Articles

Service-Learning: Tips for Aligning Pedagogies with Learning Outcomes

While it is easy to see how service-learning meshes with courses in the social sciences, public health and education, can it work equally well in other areas, such as the hard sciences and the humanities?

Yes. While service-learning is not appropriate for every course, it can and does work well in every discipline. No matter the discipline, research has shown that service-learning helps students identify and examine the “big questions” and the social context in which the disciplines are situated.

Magna Publications February 2, 2011

Concept Maps Help Build Connections to Learning

About eight years ago, students taking Alice Cassidy’s Biology 345 course were asked to create a learning portfolio as their final project for the course. The portfolio was intended to help students demonstrate their learning in creative ways that include examples, connections and reflections, based on three key criteria: content, links and visual diversity. Two pages of the eight-page portfolio had to be a concept map.

Mary Bart January 31, 2011

Helping Students Develop Problem-Solving Skills via Online Discussions

Developing sophisticated but essential learning skills is especially challenging in large classes. That’s why we regularly report on strategies that faculty members have developed and are using in large classes. The cases in point here are three different biochemistry courses in which faculty members have been using online, asynchronous discussion groups to develop problem-solving skills.

Maryellen Weimer, PhD January 28, 2011

Improve Your Decision-Making Skills

As an academic leader, each decision you make has the potential to have a lasting impact within your unit and beyond. Competing viewpoints, priorities and strong personalities contribute to the difficulty many leaders have with making decisions.

Rob Kelly January 25, 2011

Be Efficient, Not Busy: Time Management Strategies for Online Teaching

Online teaching redefines the faculty member’s schedule. The feeling of being a 24/7 professor can lead to frustration. Managing one’s time as an online teacher can be a challenge. As the popularity of online education continues to grow, teaching faculty need to develop effective time management behaviors to be efficient and not just busy. Here are ten strategies I like to use:

Deborah A. Raines PhD January 24, 2011

Assessing and Developing Metacognitive Skills

Metacognition is easily defined: “[It] refers to the ability to reflect upon, understand and control one’s learning,” (Schraw and Dennison, p. 460) or, even more simply, “thinking about one’s thinking.” Despite straightforward definitions, metacognition is a complicated construct that has been the object of research for more than 30 years.

Maryellen Weimer, PhD January 21, 2011

Professors Use Twitter to Increase Student Engagement and Grades

Keeping college students off social media sites and focused on the course material is a daily challenge for many of today’s college faculty. But what if you could harness the power of today’s technologies and students’ proclivity toward social networking to enhance the learning experience rather than distract from it?

Mary Bart January 18, 2011

The Lost Art of Note Taking When Writing a Research Paper

When students write essays requiring research, in the age of Wikipedia and other online resources, I worry a little, not so much about the quality of the sources themselves (that has always varied, even in the day of hardcopy sources), but about the quality or outright dearth of note taking that often accompanies the writing of research papers.

Matt Birkenhauer January 17, 2011

Tips for Increasing Interactivity in an Online Course

In a follow-up to the online seminar “Creatively Engaging Online Students: Models and Activities,” Curt Bonk, professor of instructional systems technology at Indiana University, offered the following response from a participant who asked, “What is your favorite method to increase interactivity in an online class?”

Rob Kelly January 14, 2011

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