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 »
Course Design
Ordinary Objects, Extraordinary Teaching Experiences
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 »
Using Backward Course Design to Demystify the Syllabus Writing Process
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 »
A Better Way To Grade
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 »
Maximizing Your Undergraduate Teaching Assistants’ Potential
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 »
Academic Year In Review: Top Blog Posts from 2016-17
The CITL Blog Year in Review: 45 blog posts to date have been read over 6800 times this past year by more than 2400 unique readers from across the world. We are beyond pleased the CITL Blog has become a part of your professional reading and hope you will continue to read and grow with us. When we started this… Read more »