross the stage and their parting is no cause for sweet sorrow. 
Maybe the classroom is too hot. Maybe you aren’t feeling your best. Maybe there’s just something in the air. Whatever the reason, your well-planned and executed lesson just falls flat. I can usually tell about 10 minutes into class when things just aren’t jibing–rather than blank stares of confusion, I see only glassy eyes of apathy. 
When there's a lull in the discussion, it's tempting for instructors to interject their ideas and opinions into student forums. However, teachers should use caution when posting messages. Some students may rely on the teacher's comments or wait for the teacher to lead rather than jump into the discussion. When possible, let the participants lead and only join the discussion when necessary. Via Dennis T OConnor Which online instructor characteristics help students succeed? It’s a rather basic question that has not been adequately answered. We did a literature search to find if anybody had done any research from the students’ perspective on what constitutes a quality online instructor. There were perhaps 10 articles by professors speculating about what they thought defined quality online instruction, but nobody had asked students. 
What happens to the value of the college degree when top universities are essentially giving away some of their courses free? That was the essence of a question that I posed to some of the students in my travels recently, and it touched off a wide-ranging discussion about how you calculate the value of a degree between different institutions and the purpose of college. Ah, spring: when a student’s mind turns to … final exams. Sure signs of the semester’s end include the first chirps of students’ asking if they can have a study guide.
My goal was to engage the students in the debates that seem to be swirling around them but so often don’t include them in meaningful ways. Their answers, in many cases, surprised me, based on what I have been hearing from both traditional leaders in higher ed and the people who want to disrupt the industry. And the students were much more nuanced in their thinking than they often sound in the news media, where sound bites and pithy quotes are usually favored over substance. So now at the risk of doing just that, here are three of the themes that emerged from my conversations. 
When we professors were students, we were all guilty of being off task from time to time during a class. Maybe you thought there wasn't any harm in jotting a note to a friend. Perhaps, in more recent years, you stole a quick glance at Facebook during a lull in the lecture.
What differentiates me from students (who tend to be 18 to 22 years old) at my small liberal-arts university is that I felt a level of respect toward my professors that seems to be fading. As I spend too much time repeatedly asking the same students to stay on task, the gap between our versions of acceptable classroom behavior grows. One-third of today’s college students require remediation. Of those students, half will never receive a college degree. Clearly, something isn’t working. This infographic lays out the state of college readiness in the U.S., and explains why being prepared for college matters now more than ever. 
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, and other institutions are old hands now at taking course material from the classroom and lab and putting it online for learners anywhere to use. Yale University may be the first to reverse the process, using its Open Yale Courses as the basis for an old-fashioned book series. |
Room 10 was often an uncomfortable place. I dreaded having to walk in there. Room 10 felt a bit like Hell’s Kitchen and my teacher, Mrs. H, was the Gordon Ramsey of chemistry teachers, to use a current analogy.
Giving students choices about assignment weights does confront them with who they are as learners. Ostensibly they would chose to put more weight on those assignments that build on their strengths or their preferences for how they like to learn. I routinely let students in my beginning communication course select which assignments they would complete (not how much those assignments counted). When I asked students to explain what their choices said about them as learners, the answers were not terribly encouraging. Mostly they reported picking the assignments that looked the easiest. 
Humanities students should be more like computer-science students. I decided that as I sat in on a colleague's computer-science course during the beginning of this, my last, semester in the classroom. The work of coding, I discovered, was an endless round of failure, failure, failure before eventual success. Computer-science students are used to failing. They do it all the time. It's built into the process, and they take it in stride. 
Students’ awareness of disposition development is the first step. They must learn that dispositions involve habits of thinking which influence their actions and behaviors. Explicit instruction about specific dispositions becomes a critical part of such awareness. Students need to know how dispositions, such as initiative, diligence, integrity, responsibility, and determination, influence their actions and behaviors in the classroom and how those actions and behaviors impact their level of achievement and pursuit of excellence. 
Good grading and good teaching go hand in hand. If you haven’t taken a fresh look at your assessment strategies recently, it’s likely that you’re missing some powerful ways to improve your courses and deepen the caliber of learning that takes place in your classroom. The purpose of this exclusive two-day event is to help you create purposeful, meaningful opportunities for students to learn exactly what you want them to learn. 
Users of Apple’s Keynote should be right at home working in Pages, at least in the way it displays documents, creates or opens new documents, the location of menu items, the way folders are created and deleted, etc. No one likes to read negative after negative after negative. It can be very discouraging. So let the student know a few instances where he or she has gotten it right—or nearly right. This helps take the sting out of an assignment that is loaded with errors, and can serve as a motivator that tells the student he/she does understand and is going in the right direction at times.
How the various topics that make up a course relate to one another is obvious to teachers—at least it should be—but I don’t think we devote much, if any, time explaining those content relationships to students. We finish up one topic or unit, summarize it, maybe there’s an exam at this point and then we start on the next content chunk. 1. Post a worksheet that helps students view your online assignment comments. Many students are new to online courses, and thus have not had experience with assignments being marked and graded online. This could translate into students not having their computers correctly set so they can see your reviewing/tracking feature comments. To minimize this problem, post a sheet—on day one—somewhere in class that students can always access, to give them instructions on how to properly set their computers to view your comments. (If you would like a copy of my instructions, just drop me an email, and I’ll be happy to send it!) 
John Boyer describes his course as an "Intro to the Planet" that brings "the average completely uninformed American" up to speed on world issues. His approach? Decentralize the rigid class format by recreating assessment as a gamelike system in which students earn points for completing assignments of their choosing from many options (1,050 points earns an A, and no tasks, not even exams, are required). Saturate students with Facebook and Twitter updates (some online pop quizzes are announced only on social media). Keep the conversation going with online office hours. In the online courses at Graceland University Gleazer School of Education M.Ed program, we have a structure in place called “Critical Friends.” It works like this: Students are organized into groups of three or four students, and must submit their weekly assignments to their group prior to submitting them to the instructor. As the excerpt from the weekly participation rubric below outlines, students are expected to give critical feedback to each other as it relates to both content and structure: |
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