Category Archives: Course Design

Avatar photo

Beyond “Death by PowerPoint”: The “Mini-Documentary” Approach to Course Video Lecture

In higher education, we are currently facing a dual crisis in content creation (a tri-crisis if you count AI content creation, but that’s for another day!). On one side, we have the so-called “Zoom Fatigue”—the exhaustion students feel from sitting in endless hours of talking heads in video calls. On the other side, we have “Death by PowerPoint”—the instinct for instructors to put every single spoken word onto a slide, forcing students to split their attention between reading and listening, and worse, doing that in one to two hour long (or longer!) recordings.

Continue reading →

From Student Voices to Course Design Choices: What Student Panels Reveal About Engagement
Avatar photo

From Student Voices to Course Design Choices: What Student Panels Reveal About Engagement 

Most of us are very familiar with the traditional ways colleges gather student feedback and measure student engagement. End-of-course evaluations are nearly universal in higher education, and they can offer helpful information about the student experience. However, these surveys are backward-looking and rarely provide the kind of nuanced, candid insight we need to make meaningful changes in our teaching and course design choices. Recent research backs this up. Becker, Brandt, and Psihopaidas (2021) found that student evaluations often miss the deeper contextual and emotional dimensions of learning that instructors need to make meaningful improvements. Their study demonstrated that when students are asked to talk through their experiences in real-time conversations, such as student panels, instead of rating them on a form, they reveal far more about what supports or hinders their engagement. Continue reading →

Stop Guessing: How UX Research Builds Better Educational Experiences
Avatar photo

Stop Guessing: How UX Research Builds Better Educational Experiences

Is your syllabus clearly organized? Will your students understand it? Is your course site laid out intuitively? Can students identify where to start and how to find different kinds of information?

Just because it’s easy for you to navigate and interpret your course materials doesn’t mean it’s going to be easy for your students–you have a wealth of information about the discipline and course structure that students don’t have when they first encounter it. And it’s very difficult to look at your course through the eyes of someone who doesn’t already have that context.

Continue reading →

Banner image featuring a stack of colorful papers on the right with playful, hand-drawn red and blue scribbles, arrows, question marks, and shapes scattered around the text in the center, reading: "Failing Forward: Embracing Productive Failure in Education."
Avatar photo

Failing Forward: Embracing Productive Failure in Education

After a particularly rough term in high school, my mom tried to comfort me by saying, “When you fail, you learn more.” I replied, “Then I must be a genius!” Cheeky, yes—but she wasn’t wrong. In fact, research shows that productive failure plays a vital role in how we learn. In the classroom, however, the fear of failure often prevents students from taking risks, asking questions, or engaging deeply, especially in higher education, where grades and perfection are prized. So, how can we shift this narrative and build a classroom culture where failure is seen not as defeat, but as a powerful learning tool? Continue reading →

Avatar photo

Checking in on Student Mental Health, Generative AI Usage, and Academic Integrity

In his book The Nineties, Chuck Klosterman sets the stage for his analysis of the 1990s by setting up how generations tend to view each other, a theme he’s built on across many of his essay collections:

“Younger generations despise older generations for creating a world they must inhabit unwillingly, an impossible accusation to rebuff. Older generations despise new generations for multiple reasons, although most are assorted iterations of two: They perceive the updated versions of themselves as either softer or lazier (or both). These categorizations tend to be accurate. But that’s positive. That’s progress. If a society improves, the experience of growing up in that society should be less taxing and more comfortable; if technology advances and efficiency increases, emerging generations should rationally expect to work less. If new kids aren’t soft and lazy, something has gone wrong.”

Continue reading →

“I want that!” The Ins and Outs of Third-Party Tools and the Technology Adoption Process
Avatar photo

“I want that!” The Ins and Outs of Third-Party Tools and the Technology Adoption Process

“Man! I LOVE this tool!”

Have you discovered a tool that changes everything in your teaching? Maybe it makes your grading simpler or easier, or maybe it provides a more interesting or thought-provoking way to engage your students with the material. 

You may have even heard that the tool you like can integrate with your learning management system (LMS), and are wondering about the process of getting the tool adopted on a larger scale for your department, college, or even the whole institution.

Here’s a handy guide to everything “third-party”, and how you can best make use of these resources in your class. Continue reading →

Beginning to Integrate a Framework for AI Literacy Into Existing Heuristics
Avatar photo

Beginning to Integrate a Framework for AI Literacy Into Existing Heuristics

Within education, we are likely familiar with the many cognitive models and heuristics used to depict learning stages or provide frameworks for approaching the art and science of teaching. Bloom’s Taxonomy, Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development, Vygotsky’s Zones of Proximal Development, and many other models and theories provide conceptualizations of individual steps, thoughts, stages, or actions to be taken in the internalization and mastery of concepts in education, both for students and instructors. It seems a natural progression then that a similar framework would begin to develop in the age of artificial intelligence that helps instructors and students alike understand the stages of development or work to be done in understanding, testing, and applying AI workflows to our current states of learning and teaching. Even photo editing tools are now powered by AI to achieve various effects. The Deepnude tool, for instance, can create copies of portrait photos and create their more sensual versions. Continue reading →