The "Learning Glass," sometimes called a Lightboard, is a large piece of glass ringed by LED lights. When fluorescent marker is applied to the surface of the glass, it catches the light from the LEDs and glows clearly and brightly. An instructor can take advantage of this and draw from behind the glass, allowing the audience to see them and their written work at the same time.
UAF CTL recently installed a Learning Glass unit, joining institutions such as Northwestern, San Diego State University, and University of Florida. Several UAF instructors have already created videos that are being used this semester.
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.
A course banner offers the instructor the opportunity to provide a unique welcome, a personal touch, basic information, style and flair to an individual course or possibly a group of courses. Give your students the assurance, at a glance, that they are in the right place. Create a course banner with your course section, number, and title.
Research shows that the educational outcomes associated with field trips are not dependent on a face to face visit. Outcomes are instead based on student engagement driven by activities before, during and after visits to a site. This Teaching Tip provides an overview of good practices and a starting point for those considering using field trips in their class.
One of the most common questions we receive from faculty in UAF CTL iTeach workshops is
"what does an online course look like"? We all have years - and in some cases decades - of practice forming expectations of face-to-face learning experiences, but for those who are new to teaching online, it is often difficult to imagine how it all works. Learning experiences are complicated. Even if you're a veteran online instructor, it can be helpful to take a look at what others are doing in their online courses. No matter where you're at, touring a few courses can be a very important step toward building your fluency with the medium of online instruction.
There may be times you need to explain concepts that are visual in nature, for which you might want to annotate or diagram ideas for your students who are not physically in the room with you. This can be the case, for instance, if you are teaching an elearning course or if you are using a flipped classroom model in your class.
Summer is in full swing! You are camping, gardening, roadtripping, hiking, netflixing, swatting at mosquitoes – maybe even teaching. Meanwhile, you’re actively ignoring that buzz behind your ear: Fall’s coming … Teaching … Teaching … Teaching. No one will blame you for swatting that buzz away until, say, August. It’s summer, after all. But what if you could do something now to make your course development a month or two from now a bit easier?
Elearning classes sometimes require students to watch a prohibitive amount of web video in terms of bandwidth availability, yet it’s no secret that access to inexpensive broadband internet access is almost unheard of here in Alaska. The reality is that the majority of us pay high fees for very limited bandwidth. With these constraints in mind, there are a few strategies you may be able to employ to watch web video economically.
