August 1, 2024
Kick off an online course with an asynchronous goal-setting icebreaker where students can form community and intentional goals for the course. This activity can be extended with goal progress check-ins throughout the semester for continued engagement.
June 30, 2023
Faculty seeking a dynamic lecture-recording method for their online, hybrid, or flipped classrooms appreciate the Lightboard strategy. A Lightboard is an educational technology tool with a glass writing surface embedded with LED lights, allowing instructors to face the camera and create engaging instructional videos. LED lights and fluorescent markers make the writing highly visible on…
June 19, 2023
“In the United States, almost 50% of the students who follow a degree in science, technology, engineering, or mathematics (STEM) will not complete it” (Johnsom et al., 2022). Moreover, when the World Health Organization announced about the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Kindergarten to 12th grade schools and institutions of higher learning worldwide responded with…
June 13, 2022
Traditional gallery walks let students stroll through the classroom viewing their peers’ work, which is often set up on the top of their desks. At its heart, a gallery walk is an interactive, discussion technique where students move around the room, actively analyze information, and provide peers with feedback about their work (Fasse & Kolodner,…
July 8, 2021
Conrad and Donaldson note that the shift from the instructor as provider of knowledge to the “the instructor as facilitator of active student learning” began well before the introduction of online learning, with the work of John Dewey, who emphasized “diverse and meaningful peer collaboration” in learning environments. One of the ways to foster significant…
March 5, 2020
Description The digital powerups strategy provides an innovative way for instructors to engage students in higher-order online discussion by humanizing and personalizing the discussion. This strategy should be used to allow students to engage in online discussions in relevant and authentic ways. Online discussions can “allow students to participate actively and interact with students and…
March 2, 2020
If one of the central goals of higher education is “deep and meaningful learning” as Rourke, Anderson, Garrison, and Archer suggest (1999), it is important to consider how to best capitalize on the ease and abundance of interaction in online courses to facilitate this type of learning (p. 3). In their Community of Inquiry Model,…
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…
December 3, 2018
Good course design involves alignment of course and lesson objectives with relevant activities and assessments.
October 21, 2016
It can be difficult to build a sense of community in an online course (Moskal et al., 2010), especially in mathematics where written work is usually somewhat limited. I find that regular class discussions provide a considerable benefit in this process. But the practice that has most effectively improved connections between students and between me…