September 18, 2020 Flower Darby
Online classes, by their very nature as distance learning experiences, present barriers to student engagement and learning. These barriers are a primary reason that we see low student engagement…
In Effective Teaching Strategies, Online Education
September 16, 2020 Darina M. Slattery, PhD
The primary focus of any instruction should be to focus on the learning outcomes or capabilities you are trying to achieve. Bloom (1956, 1964) identified three types of learning…
September 4, 2020 Neria Sebastien, EdD
When hundreds of spring and summer undergraduate courses were abruptly moved from onsite to online delivery in the wake of COVID-19, several faculty and students nationwide reacted with panic…
September 2, 2020 Rachel J. Ebner, PhD
Due to the pandemic, both instructors and students have had to adapt quickly to different forms of online learning models. Asynchronous learning has emerged as a predominant model because…
August 24, 2020 Julie Sochacki, JD
When I envision teaching this fall, my highest priorities are social presence and flexibility. No matter the outcome of the fall 2020 semester, my goal is for students to…
August 21, 2020 Dennis Lowe, PhD, and Taylor Lowe, BA
In the Chronicle of Higher Education’s guide to student engagement, Cavanagh (2019) emphasizes the importance of connecting course content to the emotional lives of students. Bundick, et al. (2014)…
August 19, 2020 Jeremiah E. Shipp, EdD
The global pandemic sent higher education institutions into a whirlwind as many faculty members scrambled to make the rapid transition from traditional to online courses. However, COVID-19 revealed the…
I was in the middle of conducting a research study, examining my own teaching of implementing fun and play into learning, when COVID-19 hit, and we were forced to…
August 14, 2020 Tracey-Ann Carter, PhD, and Toni SimsMuhammad, DAH
It is safe to say that online instruction may become to the traditional classroom what the telescope is to the naked eye. The future of higher education institutions will…
August 10, 2020 Dennis Lowe, PhD
During a recent online class, a student posted in the chat, “We should use breakout groups in all courses.” On the other hand, a faculty director bemoaned receiving student…
**Editor’s Note: This is a recent article from The Teaching Professor. If you are interested in similar articles, check out The Teaching Professor membership.** Most higher education institutions have…
Creating a vibrant community is always on my mind, so the very first thing I do on the first day of class is pass around a tray of cookies…
July 31, 2020 Susan Swayze, PhD and Rick Jakeman, EdD
The discussion forum plays a central role in our online graduate-level, advanced research methods course, providing opportunities for students to demonstrate knowledge and connect and learn with each other…
July 27, 2020 Andrew St. James and Darlene Campbell, PhD
“No combination of words can put together the feeling of relief, comfort and gratitude I have towards your course and your fantastic TAs.” –Student comment, Spring 2020 As universities…
“Okay, anyone have any questions? . . . No? Then let’s do it with the music. We’ll start the combination to the right.” The instructor, Julie, ducked off camera…
Connecting with students is one of the most rewarding aspects of a professor’s job. Some faculty hesitate to teach online, frequently offering the rationale: “I want to connect with…
“What are we supposed to be doing?” (said every student at least once in a breakout room). Small groupwork enables students to “compare their current understandings with those of…
Last spring, my college, like so many other schools, made a dramatic mid-semester pivot from face-to-face instruction to online classes. It was trial by fire for instructors and students…
In Course Design, Online Education
June 29, 2020 Kristen Bailey, Thomas Bullington, and Luke MacIver
Dr_Tom 🎲 Dungeon Master (DM): Not every DM plays the villain. That’s not my style. I prefer to hover the party, telling the story, urging the student-adventurers onward. One…
In Effective Teaching Strategies, Online Education
June 26, 2020 Brad Garner, PhD
In our 24/7, always-connected world where we are inundated with information from all sides, the ability to identify quality resources to inform our research and actions has become a…
June 24, 2020 Abdullah Al-Bahrani, PhD, and Rebecca Moryl, PhD
COVID-19 has upended normal social connections that develop between students and professors. We are missing the connections that develop through casual interactions in office hours, pre-class discussions, post-class questions,…
June 17, 2020 Lisa K. Forbes, PhD
Today, faculty are being asked to abruptly expand their teaching practices in ways many of us would never have imagined. For many, teaching online is something they’ve never done…
In Course Design, Online Education
June 8, 2020 Miriam Bowers-Abbott
While there is no shortage of data about COVID-19, finding meaning within that data has been another matter entirely. Meaning would be especially helpful for faculty who are trying…
In Online Education, Teaching and Learning
June 3, 2020 Bonnie Bechard, EdD
For the past three years, I have taught a social entrepreneurship course with a semester-long project called Climb Above Addiction. This social venture supports prevention and recovery from drug…
Instructors, and instructional designers, spend a lot of time thinking about the flow of a classroom and how to create an intuitive sensibility that paves the progression a student…
In Effective Teaching Strategies, Online Education
May 22, 2020 Christian Aguiar and Albert Pearsall, III
This spring, the COVID-19 pandemic forced many to make a sudden transition to online teaching, a field with its own rich body of research, best practices, and good ideas.…
May 20, 2020 Gwen Bass, PhD, and Michael Lawrence-Riddell
Over the past decade, many independent schools have intentionally expanded their missions to go beyond academic excellence and include goals related to character development, equity, accessibility, and social responsibility.…
In Online Education, Philosophy of Teaching
May 18, 2020 Mary Hoeft
It was Friday, March 12, 2020—the end of a long week of “What Ifs.” What if Covid-19 spreads across the U.S.? What if our university closes? What if our…
While it might seem like a different lifetime, it was not so long ago that our world was turned upside down by the emergence of COVID-19 and the onslaught…
Because I teach online courses, I hoped—foolishly—that my own students would not suffer too much from the destabilizing effects of COVID-19 on higher education. I knew them to be well-versed…
April 29, 2020 Siva priya Santhanam, PhD
The transition to online teaching has been partially, if not completely, challenging for faculty teaching in colleges and universities. I am writing this article while reflecting on my own…
As a teacher of writing and mindfulness, I often use cross-genre approaches in my classrooms. For my writing classrooms, that might mean simple breath work, meditation, or movements to…
When I was asked to create an online course 20 years ago, I simply transcribed my face-to-face lectures into 10–15 page Word documents that I posted in our LMS.…
April 10, 2020 David Noffs and Jacob Guerra-Martinez
Editor’s note: This article was featured on The Teaching Professor in December 2018. For more articles like this, learn more about a Teaching Professor membership. Late last summer we…
Here I sit in my new, make-shift home office moving my face-to-face courses online with a view of my backyard. For the last few days I have contemplated many…
March 30, 2020 Marie A. Revak, PhD
Students in online courses start with the best intentions—keeping up with the readings and assignments, engaging in discussion, and learning from their instructor’s feedback and comments. Once an online…
As schools across the nation announce they are switching to online instruction in an attempt to slow the rapidly evolving coronavirus pandemic, teachers everywhere are scrambling to convert their…
In Online Education, Philosophy of Teaching
March 25, 2020 Donald A. Saucier, PhD, and Tucker L. Jones, MS
The worldwide COVID-19 pandemic has caused a fast and radical shift across colleges and universities to remote and online teaching models. As such, our face-to-face courses have been taken…
As universities rush to get all their courses online quickly, there’s a high probability of error but also a lot you can do to succeed. Problems may occur due…
March 16, 2020 Cassandra Sardo and Justin York, PhD
“Write an initial post and then reply to two of your classmates.” These are the standard requirements for students participating in online course discussions. Discussions in an online course…
