Faculty Focus

HIGHER ED TEACHING STRATEGIES FROM MAGNA PUBLICATIONS

Teaching with Technology

interactive teaching strategies

Interactive Strategies for Engaging Large and Small Classes Alike

As the associate director at Tulane’s Center for Engaged Learning and Teaching (CELT), I work with faculty to help them transform their classrooms into more engaged spaces. One way to do that is by creating opportunities for interaction between the professor and the students and between the students themselves. I always start the conversation on this topic with three questions:

  1. What is the purpose of making a class interactive?
  2. What does an interactive class look like?
  3. What gets in the way of you creating a more interactive space in your classroom?
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Toni Weiss April 9, 2018

Highlights from the Magna Teaching with Technology Conference

More than 400 college faculty attended the Magna Teaching with Technology Conference last month in Baltimore, and they came away with a dizzying amount of new ideas, strategies that work, and pragmatic ways to integrate technology into their teaching. This article provides a snapshot of the event’s three plenary presentations.

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Mary Bart November 7, 2017
formative assessment activities in class

Unlocking the Promise of Digital Assessment

For many professors, student assessment is one of the most labor-intensive components of teaching a class. Items must be prepared, rubrics created, and instructions written. The work continues as the tests are scored, papers read, and comments shared. Performing authentic and meaningful student assessment takes time. Consequently, some professors construct relatively few assessments for their courses.

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Stacey Newbern Dammann, EdD, and Josh DeSantis October 30, 2017
social loafing in group project

Tips for Addressing Social Loafing in Group Projects

Group work is a valuable learning device that teaches teamwork skills which students will use no matter what profession they enter. It is perhaps even more valuable in online classes, as more and more organizations are using distributed employees who need to coordinate their work from a distance.

But group work also brings with it the danger of social loafing, those one or two students who do not contribute their fair share to the project. Not only does it undermine the quality of the project, but it creates frustration among other group members who see it as unfair to have team members not pull their own weight. This can have a dampening effect on the motivation and thus performance of other members of the group.

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John Orlando, PhD October 6, 2017
college student on smartphone in class

I’m in ‘Kahoots’ with Technology in the Classroom

Teaching tool or distraction? One of the most vexing issues for faculty today is what to do about cell phones in the classroom. According to a study conducted by Dr. Jim Roberts, a marketing professor at Baylor University, college students spend between eight to ten hours daily on their cell phones. Regardless of whatever “no cell phone” policies we attempt to enforce in our classrooms, many of our students are sneakily checking Instagram or texting friends when they’re supposed to be engaged in solving matrices or analyzing Shakespeare.

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Cassandra O'Sullivan Sachar, EdD July 31, 2017
close up of a computer mouse

Using Screencasts for Formative and Summative Assessment

As a new teacher, one of the resources I found most helpful in shaping my grading practices was Grant Wiggins’s advice on feedback and assessment. Meaningful feedback, he suggests, is much more than assigning a grade or even offering recommendations for improvement. Rather, meaningful feedback is descriptive, “play[ing] back” the student’s performance and connecting it to the learning outcomes of the course.

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Megan Von Bergen July 21, 2017
creating instructional video

10 Tips for Creating Effective Instructional Videos

Instructor presence is an important component of effective online teaching, and video can help make it happen. Instructional videos have become increasingly easy to create and can turn a good online class into an engaging learning experience. Video humanizes the online experience by letting students know their instructor as a real person, not an abstraction. Good quality webcams are available for less than $100, and there are numerous free and easy-to-use resources for creating and publishing video content so it can be streamed back into our courses.

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Michael Smedshammer, PhD March 31, 2017
video conference

Expanding Learning Experiences with Virtual Guest Experts

Much of our work as educators consists of designing and delivering experiences in which students can develop their understanding and application of concepts and skills in our disciplines. Given that we have only 16 weeks with our students, we need various ways for deepening and expanding these formative experiences in our field. Visiting experts can be a wonderful way of developing expertise, and leveraging online tools like Skype and Zoom can open up powerful possibilities for new collaboration and conversation.

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Gillian Parrish, MFA February 27, 2017
Laptop and books on desk of classroom.

Extending the Shelf-Life of Your Instructional Videos: Six Common Pitfalls to Avoid

When instructional video is produced thoughtfully and used to promote active engagement, it can improve student motivation, learning, and performance, make content more memorable, and bring highly visual material to life (Ljubojevic et al, 2014; Zhang et al, 2006; Hegeman, 2015; Hsin & Cigas, 2013; Merkt et al, 2011; Kay, 2012; Schwan & Riempp, 2014; Routt et al, 2015; Jarvis & Dickie, 2009).

Video has other benefits as well. It allows students to watch lectures at their own pace, rewinding and re-watching as needed. It lets instructors assign lectures as homework, opening up class time for interaction. And it can reduce the total time faculty need to spend preparing and delivering the same material for different semesters or audiences. Once you’ve recorded a video, you can–theoretically–use it again and again.

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Marie Norman, PhD January 16, 2017

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