As the fall semester begins, instructors are finalizing syllabi, including the grading scale. On the first day of class (i.e. syllabus day) students will eagerly flip through (or scroll the LMS) to locate the grading scale. What will they need to do to earn enough points to get the grade they want? We spend hours… Read more »
Assessment
PlayPosit: A New Way to Engage Students Online
Many instructors have been looking for better methods to engage students online, especially when it comes to asking for more than passively watch videos. Placing engagement opportunities in our lectures, demos, and other training materials has been tricky to say the least. However, PlayPosit may have the solution. PlayPosit is an interactive video tool within… Read more »
Quick Tip: Moderate Your Canvas Quiz to Accommodate Students’ Needs
You may find that some of your students need additional time or attempts to take a Canvas quiz. Fortunately, you can use the built-in quiz moderation tools to handle these accommodations. On the Moderate Quiz page, you can manually unlock (and re-lock) a quiz for a specific student, allow more time to complete a timed… Read more »
Implementing Successful Peer Review Practices
Peer review—the process of engaging students in providing feedback on each other’s work—is one of the most productive practices for courses that integrate any form of writing. While receiving useful feedback from their peers, students discover how others approach writing tasks. In doing so, students learn how to give, receive, and integrate feedback—skills that are… Read more »
What Will You Keep This Fall? Susan Siena on More Frequent Tests
In my last video in this series, Dr. Susan Siena from the O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs talks with me about moving from a few higher-stakes exams to more frequent, lower-stakes ones. Susan has evidence that students see better connections between exams and the course content, due to the more immediate assessments, and… Read more »
What Will You Keep for Fall? Sapna Mehta on Alternative Assessments
In this episode of WWYK, I talk with Dr. Sapna Mehta from the Department of Biology, and she shares how she has transformed an upper-level class in two ways—by taking a hybrid approach and by replacing all her exams with weekly scaffolded exercises that lead to a final project. That final project is also one… Read more »