I Am Not a Robot
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…
The First Days of Class: Building Authenticity and Community
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…
The Focus is You: Katrina Gundling and a Mud Hut
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…
Testing and Assessment: Looking in the Wrong Places
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…
Multi-Faculty Collaboration to Design Online General Studies Courses
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…
Bringing PEACE to the Classroom
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…
Smiling female student solving mathematic formula on whiteboard with her teacher during lecture in the classroom.
First Day of Class Activities that Create a Climate for Learning
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…
In the Halls of the King Under the Mountain (of Grading)
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…
Music in the Classroom
As faculty, we want our students to achieve, but more than that we want our students to see, at least in some way, that what they are learning in class…
A Memo to Students: College and the Real World
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…