You may or may not know about all of the challenges your students are facing. The pedagogical framework of Universal Design for Learning can help accommodate these needs and provide more flexibility while maintaining academic rigor.
Asynchronous online and face-to-face are the most familiar modes of course delivery but you may want to consider a hybrid delivery model to meet student or program needs.
Here are three scenarios you might find yourself in — and three new-ish Blackboard features that could help you out.
The answer isn’t the same for all classes or for all faculty. Google Classroom lacks built-in integration with the Blackboard Grade Center but does integrate easily with other Google apps.
If you’re using WordPress as a tool in your class, now is a good time to think about a strategy for resetting your course materials for the fall semester.
Though I’ve long practiced the technique of Object-Based Teaching (OBT) in face-to-face and online classrooms alike, I’d never really looked into the scholarship behind it until recently. I’d also not really considered the pedagogical principles behind it, nor whether my pedagogy needed any scrutiny and modification. It turns out that there were some aspects of my practice I needed to modify.
In celebration of Research and Creative Activity Day on April 9, here are some ways to get online undergraduate students involved in research and creative projects, and how to involve yourself as a mentor.
An agenda creates transparency and welcomes inclusion in the classroom. If these are qualities you strive for in your teaching, consider these principles for creating open, inclusive class agendas.
The early immersion approach gets students involved in the research process as early as possible. Students are able to conceptualize, design, conduct and disseminate research faster when included from the beginning.
We tend to think of innovation as the creation of something brand new that completely revolutionizes the way we do or think of something but it can also be thought of as putting ideas into practice. When we think of innovation in these terms, it is easy to see how stepping back, re-thinking and trying something new can lead to discovery.
Gradescope is a grading tool that can save instructors time. UAF instructors are already using it in their courses, including Professor of Mathematics Gordon Williams. Learn how to take advantage of this resource and how he is using it to streamline the grading process in his courses.
Adding interactivity has the potential to allow students to better understand your video content. PlayPosit is a tool that allows instructors and students to add quizzes, polls, discussions and extra information to an existing video.
Course materials need to be accessible. The Grackle add-ons assist you with making your materials more accessible even if you’re not a standard Google apps user.
UAF eCampus, in collaboration with OIT, is excited to announce the launch of a new auto-captioning service in Kaltura. It is faster and more accurate than Kaltura’s previous service and makes it easy to edit your captions once they’ve been created. Captions and searchable transcripts have big benefits for all your students, so if you use video content in your course, now is a great time to learn how it works.
What does it mean for an online course to be accessible? How do you begin to make it accessible? Many UAF instructors have already gone through the journey of addressing accessibility in their courses. Here, several of them share their experiences on the challenges and benefits.
If you are teaching an online course at UAF, you have a clear support structure to provide reasonable accommodations for students. Here, UAF eCampus and UAF Disability Services detail available resources and the responsibilities that are shared with instructors.
This teaching tip briefly reviews FERPA and how it’s applied in the digital age.
This teaching tip touches upon alternatives to proctored exams and alignment between learning objectives and assessments.
As faculty, at some point you’ll have to rebuild and refresh your existing course or rebuild and rebrand one you inherit. If you’ve found yourself in this situation for the upcoming semester, read on. I’m right there with you and these are the steps I’ve taken:
I can’t say that I’ve mastered the art of a balanced life, but I do have some tips for those new to teaching. These are some hard-won lessons I’ve gathered over the last two decades teaching at UAF.
Teaching is a practice. We can look to the world of music for advice on how we as teachers can improve our performance in a focused, concentrated and effective way.
Ideas for collecting feedback from your students and how to get them to participate.
UAF’s Master of Education in Special Education program became the first online special education program in the nation to earn the Quality Matters’ Online Program Design Certification. Here’s how they did it and how you can earn Quality Matters certifications for your course or program.
The GIF format is ideal for creating animated images and they are commonly used to propagate memes, grab attention, succinctly explain a step-by-step process and otherwise communicate visual information quickly. We see them in news articles, our social media feeds and even in instruction. Is a GIF an element you would consider incorporating into the banner image of your online course?