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Create Intentional Communities through Meaningful Student Introductions

February 20, 2020
Description Student introductions are a high-impact practice: they build community within the course, set the stage for more substantive forms of student-student and student-instructor engagement, and can reveal unknown issues or strengths on the part of students (Dolan, Kain, Reilly, & Bansal, 2017). Building community in online classes (Nelson & Goodson, 2018) through introductions helps…

Create a Case Method Group Activity to Engage Students in Critical Thinking

September 30, 2019
The case method group activity is an instructional design strategy that involves faculty members providing one or more case studies to which groups of students respond. The case(s) could be a real-life case or simulation. It could be description of key concept(s) applied, a story or scenario, an actual case study, a problem or mystery,…

Using Buttons to Chunk Assignment Instructional Steps

December 10, 2018
It’s no secret that many students feel negatively about online courses. This often comes from the expectations that learning at the college level in an online setting will be overwhelming, and that there will be a general lack of clarity regarding coursework (Mills, 2015). Facilitating student success in online courses, means that instructors must find…

Foster Meaningful Learning with Renewable Assignments

October 4, 2018
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…

Individualize Assignments in an Online Course

October 21, 2016
Individualizing assignments in an online course promotes student and instructor interest, challenges students to strengthen their research skills, and prevents students from paraphrasing other students’ work and presenting it as their own. This entry describes a strategy used to teach an online course in Urban Sociology, however, this strategy could be applied to many other…