Faculty Focus

HIGHER ED TEACHING STRATEGIES FROM MAGNA PUBLICATIONS

Articles

Heighten Learning through Digital Storytelling

Social media has revolutionized communication by allowing anyone to easily broadcast ideas and creations to a broad audience. Whereas creative expression through media was once owned by a select few movie studios, television networks, and radio stations, now thousands of people have YouTube channels that they use to broadcast homemade shows on anything from news to entertainment to peer advice, etc. Dozens of these people are making a full-time living from the advertising revenue from their homemade shows.

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John Orlando, PhD January 21, 2014

Tips for Teaching Unprepared Students

Not all students are prepared for a class. Reasons for lack of preparation range from failure to engage with the assigned material to failure to complete or sufficiently understand a prerequisite class to lack of adequate preparation before entering school.

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Jennifer Patterson Lorenzetti January 16, 2014
teacher feedback

Why Don’t Students Use Teacher Feedback to Improve?

Here’s the conclusion of a small but intriguing study. Its findings reveal “only limited support for the idea that students actually do respond to feedback and make changes in a subsequent piece of assessable work consistent with the intentions that underlay the provided feedback.” (p. 577)

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Maryellen Weimer, PhD January 14, 2014

Nine Strategies to Spark Adult Students’ Intrinsic Motivation

Are you an instructor who struggles to change the mindset of your students? Do you find that the students’ first questions are about grades rather than the content of the course? Do you want your students to obtain good grades but realize that the grade is a result of a student who is engaged in the topic with passion, interest, and exuberance? It is this passion to learn that can be described as intrinsic motivation.

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Ludmila Battista and Verlinda Ruble January 13, 2014

What Components Make Group Work Successful?

There’s lots of research documenting the positive effects of group experiences on learning outcomes. Less is known about the specific aspects of group experiences that contribute to their overall positive impact. Thomas Tomcho and Rob Foels decided to explore this question by looking at the research on group learning in the field of psychology, as reported in the journal Teaching of Psychology.

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Maryellen Weimer, PhD January 9, 2014

Creating a Sense of Instructor Presence in the Online Classroom

Online instructors need to be intentional about creating a sense of presence in their courses so that students know that somebody is leading their educational experience. According to Larry Ragan, director of instructional design and development for Penn State’s World Campus, this sense of presence consists of three dimensions:

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Rob Kelly January 7, 2014

Practical Tips for Minimizing Cheating During Exams

There is nothing more disheartening and stressful than having to formally accuse a student of cheating on an exam. Was the student looking at his neighbor’s exam or just glancing away from his test for a mental break? Did the student ask someone how to fill out the name portion of the instruction page, or did she obtain an answer to a test question? Did the two students with identical written answers prepare study notes together or cheat off one another while someone was asking the professor a question during the exam?

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Diane G. Symbaluk PhD January 6, 2014

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