With over a decade in training and management of college teachers, I saw late policies ranging from “not one second late, period” to “any time before the last day of class, no penalties.” It is easy to do a Google search and see a plethora of comments at both ends of the spectrum, and most folks are pretty convinced their individual strategies work. What I have noticed in my administration experience, and some 19 years in the classroom, is that balance leads to a better experience for both the students and faculty.
With that in mind, I proffer several principles for accepting late work and address two concerns of the “no late work ever” folks. Additionally, I share an epiphany one of my faculty members had after changing her policy.
While online learning environments are increasingly common, relatively little is known about issues of equity in these settings. We test for the presence of race and gender biases among postsecondary students and instructors in online classes by measuring student and instructor responses to discussion comments we posted in the discussion forums of 124 different online courses. Each comment was randomly assigned a student name connoting a specific race and gender. We find that instructors are 94% more likely to respond to forum posts by White male students. In contrast, we do not find general evidence of biases in student responses. However, we do find that comments placed by White females are more likely to receive a response from White female peers. We discuss the implications of our findings for our understanding of social identity dynamics in classrooms and the design of equitable online
learning environments.
We read with interest the recent opinion article, “Online learning isn’t as inclusive as you may think,” published by University Affairs in early May. We feel the authors provided a limited perspective regarding online education and online learners. We disagree with several of the
authors’ contentions and generalizations, which we outline below. We also direct the authors and readers to sources that may help to address some of the issues the authors raise.
First, the authors suggest online learning provides opportunities to those who might otherwise have been “excluded from or marginalized in higher education.” This is a generalization for which we feel perhaps the wrong words were chosen. At Athabasca University (AU), where we
teach, we see no indication that our students come here due to feelings of exclusion or marginalization.
A guided meditation on the word “empathy.” An ambidextrous drawing where a student used both hands to illustrate and write about the word “renaissance.” A video on the word “ingenuity” where the student spoke the entire final paper into Siri without typing. A violin background score with birds flying into the sky to explain the word “unknowable.”
These are examples of student final projects in an M.B.A. class titled Creative Thinking: Designing Sustainable Innovations that I taught in Rome and where we used principles of Leonardo da Vinci to understand the creative process. Many students in this class were specializing in finance, accounting, supply chain and other “hard” disciplines, and some were pursuing joint J.D. degrees. Thus, this was probably the first time in their careers that they had worked on a nontraditional final project.
Among the many things that faculty members worried about in our Covid-19 switch to remote teaching was how to provide course materials when students could no longer walk into a campus library. The distance between our students and every volume, every assigned reading, every computer station seemed to underscore what was different and newly difficult about teaching and learning in a pandemic.
I wish Woody Allen’s aphorism that 80 percent of success is showing up applied to the persistent problem of college remediation. More than half of incoming community-college students, and approximately 20 percent of incoming students at four-year institutions, are academically unprepared when they arrive on campus. Fewer than one in 10 students who enroll in remedial coursework in community college will attain a credential within three years. "Showing up" isn’t enough, because those who enter developmental education in college struggle to complete. This is particularly troubling given that community colleges and regional public universities are the points of entry for a large number of traditionally underrepresented students.
Teaching first-semester freshmen presents some unique challenges. You are teaching them not only your subject, but also how to be college students. One of the best strategies I have found is to begin with a collaborative project that asks them to research their new home: the campus.
“I’m sorry to bother you, but…” was the opening line of every email I received in the first week of this semester. This line was usually followed by nothing that would actually bother me: a question about the week’s materials, a link to an interesting resource, a discussion about a potential research topic, and the like. This was all despite my many attempts to ensure that students did not feel like they were imposing whenever they contacted me: a pre-semester introductory email, a video welcoming them to the course, my biography and teaching philosophy, virtual office hours, and multiple reminders about my contact information. Yet, with all of my entreaties to reach out, I was still dealing with the real issues of isolation, fear, and
frustration that results in students leaving their online courses. To combat these feelings, professors—myself included—have to deliberately, consistently, and relentlessly work to build student-faculty and student-student relationships in online courses.
Maybe we should be making a stronger pitch for student-led study groups. There’s all sorts of research documenting how students can learn from each other. But, as regularly noted here and elsewhere, that learning doesn’t happen automatically, and some of us worry that it’s not likely to occur in a study group where there’s no supervision and distractions abound. Recent findings should encourage us to give study groups a second look.
One of the most basic principles in education is backward curriculum design. This approach involves beginning with the end in mind. Moore (2015) stated that the backward design model “centers on the idea that the design process should begin with identifying the desired outcomes and then work backwards to develop instruction rather than the traditional approach, which is to define what topics need to be covered” (p.34). It can be tempting to utilize the traditional approach of creating learning activities based on the topics selected for a course. However, this does not challenge the educator to think about the concepts in new
and creative ways. Backward curriculum design has numerous benefits that educators should consider, but we must think about this process in new and insightful ways.
Whether it’s talking to colleagues, reading the latest research or visiting a teaching and learning center, professors have places to turn to learn about best pedagogical practices. Yet faculty members in general still aren’t known for their instructional acumen. Subject matter expertise? Yes. Teaching? Not so much.
Most students cheat, or so they eventually admit in surveys of college alumni. Weighing the collective evidence, it appears that only about a quarter of undergraduates have not cheated. Much of the misconduct goes on below the radar of faculty members, and we can’t do much about something we don’t see. The real question is: Why aren’t we reporting more of the cases that we do detect?
If you’ve taught in higher education, you no doubt have discovered plagiarism on a written assignment or cheating on an exam. It’s also likely that your college or university requires you to report every one of those incidents — or maybe on your campus, that’s a request rather than a mandate.
Maybe you have colleagues who are the first to leap onto technology trends. No doubt you’ve heard them reminiscing about all the stuff they started using before anyone else — class Facebook pages, Twitter hashtags, in-class polling. Or maybe you’re a member of Club Early Adopter yourself?
I am, or at least I’ve aspired to be. (Have I told you about the web pages I put up for my class back in ’95?) Back in the day, those of us in the club had to kludge together solutions using tech that wasn’t made for teaching. Today, however, you have your pick of hundreds of products, custom-built for education or even for specific disciplines. Furthermore, many of the earliest technologies — think: web pages and blogs — are now something truly anyone can use, no matter your level of technical expertise.
Flipped and active learning truly are a better way for students to learn, but they also may be a fast track to instructor burnout.
Paré, D. E., Collimore, L.-M., Joordens, S., Rolheiser, C., Brym, R., & Gini-Newman, G.
(2015). Put Students’ Minds Together and their Hearts Will Follow: Building a Sense of Community in Large-Sized Classes via Peer- and Self-Assessment – Appendix. Toronto: Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario.
Interprofessional education (IPE) is a growing focus for educators in health professional academic programs. Recommendations to successfully imple-ment IPE are emerging in the literature, but there remains a dearth of evidence informing the bigger challenges of sustainability and scalability. Transforma-tion to interprofessional education for collaborative person-centred practice (IECPCP) is complex and requires “harmonization of motivations” within and between academia, governments, healthcare delivery sectors, and consumers. The main lesson learned at the University of Manitoba was the value of using a formal implementation framework to guide its work. This framework identi-fies key factors that must be addressed at the micro, meso, and macro levels and emphasizes that interventions occurring only at any single level will likely not lead to sustainable change. This paper describes lessons learned when us-ing the framework and offers recommendations to support other institutions in their efforts to enable the roll out and integration of IECPCP.
Conventional wisdom suggests that teaching students how to be creative is a task best left to the arts and design. But faculty members from other fields are increasingly seeing the benefits of cultivating in their students the kinds of integrative and lateral thinking that creativity can foster. Two examples from psychology came to us in response to our recent request for your thoughts on this topic.
About two years ago at my university, I designed a minor in the medical humanities. At its core was a class that introduced students to medical topics from the perspectives of the humanities and social sciences. When it came to designing assignments that would show how well they understood such varied concepts, I decided to go out on a pedagogical limb.
If they preferred, students could write a traditional research paper for their final project. Or they could "write" about their topic in a different way — via a 45-minute podcast, a 10-to-15-minute video, a website, or an interactive, digital essay (on a blog or a Word document) that used embedded videos, photos, and audio to help the reader understand their topics.
Your students have questions, but they rarely ask them—especially at the beginning of the semester. They feel awkward or embarrassed, or maybe it’s just inertia. Whatever the cause, the vast majority of student questions go unasked. For teachers, this is wildly frustrating because we can’t answer the questions they don’t ask (though some questions can be anticipated). In many cases, the unasked questions represent anxieties and uncertainties that negatively affect students’ performance in class and inhibits their learning. This is a particular problem in the sophomore composition class I teach. It has a reputation as a difficult class, so many students arrive intimidated and nervous.
As a result of the new coronavirus epidemic most universities in China have encouraged their professors to apply online teaching instead of in-class teaching and this is likely to continue for the indefinite future. Some professors and students have complained about problems with online teaching and lack confidence in its effectiveness, but many are still new to the whole online experience. Here are some of the problems and some potential solutions.