“Open Education’ is a deceivingly simple name for a concept that covers a broad range of philosophies, pedagogies, activities and products, many of which are critical to the University of Alaska. In advance of a series of Teaching Tips exploring some of these ideas, here’s a necessarily incomplete A-Z of ideas that are part of Open Education.
Today’s teachers face a critical challenge deciding when and how to make use of technology in their classroom, whether they are supplementing a classroom experience or leading a flipped, hybrid, or fully online course. UAF eCampus’s team of instructional designers exists to help with this (https://iteachu.uaf.edu/events/), but each of us is always our own design staff.
Quality matters to UAF instructors. And now UAF eCampus is happy to be bringing the proven work of the Quality Matters (QM) organization to UAF in support of continuous improvement of fully-online and hybrid courses.
Today’s Teaching Tip, our 142nd, also commemorates UAF eCampus’s third year of publishing weekly tips with only the occasional break for the holidays. It feels fitting to celebrate by sharing some of the interesting work being done by the outstanding educators we’ve had the privilege of working with.
You’re probably familiar with the old joke in which a man’s wife notices him cutting the ends off the ham before baking it. He tells her that’s the way his dad does it and it’s a key secret to the wonderful taste. When the man’s wife finally asks her father-in-law about it he laughs and replies, “That’s not it! If I don’t cut the ends, the ham won’t fit in my pan.’
The foundation of the Pomodoro Technique is a simple, powerful method to improve time management and focus that demands nothing more than a timer of some kind (ideally mechanical or a good simulation), a pen, and paper.
Thanks to the media deluge, you’ve probably heard of the precipitous rise of the MOOC (Massive Open Online Course)
and maybe even peeked into a MOOCourse or two. If you haven’t–or hoped to just ignore them–you might want to
think again.
The Understanding by Design model teaches us how to create our curriculum backward from big ideas to activities…but what about the benefits of teaching backward? Allowing students to explore larger concepts, while you fill in, here and there, with the details, helps to enliven the experience of the subject.
With this tip, the UAF eCampus Instructional Design Team celebrates one year of weekly advice on teaching and educational technology. During that year, the UAF Center for Distance Education moved to a new home and became UAF eCampus, the Design Team grew by 30%, and the depth and breadth of the courses and projects the team works on increased by an even greater amount.