Academic Partnerships and Instructure, Creator of Canvas, Form Strategic Partnership to Empower the Next Generation of Online Learning at Leading Universities

Academic Partnerships, which offers comprehensive support to universities in the development and marketing of their superior online courses and degree programs, today announces a strategic partnership with Instructure, the company behind Canvas – a learning management system (LMS) used by 275 educational institutions. Through this strategic partnership, all of Academic Partnerships’ current and future university partners will be able to utilize the Canvas platform free of charge, in all of Canvas’ available languages, to help streamline the online delivery of high quality educational content.

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Test Prep: Getting Your Students to Examine Their Approach

I was inspired by Maryellen Weimer’s article on “Teaching Metacognition to Improve Student Learning” and the accompanying article by Kimberly Tanner on “Promoting Student Metacognition.” Tanner reflected on a comment I have heard many times: "...it's my job to teach [your discipline or learning outcome goes here], not study strategies." How often have we heard that our students don't know how to learn? Regardless of whose fault it is, Weimer’s article shows how relatively easy it is to incorporate practical "meta-learning" strategies into our lesson plans. It's a no-brainer if a teacher conducts a structured pre-test review class, and a post-test follow-up activity, where many of the issues on clarity, confusion, and preparedness will be brought into the light.

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Get Visual: A Technique for Improving Student Writing

One of the ongoing challenges for my composition students is the task of narrowing a broad, generalized topic into a more particular, focused topic for a short research essay. To help them develop this skill, I now prescribe a broad topic for everyone to use in the first research essay. Over several class sessions, we work collaboratively to explore the general topic, identify more particular subtopics, and develop research strategies to investigate these subtopics as possible subject matter.

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App Review: CloudOn

Cloud users have a variety of options for accessing content as well as the option of using any number of apps to create content, e.g. documents, spreadsheets, and presentations just to name a few. Many of the available apps in the iTunes store and Google Play even mimic computer application programs that most of us use on a daily basis and CloudOn is one such app.

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Six Ways to Get Your Online Students Participating in the Course

Have you ever worried about the level of participation in your online courses? Perhaps you have difficulty encouraging students to interact with one another, or maybe you find student responses to be perfunctory. Surely there must be a way to encourage the kinds of participation that really supports learning.

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A New Way to Help Students Learn Course Vocabulary

Most college students struggle with the vocabulary of our disciplines. In their various electronic exchanges, they do not use a lot of multisyllabic, difficult-to-pronounce words. And virtually all college courses are vocabulary rich—unfamiliar words abound. Most students know that the new vocabulary in a course is important. They use flash cards and other methods to help them memorize the words and their meanings for their exams. Two days later, the words and their meanings are gone.

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Five Competencies for Culturally Competent Teaching and Learning

Today’s classrooms require that instructors possess competencies for teaching all students. Robust instructional strategies and culturally sensitive curricula are critical, but more important is an instructor who is sensitive and responsive to the unique differences of each student. Recognizing the need to strengthen specific competencies to reach and teach all students requires an understanding of new ideas and a willingness to view instruction through varied cultural lenses.

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Reap the Benefits of Experiential Learning Without Leaving the Classroom

Experiential learning is widely recognized as a high-impact educational practice that occurs outside the classroom through experiences such as internships, study abroad, and service-learning. However, experiential learning works very well inside the classroom as well. In fact, there are a number of reasons why faculty may want to facilitate an experiential learning component in class rather than outside of class.

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Six Paths to More Authentic Teaching

Most frequently, authenticity is described as being “real” or “genuine,” and the advice often given to faculty wanting to develop authenticity in their teaching is to “just do what comes naturally.” But obvious definitions and easy advice frequently obfuscate deeper complexities, and that is definitely the case with authenticity.

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Welcome to the Age of Active Learning: Echo360 Acquires LectureTools

Echo360 announced today that it has acquired LectureTools, Inc., a learning technology company that enables professors to make their teaching more interactive. Founded by a professor from the University of Michigan, LectureTools provides professors with an authentic and easy-to-use solution that enhances lectures with digital content, provides real-time feedback from students, measures learning and facilitates online collaboration. The LectureTools system will be seamlessly integrated with the award-winning Echo360 lecture capture and blended learning platform to provide a unique option for institutions seeking to immediately improve and extend their on-campus experience.

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