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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…

Using Images to Encourage Visual Creativity, Display Comprehension, and Application of a Lesson

November 22, 2017
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,…

Develop Critical Thinking Skills through Online Simulations Created with Blackboard’s Testing Tool

November 21, 2017
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…

Use a Reflective Online Discussion Activity to Help Students Solidify Learning

November 21, 2017
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…

Foster Creativity, Collaboration, and Student Choice using Digital Storytelling

November 13, 2017
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…

Use Role Play to Increase Student Engagement in Online Discussions

October 27, 2017
Description As faculty, we are always trying to both stimulate student engagement and assess learning. One method for increasing student engagement that has been gaining in popularity is engaging students in role play activities. These activities can vary in scale from large, multi-day events (such as Reacting to the Past) to smaller activities contained within…

Post First Discourse

August 17, 2017
Description Online discussions are most effective when students engage in higher order thinking, taking time to reflect and compose original posts. Instructors play a key role in purposefully designing discussion forums that move “student discourse out of the margins of thinking to deeper levels of thought” (Williams, Jaramillo, Peski, 2015, p. 46). The post-first discourse…