Education 2.0 & 3.0

Being physically apart can make lively discussions more challenging, but giving students the time, questions and confidence to engage with classmates can help them have meaningful conversations online.

Via Peter Mellow

As growing numbers of students take online and hybrid courses, higher education institutions are looking for ways to cultivate and sustain engagement

Via Peter Mellow

As universities began to convert traditional courses into online ones, they realized that they lacked the expertise to make the transition to online education successfully. Online courses have not been successful at engaging students or delivering strong learning outcomes, and many universities found they simply did not have the technical or business expertise to make the leap to online classes.

Via Elizabeth E Charles

How effective are your discussion facilitation skills? Do you have any evidence or are you relying on your impressions? Would some feedback be useful? If so, you’ll find in the table below and in a downloadable Word doc an empirically developed instrument that can be used to more clearly identify the various skills involved in effective discussion facilitation and to gather student feedback that can help you assess yours.

 

 

Via Jim Lerman

Thirty years of research in the scholarship of teaching and learning in higher education have demonstrated that when students are engaged in the classroom, they learn more (Pascarella and Terezini 1991, 2005). Classroom discussion is likely the most commonly used strategy for actively engaging students. Whether it is a seminar course centered on discussion or a lecture punctuated by moments of interaction with students, discussion is likely second only to lecture as the most frequently used pedagogical strategy.

Via Elizabeth E Charles

"...it can be awkward for everyone if the teacher simply calls on a quiet student out of the blue, and the student either hasn’t done the reading or can’t answer the question. I dislike unpleasantness. Therefore, in recent years, in an effort to get everyone involved in a class discussion, I use “Heads-up Questions.” These are reading-related questions that I create—sometimes just a few, sometimes a dozen or so. I post them for students via Blackboard a couple of days before our class meeting.

"Here’s what makes the discussion of the “Heads-up Questions” different from other discussions and other questions. Everyone understands that in the next class I will directly call on students to respond to those questions. No volunteers or raising of hands. I call on students, but it’s not out of the blue because they have a chance to prepare a response, and they know there’s a pretty good chance they’ll get called on during that portion of class. (They also understand that I won’t call on them directly to answer questions I haven’t let them prepare for.)

"Here’s how I use Heads-up Questions in class:"

Via Jim Lerman, Miloš Bajčetić

California community colleges take part in chatbot tool pilot aimed at getting students to interact and help each other with coursework.

Via Becky Roehrs