APPlicable Ways to Close the Online Distance
With the onset of COVID-19, new approaches and technologies are being explored and implemented by instructors at all levels, but what is new is not always better. Having been in…
Teaching Mistakes 101: What I Wish I Would Have Known
If you’re like most educators, you probably made your share of teaching mistakes. This report features more than a dozen essays by instructors who were willing to share their early-career missteps and the lessons they learned. Because sometimes you just have to follow your gut, and sometimes your gut is wrong.
Why You Should Be a Selfish Instructor
With coronavirus vaccines now approved for use, there is finally some light at containing the COVID-19 tunnel that has been restricting activities for the past year. But in the early…
Five Online Tools to Help Support a Learning Community in Your Course
There is no doubt that the COVID‐19 pandemic has radically revolutionized teaching methods and student interactions in the classroom. Like millions of teachers around the world not formally prepared for…
Bringing the Outdoors Online: Creating Online Field Labs
Field labs, common in natural resource and agricultural education programs, have learning objectives that can be hard to transfer to an online environment. Covid-19 has necessitated the movement of many…
Five Tips to Creating a More Engaging Online Course for Adult Learners
As society has evolved, so too has education. To meet the changing needs of our world, an explosion of online education has focused on adult learning. Adult education covers a…
Higher Ed at Its Best: Helping One Another Survive and Thrive Through a Pandemic
I’ve been a professor for nearly 30 years, charged with teaching hundreds of students about psychological development. They learn how humans adapt to physical, cognitive, identity, and social changes at…
A Course Design Process That Works for You
Designing a course can be daunting. Do you get an instructional designer involved? Do you incorporate backward design or even a hybrid approach? Is there a course design template out…
Don’t Spam Your Students and Other Practical Communication Tips
One of the key elements to teaching online is effective communication between teacher and student. We would like to think that our communications are the most important ones that students…
The Value of Chit-Chat in Higher Education
Remember the “good ol’ days?” How often did you walk down a hallway of your academic unit and pass a student, faculty or staff member, or administrator and have a…