Faculty Tools for Teaching & Learning

Here is a bonus blog post: as we get ready to start the new semester, it is a good time to double-check that these five elements are in your syllabus.  These will help ensure students start strong in your course, with a clear understanding of what they will be learning, what will be expected of them, and what they can expect from you, including ways to find other resources for help. 1.  Are your course objectives or outcomes written in clear language that students can understand?   Would a student reading your objectives (who may have no experience with the terms and ideas from this class) be able to read your objectives and state precisely what they are expected to learn?  This seems obvious, but it is difficult to design a map of how to get from point A to point B as a student when we don't know the location, description, or features (what the performance looks like) of point B.  Ideally the objective also gives some indication of what level of performance...

As we finalize our syllabi for the start of the new semester, let’s talk about a quick strategy that can really change how you and your students view the learning experience in a course: consider using a low-stakes quizzing strategy. Often times we use quizzes to ensure students are reading and understanding the basic content before we discuss it in the classroom or use it in online assignments.   Perhaps you have students complete a quiz before attending a F2F course, or perhaps you have one each week for an online course.   Quizzes provide very helpful feedback to the instructor—if we write the questions carefully, we can see exactly where students did or did not make the connections or missed important components of a topic.   That information in turn allows us to adapt the learning materials, class discussion, or other activities to bridge that misunderstanding or confusion. Something that I see faculty do less often is to allow students that same quiz to be ...

Today let's take a look at the Remind app and the Remind.com website.  By creating a free account on the website or through the app, you can build custom groups and send targeted announcements or other information directly to your participants.  Let's explore how it works, and then a few ideas for how to utilize it in higher education. How it Works You begin by setting up your free account through the website https://www.remind.com/ , or visiting your Apple App Store or Google Play Store and downloading the Remind app.  You'll need to provide an email address, and you can choose to link it to your cell phone or to simply use the service with email (more on the cell phone connection in a moment).  Students or participants would register with the site the same way as part of the process of following your class/group (it is free for them too). Once you sign up, you create a "class" to start building a group.  All you really need to do is create a name for t...