It’s no secret that we are big fans of active learning at the Center for Teaching Excellence.

Students engaged in active learning tend to be gloriously noisy. They share ideas and insights with each other. They write on whiteboards. They debate contentious topics. They work problems. They negotiate group projects.

In Genelle Belmas’s Gamification class, though, active learning took the form of silence – at least for a day.

By Doug Ward

Add another lock to the ivory tower.

A majority of college students say it is acceptable to shout down a speaker they disagree with, and 20 percent accept the idea of resorting to violence to keep an undesirable speaker from campus, a poll from the Brookings Institution finds.

By Doug Ward

Student motivation is one of the most vexing challenges that instructors face. Students can’t learn if they aren’t engaged, and serious classroom material often fails to pique the interest of a generation that has grown up with the constant stimulation of smartphones, social media and video on demand.

As we near the halfway point of what we hope will be the final semester of remote everything, we at CTE encourage you to take a collective breath, put your feet up, and read an important news story you might have missed.

We can’t guarantee a happy ending. Then again, that all depends on what you consider happy.       

Consider it the week that might have been.

We called it a non-workshop.

When Turnitin activated its artificial intelligence detector this month, it provided a substantial amount of nuanced guidance.