You wait with anticipation. You receive the email: Course assignments are posted. You click on your Course Assignment. And—you’re assigned to teach a course that you have never taught before. Maybe you feel excitement, maybe you feel anxiety, or some…
By: Kelly Price, PhD, and Julia Price, EdD
When students enroll in online classes, they are often wary and a bit intimidated by the experience. There are a multitude of concerns such as assignment quality/rigor, technology and the course management system, course design, the expected workload, and their…
By: Jörg Waltje, PhD, and Aubree Evans, MA
Regardless of whether you’ve been teaching for 15 years or 15 minutes, how to act and what to do on the first day of class seems to be something many faculty are constantly revising. The impact of the lasting nature…
By: Faculty Focus
The Focus is You will now occur just once a month. We have other exciting things to share with you on Thursdays, like our new, free special reports, so we have to make room for all the events that are…
By: Dom Caristi, PhD
A bunch of guys had a late afternoon game of touch football in a field. As it started getting dark and the players moved toward their cars, one realized he didn’t have his car keys and must’ve lost them while…
In the face-to-face classroom, each faculty member typically designs and teaches their own course with minimal input from departmental colleagues. Reflective of this approach, many colleges and universities have adopted similar models for their online program in which each faculty…
One of the most intriguing, and perhaps intimidating, aspects of walking into a class for the first time and introducing yourself is deciding who you will be. The teaching persona you present to your students on that first day of…
There’s no discounting the importance of the first day of class. What happens that day sets the tone for the rest of the course. Outlined below are a few novel activities for using that first day of class to emphasize…
A very short trip to a time long ago J. R. R. Tolkien’s famous 1937 fantasy book, The Hobbit, introduces among its heroes a fierce group of dwarves who are descended from noble stock: ancestors who ruled a community that…
To: My Students From: Your Teacher Re: What’s happening in college—is it real? I just read about a senior engineering student who was presenting a design project in an upper-division business communications course. In the presentation, he talked about what…