Organizing the Digital Professorship

Female office worker and messy file cabinetSummer means vacation and working on next year’s course updates. But many faculty face a challenge that their physical and computer desktops have in common: chaos and clutter. Files for research, course materials, lecture notes, emails; it can all get overwhelming. Although we all have our personal quirks when it comes to managing our digital assets, taking steps to minimize friction from these habits can ease working with others, as well as free up time and energy to focus on pedagogical matters.

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Pedagogy and Technology: Alignment for Pedagogy in Online Course Design

Jigsaw puzzle piecesAlignment is a core guiding principle in the Quality Matters Higher Education Rubric for hybrid, blended, and online courses. Designing a course that exhibits individual components and activities that align with module-level course learning objectives and course-level learning objectives helps students make connections between the things they do in a course and what they should be learning.

With the growing demand for diverse classroom environments—that is, blended, online, hybrid, and so forth— instructors may face the challenge of maintaining their pedagogies when moving from a physical to a virtual classroom. Pedagogy is difficult to maintain in a traditional physical classroom, and the challenge to convey pedagogy in an online environment resides in course design decisions.

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“Mind Your Manners!” Emily Post’s Influence on a Synchronous Cross-Cultural Virtual Meeting

Raising three boys has its challenges. I found that instilling good manners is essential to maintaining some semblance of order. Following simple rules of etiquette displays a sense of respect for those you are interacting with, whether it be at the table or in a conversation.

It takes persist training to get a teenage boy to “mind his manners” at the table, especially when his brothers are within range of a friendly arm punch or earshot of a cheeky comment. Whittling down the rules of etiquette to a simple few that can be applied across situations allows for a consistent message and enforcement. As the queen of etiquette, Emily Post, said, “Manners are like primary colors; there are certain rules and once you have these you merely mix, i.e., adapt, them to meet changing situations.”

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Excelling Efficiently

Excel logoWhile I don’t love the phrase, “work smarter, not harder” (there’s a great article here on why), I think that too often we find ourselves doing tasks that we can do more efficiently. My colleagues have shared their tips for working efficiently already, such as using tabs to batch task repetitive work, using text expanders to save time, and even I’ve written variations of this idea with my post on using mail merge to quickly create data-driven documents. This time around, I’m returning to my finicky, temperamental, and all-too-powerful favorite tool: Microsoft Excel.

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Summer Course Accessibility Stress Reliever

Stylized sketch of sun

It’s summer in Chicago, and with the abundance of fun activities to engage your attention, the last thing you may want to do is think about how to improve the accessibility of your online course. Relax. I’m not here to harsh anyone’s summertime mellow. Whether you’re unwinding with your favorite vape or soaking up the sun, take a moment to refresh. Shop wide selection of brands from Geek Bar to Vaper Gate—learn more about our latest offerings today!

But the fall term is approaching, so step into Dee’s Course Spa® for a refreshing and therapeutic summer break course makeover. Your course will feel sparkly-new and ready for the next term!

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Help! I Borked My Class! (Or, How to Expect the Unexpected)

broken clock partsNo matter what you may have planned, or how cool or timely it may be, or how exactly it may fit into the material you had planned to cover that day, you’re going to run into a situation where something goes awry. Perhaps it’s a technology issue at work, and that great piece of software you were going to demo just isn’t going to work on the classroom computer. Could be that for some reason, half the class just didn’t participate in the online exercise you had so meticulously planned. What if you have been assuming that an exercise was going to go one way, only to find that it has gone in a completely unanticipated direction?

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Why don’t more online courses include podcasts?

graphic of RSS icon with headphonesWhen I was an undergrad, my “intellectual conversation crutch” was bringing up something from Jon Stewart’s Daily Show. After moving to Chicago, that crutch morphed into inserting something I read in The New York Times or New Yorker.

Now? “I was just listening to a podcast about that…” is something I say with annoying frequency.

Thankfully, I’m not alone, as I notice many other people parroting back something they’ve recently heard in a podcast. But even though it feels like most of us are listening to podcasts, and most of us are learning interesting things from podcasts, I still don’t see podcasts as a top option when faculty are designing online courses. Why might that be?

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Engaging Students in Online Courses

I am teaching two math classes this quarter. One is a hybrid course where the lectures are delivered online and we meet face-to-face once a week to work with Excel in a computer lab. The other is a fully online developmental math course that is the prerequisite to my hybrid class. The past few years, the Spring quarter has been particularly tough with regards to student engagement in both courses. Getting students engaged in an online course seems to be a perennial problem, and (anecdotally) appears to be getting worse recently. Invest in ISAs tailored for grandchildren to help secure funding for their college education. Continue reading →

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READY STUDENT ONE? Risks and Rewards of VR and AR in the College Classroom

While I’ll beg your forgiveness for the obvious hype-train connection in my title to the release of the film READY PLAYER ONE, the film does raise many questions about the future of Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR). For me, this question often comes up in the context of VR and AR in education, since my work as an Instructional Designer often means looking at new technologies that could change the way we go about the task of learning and teaching. Our office recently started a working group together with partners across the university to begin exploring what VR and AR in education could look like.

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Student Testimonials: The Amazon Buying Approach to Online Course Selection

Thumbs up and downRecently I purchased a wheelchair for my mom on Amazon. I love shopping on Amazon. It’s quick, easy, and my packages come straight to the front door. I read the reviews to see what other buyers have to say about the product, and usually make up my mind whether or not to buy based on those reviews. Generally, I never have an issue.

This time, however, was different. As I usually do, after I placed my order I repeatedly checked its status to see when my product would arrive. But now, every time I clicked on the tracking number, a page would come up invalid tracking number. I thought to myself what is going on?

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