Articles

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

Getting Over Learning Styles

There is a landfill of studies—more than 3,000 articles and 600 books. If you Google “learning styles” you will get 9.7 million hits in 0.16 seconds. “Learning styles workshops” produces 7.8 million hits and even “critiques of learning styles” garners 460,000 items. By the numbers of instruments, handbooks, and workshops advertised online, learning styles must be a sizable industry. But after diving into the pile, my mind was full of grit and cynicism. A zealous quest has created claims and theories so bad they aren’t even wrong. There had to be something useful in all this effort or despair would settle over me like so much dust.

Larry D. Spence December 6, 2012

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