HIGHER ED TEACHING STRATEGIES FROM MAGNA PUBLICATIONS

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Students Place a Premium on Faculty Who Show They Care

Most teachers know that caring for students is important, but do they realize just how important? A recent article by Steven A. Meyers offers a succinct, well-referenced, and persuasive review of research that addresses the topic. It begins with what most teachers already know: Caring is regularly identified as one of the ingredients or components of effective instruction. What many teachers do not know is that students value the dimensions of caring more highly than teachers do.

Maryellen Weimer, PhD January 11, 2013

Adapting PowerPoint Lectures for Online Delivery: Best Practices

If you use PowerPoint lectures in your face-to-face classes, you can use those same lectures as jumping-off points for creating narrated animations for your online students to watch. That’s the good news.
However, chances are you’ll need to make extensive changes—both to your existing PowerPoint slides, and to how you deliver them. Typically, this means scripting the lecture before narrating and recording it so that all information presented online is:

Emily A. Moore, MEd January 7, 2013

Detailed Instructions for Using PickMeBuzzer on Apple iOS Devices

Back in July I reviewed PickMeBuzzer and concluded that, while the app has a lot of potential, it needs some work to make it more intuitive and stable.

Well, after working with the PickMeBuzzer app designer, I can tell you that I am now very pleased with the app and have in fact used it a couple times in my class with great success. Here are step-by-step instructions for using it with a Jeopardy-like class activity.

Dave Yearwood, PhD January 4, 2013

Critical Thinking: Definitions and Assessments

Despite almost universal agreement that critical thinking needs to be taught in college, now perhaps more than ever before, there is much less agreement on definitions and dimensions. “Critical thinking can include the thinker’s dispositions and orientations; a range of specific analytical, evaluative, and problem-solving skills; contextual influences; use of multiple perspectives; awareness of one’s own assumptions; capacities for metacognition; or a specific set of thinking processes or tasks.” (p. 127)

Maryellen Weimer, PhD January 3, 2013

Using Multiple Course Evaluations to Engage and Empower Your Students and Yourself

Course evaluations are often viewed as a chore; one of those unpleasant obligations we do at the end of each course. In the Teaching Professor Blog post “End-of-Course Evaluations: Making Sense of Student Comments,” Maryellen Weimer is bang-on in stating that the comments students dash off can be more confusing than clarifying.

Greg Cooper January 2, 2013

Assignments That Promote Critical Thinking

Teaching students to think critically has long been a goal of education. Some, like the authors of the article highlighted here, think it’s a goal whose importance has increased. When today’s students graduate, they “must fend for themselves in an information environment characterized by a fragmented media establishment, blurb-driven news coverage, and an increasingly polarized political system. Given the normative bias, questionable logic, and contorted facts that people face these days, it is essential that students learn to discern and evaluate different types of information.” (p. 619)

Maryellen Weimer, PhD December 14, 2012

Asynchronous Art History: Teaching Online with Picasso

When people find out I am an online art history instructor, the most common reaction I get is “How does that work?” Most of the time, people assume that because art is such a visual outlet that somehow the online classroom is not the most appropriate place to teach art. I have to admit, when I was first approached about teaching art history online, I was skeptical as well. But as time and terms wear on, so too does my belief that teaching art asynchronously can be an effective, and dare I say it, better way to teach art history. Here’s why.

Melanie J. Trost December 13, 2012

Online Student Retention Strategies: A Baker’s Dozen of Recommendations

Despite the tremendous growth of online education programs, student retention for online courses remains problematic. The attrition rate from online universities is often cited as 20% to 50% (Diaz, 2002). Studies also reveal that attrition from online programs can be as high as 70% to 80% (Dagger, Wade & Conlan, 2004).

Michael Jazzar December 7, 2012

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