Tag: online teaching strategies

What Should I Do With My Slides Now That I’m Teaching Online?

Introduction If you’ve taught face-to-face before, there’s a good chance you’ve developed slides to help give lectures in your classroom. You may even have structured your course around them: ten slide decks for ten weeks of class. There’s no shame there–keynote speakers and conference presenters use slides as an important part of their practice, and when properly designed they can make for engaging in-person presentations. Now you’re designing an online or hybrid class, and you’ve got your slides in hand. These worked great in my face-to-face class, you’re thinking. I’ll just put them online for students to read. But wait!


Promising Practices in Inclusive Teaching

Learning designers Jeanne Kerl, Brian Runo, and David Noffs attended the Second Annual Teaching Forum on Promising Practices: Learning from Our Community held April 18, 2018 at the Norris University Center at Northwestern University’s main campus in Evanston. The plenary session speaker was Dr. Frank Tuitt, Senior Advisor to the Chancellor and Provost on Diversity and Inclusion and Professor of Higher Education at the University of Denver. His address was entitled, Making Excellence Inclusive in Challenging Times: Diversity Consideration for the Classroom and Beyond. Dr. Tuitt started his presentation with a review of the challenging times we are facing. Headlines


How (and Why!) to Write a Pre-Course Survey or Questionnaire

Introduction Have you ever wished that you knew a little more about your students, beyond what is shared in an introduction discussion? Have you ever hoped that students might take a moment to reflect on success strategies before your course begins? Would you like to be certain that students have reviewed the materials needed to get started in your class? If so, a pre-course survey or questionnaire may be just the way to get started in your online or hybrid class. Check out three different types of pre-course surveys and questionnaires, including rationale, approaches, and question types, Learning About Your


Creating Community in the Online Classroom

On Thursday, March 15th, I attended Dr. Lisa Cravens-Brown’s TeachXperts presentation, “Creating Community in the Classroom.” Although Dr. Cravens-Brown’s presentation focused on physical spaces, I was curious if some of her ideas could also apply to online learning; and was delighted to discover that they did. Dr. Cravens-Brown began her presentation by sharing two main concepts from research on community building in education. First, a sense of belonging to a community positively impacts several variables in education: task persistence, motivation, course success, and perception of the instructor. Second, environments influence perception – the structure of the classroom sends students a


Five Ways to Incorporate Universal Design for Learning into Your Online Course

Introduction What if someone told you that there were research-proven techniques you could use to improve your online class for all students, increasing retention, persistence, and satisfaction by more than 4% over the baseline? I’m sure you’d be skeptical. Students differ so significantly from each other and from quarter to quarter; how can any instructor anticipate the individual needs of every student? Universal Design for Learning is a great place to start. What is Universal Design for Learning? At its core, Universal Design for Learning is a flexible, research-based pedagogical framework that aims to develop curriculum that meets the needs