When a student asked, “How many sources do I need?” history Professor Leah Shopkow took the question seriously, transforming her teaching. In an article she wrote about this assignment transformation, Shopkow explains how she went from answering, “It depends,” to truly teaching her students what historians do when they write. Unaware of the forms writing… Read more »
Instructors tasked with designing an online course often have two questions: What do I need to know, and where do I start? Our upcoming workshop, “Quality Matters: Applying the Rubric to Online Courses,” helps to answer both questions. Quality Matters (QM) is a non-profit organization concerned with improving and certifying the quality of online and… Read more »
Images and objects surround us in our everyday lives—from the advert on the bus to the heirloom in our grandmother’s living room—but are often left out of the classroom. Objects and photos engage students across many disciplines (education, anthropology, history, sociology, languages, etc.). By learning to look critically and evaluate an object’s construction and use,… Read more »
A syllabus can be a creative and integrative expression of graduate students’ academic and pedagogical interests. Whether graduate students are applying to teach for their department, Collins, or Global Village, or preparing for academic job interviews, they can use the syllabus to showcase how they would teach their dissertation topic. It can be tempting, however,… Read more »
Specifications Grading (“Specs” Grading) is a form of contract grading based on the amount of work students choose to complete in a course. Allowing students to make this decision up front can increase motivation and self-direction in a course, and it can also focus and reduce grading for the instructor. Specs Grading motivates students like… Read more »
Do you have undergraduate teaching assistants and would like to utilize them more effectively? Are you looking for a way to make your large lecture class more active? Consider implementing the Learning Assistants (LA) model. Like other peer instruction models, undergraduates who have successfully completed a course serve as a peer instructor in a subsequent… Read more »
