Thoughts on Teaching
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OfflineFor online faculty, the desire to encourage students and help them succeed is a powerful motivator, especially in the introductory courses when the students are first developing their footing in the online setting. At what point, though, can an online faculty cross the line from being encouraging to detrimental?
For online faculty, the desire to encourage students and help them succeed is a powerful motivator, especially in the introductory courses when the students are first developing their footing in the online setting. At what point, though, can an online faculty cross the line from being encouraging to detrimental?
When a student first begins an online program, he/she can quickly become overwhelmed with the amount of self-discipline needed. Unlike in a ground course, the student cannot count on…
OfflineOnline education requires and demands every instructor and professor to move beyond a facilitator statue. One way we are able to do this is to recognize when we need to seek assistance for ourselves to help our students. What steps to do we take when we have exhausted all we know how to do for our students who obviously need our support and assistance?
When We Need Help
A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.
~ Henry Brooks Adams ~
Online education requires and demands every instructor and professor to move beyond a facilitator statue. One way we are able to do this is to recognize when we need to seek assistance for ourselves to help our students.
What steps to do we take when we have exhausted all we know how to do for our students who obviously need our support and assistance? I posed this question to…
Teaching requires both perspiration and inspiration. Teachers who demonstrate characteristics of servant leadership serve their students by giving their self, their time, and their love to enable their students to achieve more.
Quality classroom facilitation requires faculty members to fulfill the course requirements (perspiration) and to give students those immeasurable components of life that go beyond course requirements (inspiration). These requirements demand a servant's heart. Recognizing that everything we have and everything we are is the result of God's grace and those who unselfishly sowed their lives into our lives make us better persons. Thus, to whom much is given, much is required. What others gave to…
OfflineBy exploring the emotional issues that come with teaching in the online classroom, this article gives some practical suggestions for making each classroom experience one that is positive, personally rewarding, and enjoyable for all participants.
The first time you teach a course in the online environment it is pretty exciting. You feel like you are on the cutting edge of technology. You imagine your students reading every post that you write and using your feedback to reach great heights.
However, once you have taught the same course a few times, you must admit that your excitement starts to wane. You realize that a lot of the great critical thinking questions that you post are unanswered by students and that sometimes a student's…
Teaching for the ways students learn: Ditching the lecture
Benefits of peer-to-peer education
The lecture has been the traditional modality that professors have used to impart their knowledge to students. However, the lecture based learning style may be an anachronistic method given the emerging paradigm of student-centric learning. While the lecture has undoubtedly been used to educate some of history's brilliant thinkers, there are several shortcomings with this method. The amount of information intake an individual has is limited. There is an inherent lack of feedback given the…
OfflineThis post asserts a strategic approach to help students develop a sense of what academic writing is generally and how to be an effective and efficient presence in the discussion forum, specifically. It demonstrates how to be substantive in the Discussion Forum while simultaneously learning how to prepare for written assignments.
Help for Students in the Discussion Forum and Written Assignments
Only as high as I can reach can I grow, only as far as I seek can I go, only as deep as I can look can I see, only as much as I dream can I be (Ravn, 2012).
The Discussion Forum is the center for excitement in the online learning environment. For students who thrill to learn from sharing ideas, inspire thought, and build a developmental database of experience, the discussion forum is an actualized paradise of an intellectual…
OfflineParticipation is a task every student will need to complete as an online student. Some students have a more difficult time than others to create meaningful posts. These posts can be difficult to create because students do not know how to make connections and expound their thoughts. By implementing a concept I learned as an Early Childhood Educator has improved my students’ participation quality.
As I continue to improve myself as an online instructor, I began to realize I can implement the skills and tools I learned as an Early Childhood Educator. One of these skills relate to a reading comprehension strategy. This strategy is called text connections. There are three forms of text connections - text to text, text to self, and text to world.
These connections are what I am currently teaching my students. These connections are taught through metacognitive strategies (thinking about your…
OfflineMaking education more fun can be a fruitful pursuit.
Recently, I was watching a Ted Talk where Jane McGonigal (2010) was arguing for the latent potential of videogames to change the world. Her argument was that we have a generation of expert gamers who are busy working on virtual problems that are highly complex, require focused attention, and are inherently engaging--but are somewhat meaningless in the "real world." Thus, she proposes that we find ways to make games applicable to real world problems (McGonigal, 2010). While Gonigal (2010) is…
Providing Quality Embedded Feedback for Students
Your students have just submitted their drafts, and now you are faced with the daunting process of editing these drafts. Stop. First, consider your role in this stage of the writing process. Are you the editor or the instructor? If you are the editor, you are doing the work, and the student does not necessarily process the changes you will make. On the other hand, as the instructor, you are guiding your students through this phase of the…
OfflineCreating critical thinkers should be a primary focus of higher education. Incorporating Socratic questioning into our instruction, especially in an online environment, can be incredibly effective as shown by research.
What is the purpose of higher education? What is the responsibility of an online instructor? The answers to these questions vary depending who is asked (and when). However, I think at the heart of every answer lies a common theme: online instructors should help students become critical thinkers so that this skill can help students make the most of their lives.
As any online instructor, at times I struggle with getting my students to think critically. With the…
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