Recent Teaching Tips
Effective distance teaching through flexibility
Pros and cons of three distance-education methods — audio conference, video conference and online — from UAF’s rural-oriented programs.
read moreFostering engagement in online discussion
Creating active discussions in a course can be challenging. In times of COVID-19, fostering that space for community exploration and making connections between content and the current world can become the anchor that keeps the momentum.
read more
Existing online courses not immune to COVID-19 changes
Courses that were already being taught online were not immune to the rapid changes brought on by COVID-19. After all, online courses exist in the world of humans and that world was not normal.
read more
Early reflections about what worked and what we learned
With an unprecedented semester behind us, some faculty share their perspectives on how they adapted their teaching in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
read moreOLC Innovate 2020 Virtual Conference
UAF eCampus has secured registration fees for anyone associated with UAF to virtually attend the Online Learning Consortium's (OLC) "Innovate 2020" Virtual Conference. This virtual conference is from June 15-26 with daily sessions on weekdays. (There are also...
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Keeping the door open
Now more than ever, you are an important tether between our students and campus. Here are some tips for keeping the door open to maintain a relationship with your students.
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End-of-semester grading for an extremely unusual semester
The end of spring semester is coming at us like a freight train and if you don’t usually use the Blackboard Grade Center, you may be wondering how to adjust the way you share grades with students while staying FERPA-compliant.
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Impermanence, vulnerability and slowing down: Lessons from meditation
In times of uncertainty, we can apply principles from meditation to our teaching practices. Let’s reflect on a few of these principles: impermanence, slowing down and vulnerability.
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Best Practices
Keeping the door open
Now more than ever, you are an important tether between our students and campus. Here are some tips for keeping the door open to maintain a relationship with your students.
Connecting with your students during crisis
Empathy is a powerful tool for social connection. Reaching your students now is critical not only to their academic success but also their overall health and wellbeing.
A Gentle Reminder to Take a Pause – Revised
This Teaching Tip has been revised from the original version for off-campus options. A default answer to ‘How are you?’ is often currently ‘Busy!’. In addition to forces beyond our control, we take on so much right now and sometimes feel overwhelmed as a result. ...
Three ways to encourage student resilience
Today’s college students are excessively stressed. These suggested strategies can make your course less stressful without reducing rigor.
One perspective on Quality Matters course certifications
UAF adopted Quality Matters as a framework for continuous improvement of online and blended courses four years ago. Gary Copus, professor emeritus, shares highlights, benefits and challenges of certifying three UAF Justice courses.
Creating a culture of mentorship
Explore the value of mentorship in academia and get ideas for how you can intentionally promote peer mentorship via course design and departmental initiatives.
Use student conferences to develop positive rapport
Research shows that the relationships between students and their instructors in a university-level course is “one of the most important factors” contributing to student success. Use student conferences to give and receive feedback and build relationships that will improve everyone’s engagement in the course.
Strategies for the first six weeks of class
The first six weeks are critical to student success (and UAF’s retention goals). Here are three small things you can do to help your students succeed this semester.
Four things to do before the semester starts
A new semester is starting in just a few days and there’s so much to do! Start here with these four step-by-step priorities.
Remove distractions from your class
Taking an online course can sometimes be like walking through an airport — distractions everywhere. Here are some simple and not-so-obvious ways to remove distractions from your course content.
Teaching Tip: A gentle reminder to take a pause – and a breath (or two)
A default answer to ‘How are you?’ is often currently ‘Busy!’. In addition to forces beyond our control, we take on so much right now and sometimes feel overwhelmed as a result. This year has been unsettling for most of us on some level and many of our workloads have...
Are you ready to be Googled?
It’s probably old news to you that it matters what appears when people Google you. However, the pesky thing about managing your web presence is that it’s a continual practice. Here are tips to help you spruce up your online image.
Blackboard
Save time setting up due dates in Blackboard
Setting due dates for assessments in Blackboard can be a time-consuming task. Use the Grade Center Due Dates tool to manage this task faster.
Make use of Blackboard Test Tool
In the UA Blackboard system, one of the most used tools is the Test Tool. It can be used to create quizzes, midterms, exams and pre- and post-assessments.Good and effective use of the Test Tool can be facilitated by carefully thinking about how to...
Three ways to submit a Blackboard assignment
There are three methods for submitting assignments through Blackboard’s Assignment feature. This teaching tip will help you decide which works best for you and your grading process.
Try something new in Blackboard
Here are three scenarios you might find yourself in — and three new-ish Blackboard features that could help you out.
Three tips to untangle Blackboard notifications
Customizing notifications in Blackboard allows both instructors and students to better manage their online educational experiences.
To total or not to total – Blackboard Grade Center
Every teacher has goals to be effective and efficient. Knowing more about the tools and features in Blackboard’s Grade Center can help you reach your potential. This week’s tip concentrates on different kinds of Total columns you might use in your course to organize and compute final grades. There is a lot of capability and might be the perfect feature for you to implement in your course.
Blackboard adds new features
New features have been updated in Blackboard Learn relating to assignment submissions. Teachers and students are now able to add attachments via drag and drop. There are also new features that allow tracking of quiz attempts and assignment submissions. Read this week’s Teaching Tip to learn how the new features are giving both students and instructors more power in Blackboard Learn.
Providing feedback in Blackboard two ways
Building a rubric can help you determine how—or if—an assignment aligns to your course objectives. Once built, you may use it to frame your feedback. Sharing the specifics with students prior to task assignment helps focus their efforts. Your students may not know about the wealth of information provided by clicking on the link, “View Rubric.”
Adapt your course for Blackboard Mobile Learn
More and more students are using mobile devices and an app called Blackboard Mobile Learn to access course content on the go. While students shouldn’t solely rely on smartphones to complete course requirements, there are steps instructors can take to make it a better experience, such as using common file types (like PDFs), keeping titles short and testing links on a variety of devices.
Build game badging options inside of Blackboard Learn
We all spend time playing games. According to vertoanalytics.com, we spend more than a billion hours per month playing mobile games and that doesn’t include games played on laptops, desktops or with game consoles.1 According to the entertainment software association, in 2015, 65% of US households had at least one person who played online games, three hours or more per week.
Building accessibility into online Blackboard courses
Blackboard provides built-in mechanisms to ensure online content adheres to accessibility standards for its static structure. Once content or third party elements like multimedia and links to resources are added, there are steps you take to maintain accessibility. As you begin adding course content in Blackboard, be mindful of what the end result may look like using a screen reader.
Blackboard provides student performance analysis tools
The Blackboard Grade Center offers options for reviewing student performance on your tests and exams and can be a useful mechanism for evaluating the effectiveness of your test questions. A poorly worded question doesn’t mean your students aren’t mastering the content. Look for Attempts Statistics, Download Results, Item Analysis and Column Statistics as options in the column header for your test.
Emerging ideas
Effective distance teaching through flexibility
Pros and cons of three distance-education methods — audio conference, video conference and online — from UAF’s rural-oriented programs.
Fostering engagement in online discussion
Creating active discussions in a course can be challenging. In times of COVID-19, fostering that space for community exploration and making connections between content and the current world can become the anchor that keeps the momentum.
Existing online courses not immune to COVID-19 changes
Courses that were already being taught online were not immune to the rapid changes brought on by COVID-19. After all, online courses exist in the world of humans and that world was not normal.
Early reflections about what worked and what we learned
With an unprecedented semester behind us, some faculty share their perspectives on how they adapted their teaching in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Impermanence, vulnerability and slowing down: Lessons from meditation
In times of uncertainty, we can apply principles from meditation to our teaching practices. Let’s reflect on a few of these principles: impermanence, slowing down and vulnerability.
Collaborative student research brings diversity to course content
Course content in the Arts is often lacking in diverse perspectives. Involving your students in collaborative research can help in a variety of ways to reinvent that curriculum to reflect our modern world.
Easter eggs in videos can increase student engagement
See how two UAF instructors are using Easter eggs — hidden features — in their instructional videos to retain student engagement in their online classrooms.
Should you require proctored exams?
Proctored exams are a standard practice for preventing cheating but they can also place an inequitable burden on students.
Coaching students toward success
As UAF eCampus launches its eCoaching program, it’s important to remember how our coaching role can lead to student success.
Open resources for accessibility
Accessibility is a topic appearing in mainstream conversation with increasing frequency. When it comes to making course materials inclusive and accessible, there are a variety of open tools available.
Cancel your final
Give everyone a break from the stress of traditional finals and infuse a new sense of purpose in your final assessment with these suggestions for alternative final assessments.
GER outcomes in your syllabus
General Education Requirements (GER) for baccalaureate degrees describe required courses that students must complete in order to achieve a bachelor's degree. Here at UAF, GERs provide a common set of learning experiences for students and have outcomes that encapsulate...
Pedagogy
STEAMy ideas for your course
A recent trend in higher education involves integrating arts, humanities, and STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) curriculum now known as STEAM. Large research studies (1) show that integration can broaden the student experience within highly...
Let’s talk about digital literacy
More than ever, faculty are being tasked with fostering digital literacy in order for students to be successful in class and ready for the workforce. Digital literacy as an important component of higher education is something that has become critical in higher...
Facilitate active learning online
We learn better when we are involved in constructing our own knowledge. Some of us know this from experience -- it’s why we do research, why we collaborate, why we ask our kids questions when we read to them. But this is also a finding backed by decades of research on...
Invite students to publish
Are you interested in encouraging your students to create work to share with others? Adding your voice to the domain knowledge--which shapes our education--is a strong motivator. As teachers, writers, designers, and artists we long to create and share. What is Open...
Examining hybrid designed course structures
This is the second in a two-part series of Teaching Tips based on Hybrid Pedagogy. While the first teaching tip provided some background and definitions, this tip focuses more on specific changes instructors can make to their classes to cultivate...
Explore hybrid course design
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.
Practice object-based teaching
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.
Alternatives to the proctored exam
This teaching tip touches upon alternatives to proctored exams and alignment between learning objectives and assessments.
Ideas for customizing the lab experience
We tend to think that lab courses must march students through a well-rehearsed set of steps. After the experiment is performed, and the data gathered and presented, students submit a lab report with an error analysis which provides an opportunity to explain why the results deviated from theoretical predictions. This gives you, the instructor plenty to assess. The real question is: Are you measuring what you want with your lab activity assessment?
Journaling for reflection and critical thinking
Reflective writing can help us carry ourselves through processes of change. Learning is a process of change and research shows that journal writing can support students across disciplines in connecting with and making meaning of their learning.
Bring robust labs to online classes
As we discover, test and improve methods of online teaching, one category of courses, the science laboratory based class, has resisted many efforts to bring lab units to the online realm. But this need not be the case. There are several models, methods and ready made solutions available to instructors or departments who are contemplating this transition. In this Teaching Tip, we cover the range of options available.
Illustration: University of Munich Remotely Controlled Lab on Millikan’s Experiment web interface.
Get students to give feedback beyond “good job”
Let’s not be satisfied with the “feedback sandwich approach” in course discussion. Providing guidance and setting expectations for what good discussion feedback looks like can help move students beyond giving comments that do not prompt further discussion, build on an argument or rethink one’s own stance.
Tools & How to
Fostering engagement in online discussion
Creating active discussions in a course can be challenging. In times of COVID-19, fostering that space for community exploration and making connections between content and the current world can become the anchor that keeps the momentum.
End-of-semester grading for an extremely unusual semester
The end of spring semester is coming at us like a freight train and if you don’t usually use the Blackboard Grade Center, you may be wondering how to adjust the way you share grades with students while staying FERPA-compliant.
Try Flipgrid for more engaging discussions
Flipgrid is one way to engage students in an interactive discussion and can be utilized without creating additional work for the student or faculty member.
A Swiss Army knife for video
Kaltura MediaSpace provides a rich set of tools and features for staff, instructors and students to create video. Learn how to make the most out of what it offers.
Autocaptions are new in Kaltura
Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Ethical ramifications. IRB application. Supercontinent Pangaea.Sit in a few classes at UAF and these are terms you may hear. These are also terms that have been accurately transcribed by the new autocaptioning feature in Kaltura,...
Use Zoom videoconferencing in your courses
Many UAF instructors rely on Google Hangouts or Blackboard Collaborate Ultra to facilitate synchronous sessions in their courses. There’s a new tool on the block: Zoom Meetings. Let’s run through what can be accomplished by meeting in Zoom, the new videoconferencing...
Streamline video creation with Kaltura Personal Capture
Kaltura Personal Capture is a video creation tool that replaces Kaltura Capturespace. Learn how faculty, students and staff can use Personal Capture to quickly create professional video presentations.
So you want to make a podcast
Maybe you have a good idea, and you’ve even been working through topics for the first few episodes but what’s next?
How to update due dates in Blackboard
You may have noticed the familiar Set Grade Center Due Dates tool has not been available recently. This handy tool has become incompatible with the current version of Blackboard. While we hope that it can return in the future, there is another way to edit...
Should you use Google Classroom?
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.
Get your WordPress site ready for next semester
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.
Grade efficiently with Gradescope
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.