Two recent studies from the National Association of Colleges and Employers and the National Academy of Sciences highlight the need to address a more integrative curricular approach to improve competencies desired by employers. In this Teaching Tip, we take a brief look at these two reports and invite faculty to join the discussion on how integration of scientific, technical and liberal arts fields can work to enhance post-graduation success.
Open Educational Resources (OER) are any type of media that is free and available for educators and students to use, reuse, repurpose, and sometimes modify for educational purposes. OER can help your students save money and can help you think about how you can teach outside typical textbook constraints. But how do you go about finding good OER? In this Teaching Tip, we will discuss methods for locating and evaluating resources.
How can you guide students through the creation of a successful presentation of data? What are some common pitfalls? How can data visualization be interactive online? If you engage your students with processing and presenting data and would like to find and discuss a variety of the available tools that can help students share their data in a way that is visually appealing and interactive when online, this session is for you. We will also talk about the growing number of machine learning tools now available for processing and visualizing big data.
If your course materials are offered on the WordPress community server, there are a few plugins that can help make you and your student’s experience better. In this Teaching Tip, we will recommend five plugins you can enable to help manage your course.
Teaching online courses that are publicly viewable can be a great way to potentially increase enrollment in your course or program, encourage students to perform at a higher level and share your expertise beyond the closed audience.
What happens when we put students in the director’s seat in terms of what, when, and how they learn and what might that look like in a course? There are many examples of democratizing the educational experience through a range of institutional and classroom levels and across the K-20 progression. There are likewise many opinions on this idea from steadfast proponents and those in opposition. In this Teaching Tip, we’ll take a brief look at imparting more academic power to students — the benefits, practical considerations, and potential pitfalls.
If you have chosen to teach in the open, there are many tools you can use such as WordPress. There are a few reasons you may be conducting some or all of your course in a space outside of the confines of Blackboard. Read this tip for a few ‘whys’ as well as how you can learn more about Community.
There is a new version of Google Sites and it is really easy to use! Need to make a quick website for your class materials? Want to have your students create simple websites for presentation or other activities but not get bogged down with technology? In this Teaching Tip, we check out the fancy new Google Sites, now available at UA Google Apps for Education.
On a flight from Boston to Seattle a couple years ago, I was sitting next to a young man who told me that he was in his final semester in computer engineering at M.I.T. and he was going for his first interview at a big company, which he was pretty excited about.
Have you been playing Pokémon Go lately? You have probably heard about it if you haven’t actually tried it out for yourself. Apart from cute Pokémons, one of the reasons this game is sensational is because it involves Augmented Reality (AR), which is a digital layer that can be seen on top of the real world through your mobile device, which is super fun.
How do your students know whether they have mastered a concept before they take a formal assessment? Your students may take advantage of online textbook resources that include cognitive tutors to test their knowledge if available. And, methods such as iterative assignments with defined revision cycles, group discussion, interactive video, a pre-quiz, and class review time can help as well.
Combinatory play is the process of considering two or more unrelated ideas, topics, images, disciplines, etc. and putting them together in a way that is new. Experimentation, deconstruction, synthesis, iteration and failure are part of this process of learning and discovery. Combinatory play utilizes a wide range of learning domains that help to feed creativity and innovation.
If you are teaching online or if you would like to flip some of your classes, consider creating a series of brief eBook-style lectures using Google Slides. Benefits to using this approach include the ability to include video screencasts, animation, and images easily in a beautifully presentable format.
Flexibility is often a factor for students taking distance courses. Certainly, being able to attend class regardless of where or when it is happening can be a huge benefit for non-traditional students especially. Distance courses and programs at UAF inhabit a spectrum based on percentages of reliance on specified time and place.
There are many reasons to connect with students via an online meeting space. For example, eLearning-supported instructors may want to have students check in individually throughout the semester and face-to-face instructors may want to hold group activities outside the physical classroom with real-time interaction. Connecting synchronously with students can happen easily via Google Hangouts, available through the UA Google Apps for Education suite.
If you use a Community@UAF WordPress site for student contribution in the form of posts, your students can edit the date and time of submission, which may be a concern if you strictly enforce due dates. If you would like to know the exact date and time a student creates a post, there are at least four ways to find out.
‘Informal learning’ can be described as the learning process that takes place outside the educational institution. It is spontaneous, self-directed, not curriculum-based or qualification oriented and is accidental in nature.1 For example, clicking through on a Facebook link out of curiosity and learning about something as a result.
This week we’d like to revisit Teaching Tips that have been published during the past year so we’ve put them together in a handy booklet for you. These Teaching Tips were published from July 1, 2014 – March 1, 2015.
Thanks to Google, we have access to a plethora of tools to help us get stuff done. This week’s Teaching Tip focuses on a few ways to extend the functionality of the Google products we already know and love — Chrome and Google.