By Doug Ward
The beginning of an academic year is a time of renewal. Our courses and our students start fresh, and we have an opportunity to try new approaches and new course material.
The beginning of an academic year is also a time for sharing advice, information, experiences, and insights. Here are some interesting tidbits I think are worth sharing.
By Doug Ward
Data analytics holds great potential for helping us understand curricula.
By combining data from our courses (rubrics, grades, in-class surveys) with broader university data (student demographics, data from other courses), we can get a more meaningful picture of who our students are and how they perform as they move through our curricula.
By Doug Ward
The University of Kansas has gained international attention with its work in student-centered learning over the past five years.
By Doug Ward
Howard Gobstein issued both a challenge and a warning to those of us in higher education.
Universities aren’t keeping up with the pace of societal change, he said, and the initiatives to improve education at the local, state and national levels too often work in isolation.
By Doug Ward
The overarching message from a meeting of the University Innovation Alliance was as disturbing as it was clear: Research universities were built around faculty and administrators, not students, and they must tear down systemic barriers quickly and completely if they hope to help students succeed in the future.
By Derek Graf
As instructors, we sometimes look for ways to create big changes in our courses, departments, and degree programs. Searching for complete overhauls to our teaching practices, we risk losing sight of the small changes we can make in our next class meeting.
By Doug Ward
From the trenches, the work to improve college teaching seems interminably slow.
By Doug Ward
Strong beliefs about volatile issues can quickly turn class discussions tumultuous, especially during election season.
Rather than avoid those discussions, though, instructors should help students learn to work through them civilly and respectfully. That can be intimidating, especially in classes that don’t usually address volatile issues.
By Derek Graf
Here’s another approach to using silence as a motivator for active learning.
I’ve written previously about how Genelle Belmas uses classroom silence to help students get into a “flow state” of concentration, creativity, and thinking. Kathryn Rhine, as associate professor of anthropology, uses silence in as part of an activity that challenges students to think through class material and exchange ideas but without speaking for more than 30 minutes.