Assessment

Online debates have been found to elicit higher levels of cognitive presence in online discussions versus the more traditional question-and-answer format (Zydney, deNoyelles, & Chen, 2014). This can be explained in several ways. In a debate, students must argue for or against a position, with the intention of persuading others to assume the same position.…

  Discussion forums are commonly used in online courses because benefits are multiple. However, instructors and students may find it daunting to read tens or hundreds of posts. One way to make online discussions less overwhelming is to allow alternative means of expression. Instead of writing, students may be encouraged to use images, voice, and…

Different from a traditional disposable assignment, a renewable assignment is an assignment where students compile and openly publish so that the assignment outcome is inherently valuable to the community after the class is over (Veletsianos, 2017). Renewable assignments can be scaled to graduate and undergraduate students across disciplines and take various forms.One form that renewable…

According to Facing History and Ourselves (2017), “a journal is an instrumental tool for helping students develop their ability to critically examine their surroundings from multiple perspectives and to make informed judgments about what they see and hear. Informal writing, such as journaling can serve as a way to formatively assess the student. Additionally, Walker…

Educators can use a creative way to encourage students to explore how they can represent a humanities or social science concept through images. Some students have interesting ideas, but are unable to express them through essays or conventional discussion because many of our instructional activities do not lend themselves to such ways of thinking (Drapeau,…

Simulation with sophisticated manikins or standardized patients has firmly established itself as an effective teaching practice in nursing and medical education (Liaw, et.al., 2015; Shin, Park & Kim, 2015). Although mastering many skills of advanced practice nursing requires high fidelity simulation, the thinking processes – diagnostic reasoning and clinical decision-making – can be successfully learned…

In order to build the scaffolding for learning, students need to acquire knowledge to build from. Lectures and chapter reading assignments can make current Instructional Designers cringe, but often times it is a time-efficient strategy to deliver content. What the authors of Make it Stick illustrate so well is that often when learners listen or…

When an assignment offers students an opportunity to demonstrate learning through creativity, peer and small group collaboration, integration of technology of choice, and learning by sharing, aligning with student learning outcomes becomes simple. Digital storytelling as a strategy can provide evidence of the integration of complex to simple concepts learned within the discipline, while requiring…

Research shows that students perform better when the rubric provided by an instructor is deconstructed for them (Jones 2017). This allows the students to see not only how they are going to be graded, but why they are going to be graded that way. The ideas for the evaluation categories on the rubric came from…

Asynchronous discussions are often utilized in online courses and while they can be effective toward creating and sustaining a learning community, they are not effective if not optimally designed. It can sometimes be difficult for students to converse in a way in which knowledge is co-constructed, and a way in which students can constructively critique…