Course Design

Using PowerPoint Effectively in Your Courses

Although PowerPoint often gets a bad rap as an instructional tool, it really doesn’t deserve it. PowerPoint’s bad rap comes from it being used poorly. Yeah, it’s easy to produce mind-numbing PowerPoint slides, and unfortunately, mind-numbing uses of PowerPoint are all around us—in online information and instruction, classroom-based instruction, training courses, and in the boardroom. But PowerPoint is just a tool. And like most tools, it can be used well or horribly or anywhere in between.

Patti Shank PhD CPT May 6, 2011

How to Teach a Course That Leads to Certification

The Computer Information Sciences program at ECPI College of Technology offers job oriented, “hands-on” education required to meet the needs of an ever-changing and increasingly technical society. We encourage students not only to earn their degree but also to get certified in their respective fields. The great success we achieved in getting more than 50 students Comptia Security+ certified compelled us to share our experience.

Vijay Bhuse PhD April 26, 2011

I Won’t Mess with Your Course if You Don’t Mess with Mine

There’s a tacit rule that most college teachers abide by: I won’t mess with your course if you agree not to mess with mine. Gerald Graff observes and asks, “This rules suits the teacher, but how well does it serve students?” (p. 155)

Maryellen Weimer, PhD April 19, 2011

Designing Problems for Problem-based Learning

As the name implies, problems are absolutely essential for problem-based learning (PBL). Problems initiate students’ learning in PBL. In other words, if there are no problems, there will be no problem-based learning.

Nachamma Sockalingam PhD March 16, 2011

Using Blended Learning to Transform the Classroom Experience

When we maintain our focus on learning, the means used to help students learn dominates our thinking. Too often teachers can fall into the trap of testing students only on lower-level material (knowledge and comprehension questions). When exams become the only means to assess learning, a teacher becomes a carpenter with only a hammer: all problems start to seem like nails.

Ike Shibley, PhD February 22, 2011

Putting the Learning in Blended Learning

Blending learning involves using a combination of face-to-face interactions and online interactions in the same course. Students still regularly meet in the classroom in a blended course, but the frequency of those meetings is usually decreased. The goal of blended learning is to facilitate greater student learning and could thus fit within a learner-centered paradigm.

Ike Shibley, PhD February 21, 2011

Service-Learning: Tips for Aligning Pedagogies with Learning Outcomes

While it is easy to see how service-learning meshes with courses in the social sciences, public health and education, can it work equally well in other areas, such as the hard sciences and the humanities?

Yes. While service-learning is not appropriate for every course, it can and does work well in every discipline. No matter the discipline, research has shown that service-learning helps students identify and examine the “big questions” and the social context in which the disciplines are situated.

Magna Publications February 2, 2011

Curriculum Development, Alignment and Coordination: A Data-Driven Approach

Most faculty work hard to make each individual course they teach the best learning experience it can be. They learn with each semester, and make revisions based on what worked and where the course stumbled. If done correctly, it’s a continuous improvement process that runs like a well-oiled machine. But no matter how good their individual courses are, it’s easy for faculty to end up in a silo–unsure of what’s happening in other courses throughout their discipline or department.

Mary Bart November 29, 2010

Lecture Capture: A New Way to Think about Hybrid Courses

“Hybrid education” has become a hot catchphrase recently as faculty blend face-to-face learning with online technology. But the growth of hybrid education has been steered by the unstated assumption that hybrid technology should be used to facilitate discussion outside of the classroom, while classroom time should be spent lecturing.

John Orlando, PhD October 25, 2010

Are You Committing Plagiarism? Top Five Overlooked Citations to Add to Your Course Materials

Although we strive to uphold academic integrity, we may unknowingly be committing plagiarism. As we know (and tell our students) plagiarism is copying from a source verbatim, but it is even more than that. According to Reference.com, “plagiarism is the unauthorized use or close imitation of the language and thoughts of another author and the representation of them as one’s own original work.”

Miki Crawford PhD September 29, 2010

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