Teaching strategies for the college classroom

Professors' use of Twitter represents an innovative form of educational discourse as the number of social media sites and users rises in the digital age.

I mostly teach basic technical writing, and I face the same problem that confronts many of us who teach writing. It’s hard enough getting students to do the assignments, and almost impossible to get them to do a first draft. But writing takes practice, and if you require students to practice, that leads to an inevitable mountain of papers to grade.

At my college, the trend is toward bigger classes and fewer course hours in English. This makes giving students the chance to practice all the more important, and providing the necessary feedback all the more challenging. I’d like to share a couple of solutions I’ve devised that help me deal with both these problems.

Helping students identify communications failures and choose an appropriate medium for expressing their ideas may well turn out to be the easier parts of the task, though. The bigger challenge will be to help them develop the attitude of openness that can both aid effective communication and reduce the likelihood of conflict, even if disagreement remains.

There are concerns about authenticating the identity of those completing assignments in distance education. Here are some solutions.

Understanding learners’ experiences in the online classroom help you improve your courses for current and future students and help build a strong learning

Creating videos, presentations, and lessons that college students access and interact with on their own time and terms is one thing, but developing learning content that requires both students and instructor to be online at the same time presents a whole different set of challenges for college professors and instructional technologists.

People who have taken dozens of massive open online courses share their advice for those teaching them.

The Education Department announced Friday that it would push back by a year the deadline for complying with a rule requiring states to authorize colleges within their borders, but did little to clarify a regulation that colleges and their representatives say is confusing and difficult to navigate. The new deadline is July 1, 2014.

Active learning brings many benefits to the college classroom, but no matter how much emphasis your curriculum places on engaging students, sometimes you still have to disseminate information.

If some faculty do not fully embrace their role as academic advisor, don’t assume that they are indifferent to students’ needs or feel that advising is strictly a student affairs function.

Detailed, specific feedback enhances student learning. It also helps boost morale, promote engagement, and encourage faculty-student connection. Unfortunately, it often consumes an inordinate amount of faculty time.

Truth, we’re told, is the first casualty of war. But as I hunker in my office bunker, the dull thud of history term papers landing on my desk, columns of sleep-deprived and anxiety-ridden students trudging past the door, I’m convinced that truth is also the first casualty of undergraduate paper writing. It is not only the historical truths trampled in the mangled and muddied papers written by my students. More insidiously, a deeper truth also suffers. Only tatters remain of the contract, implicit but immemorial, that teachers will grade student papers fairly and honestly. This shared conviction, that the students’ level of writing can be raised only if the teacher levels with them, now seems a historical artifact.

Do you have a favorite assignment? One that may or may not count for much in the grand scheme of the class, but that you always look forward to? Maybe, even, an assignment that never once makes you headdesk as you grade?