AspirEDU Attains Certified Partner Status with Canvas by Instructure

AspirEDU, a company specializing in data driven educational analytics, announced that it has attained Certified Partner status with Canvas, joining the ranks of other Canvas partners such as Pearson, McGraw Hill, Wiley and Adobe. Canvas by Instructure is a cloud native learning management system (LMS) used every day by more than 400 colleges, universities and school districts. In addition, the Cisco Networking Academy selected Canvas to power “The World’s Largest Classroom.”

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The Importance of Relevancy in Improving Student Engagement and Learning

For more than nine years, I have been deeply interested in metacognition as it applies to the art and science of teaching. I have also been involved in taking non-professional teachers and training them to be both content area experts and more than adequate teachers in the classroom. This can be a tough endeavor as people like to teach in non-traditional schools for a variety of reasons and some are not always interested in becoming teachers qua teachers. Worse are those who feel being a subject matter expert is enough because as long as they’re talking, the students must be learning, right?

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Lessons Learned from My Students

My students have taught me some invaluable lessons during my first two years as a college professor. I’d like to share three of the most important ones here. They aren’t new lessons and I didn’t use any unique methods to learn them. I collected data midsemester from students, I talked with them, and I looked closely at what was happening in my classroom. The lessons were there for me to learn, and taken together they have helped me think more clearly about what I want my students to know and do, and who I want them to become. They are lessons that have made me a better teacher.

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Panopto and Instructure Expand Integration between Lecture Capture and Learning Management Systems

Video platform provider Panopto today announced a unique, expanded integration with Canvas, an easy-to-use learning management system (LMS) by Instructure, enabling educators and students one-click access to Panopto-recorded video lectures inside Canvas and enabling IT administrators one-click integration of all courses and lectures.

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Private Journal Replaces Discussion Forum in Blended Course

The discussion board in Kathleen Lowney’s large blended (or hybrid) section of introduction to sociology at Valdosta State University wasn’t serving its intended purpose of engaging learners with the content and preparing them for face-to-face class sessions. She tried dividing the students into smaller discussion groups of 50 and then 20, and the results were the same: the weaker students waited until the last minute and essentially repeated what the better students had posted previously. When she replaced the public discussions with private journals, the quality of students’ posts improved, as did their grades.

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Experimenting with Facebook in the College Classroom

While discussing the nuances of regression analysis, I saw some of my students smiling. It wasn’t a smile of understanding; it was a response to seeing a Facebook comment on their smart phone. I later learned that 99% of the students in the research method class were Facebook users, routinely checking for updates 10-20 times a day. I asked them to refrain checking their phones during class.

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Becoming a Better Teacher: Principles That Make Improvement a Positive Process

These principles don’t propose breathtakingly new insights, but they offer a context for improvement that should make efforts to teach better more successful...All teachers can improve; most should. Don’t base efforts on premises of remediation and deficiency. Positive premises work just as well. You can improve your teaching just as effectively doing more of what works well as you can...

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Course Redesign Finds Right Blend of Content Delivery and Active Learning

Introductory courses are packed with content. Teachers struggle to get through it during class; students struggle to master it outside of class. Too often learning consists of memorizing material that’s used on the exam but not retained long after. Faculty know they should use more strategies that engage students, but those approaches take time and, in most courses, that’s in very short supply.

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Eight Roles of an Effective Online Teacher

Teaching face-to-face and teaching online are both teaching, but they are qualitatively different. In comparison, driving a car and riding a motorcycle are both forms of transportation, but they have enough differences to warrant additional training and preparation when switching from one to the other. The same is true when faculty move from the traditional classroom to the online classroom. There are some things that the two have in common, but there are also plenty of differences. With this in mind, consider the following eight roles of an effective online teacher.

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