Are you working on a new course, an assignment, or a teaching idea and need a place to start? Start at CTL, UAF CTL’s online headquarters for all your questions about course design. Learn on your own with our Pedagogy Resources, featuring tips and deep dives on course design, technology concepts, examples, links, and more.
Today’s teachers face a critical challenge deciding when and how to make use of technology in their classroom, whether they are supplementing a classroom experience or leading a flipped, hybrid, or fully online course. UAF CTL’s team of instructional designers exists to help with this (https://ctl.uaf.edu/events/), but each of us is always our own design staff.
More and more students are using mobile devices and an app called Blackboard Mobile Learn to access course content on the go. While students shouldn’t solely rely on smartphones to complete course requirements, there are steps instructors can take to make it a better experience, such as using common file types (like PDFs), keeping titles short and testing links on a variety of devices.
By spending an hour a day updating your course over the holiday break you’ll be ready to go. There are 26 days between when Fall Grade are due and the first day of Spring classes.
By design, Google Applications offer bare-bones formatting and functionality, but sometimes you need additional features to support your purpose. This week's Teaching Tip introduces five add-on like the Google Doc Highlight Tool which allows you to designate a certain color of highlight with a theme. Once done, you can gather those selections, organize them by themes, and share the results with others. Explore more!
Our purpose as instructors is to facilitate new student understandings. But, what are understandings? Are there different kinds? It seems they can be simple, such as remembering the elements of the periodic table, or extremely complex, such as discovering new knowledge about oneself and one’s relationship with the world.
The physical space of a campus blends student support into the learning environment: on the first day of school, students taking face-to-face courses walk onto campus, stroll past the library, the Writing Center, and their advisor's office on the way to your class. They greet their classmates who, a few weeks into the semester, are the ones they will ask when they’re confused about your instructions.
We all spend time playing games. According to vertoanalytics.com, we spend more than a billion hours per month playing mobile games and that doesn’t include games played on laptops, desktops or with game consoles.1 According to the entertainment software association, in 2015, 65% of US households had at least one person who played online games, three hours or more per week.
Nearly everyone alive today has experience as a student in a traditional, brick and mortar classroom within a traditional classroom paradigm. How many of us have experience as fully online students? There are few basic ways that online instructors without such experience can bridge that gap and accommodate and empathize with the needs of students.
The start of a new semester begins soon! In a face-to-face class, you usually connect with students on the first day of class. You quickly confirm students know where and when to meet. Most faculty give an overview of the course and introduce students to the syllabus. Faculty introduce themselves to the students and often have the students introduce themselves to the class.
Have you been playing Pokémon Go lately? You have probably heard about it if you haven’t actually tried it out for yourself. Apart from cute Pokémons, one of the reasons this game is sensational is because it involves Augmented Reality (AR), which is a digital layer that can be seen on top of the real world through your mobile device, which is super fun.
Setting up a discussion board designed to allow your students to communicate with one another may lower the number of emails you receive. It will empower students to ask each other quick questions, and it might get them talking. Make sure students know it is a resource that becomes more useful with their active use. As students continue to interact they build relationships which benefit them both during the course and after. Read this teaching tip for ideas on how to implement this type of discussion board.
