Peer feedback can be a powerful tool for revision, but to be effective it needs to be descriptive, positive, and forward looking. Students need instruction and practice to generate responses their peers will be able to usefully incorporate in the next draft. This is a straightforward generative writing method for creating this kind of feedback: more… »
Engagement Activities
To promote student engagement in course materials in a mostly-asynchronous course, I developed a framework of “Weekly Engagement Activities” that provide multiple flexible opportunities for students to demonstrate their engagement. This is the language used to describe the framework: Each week, students have multiple ways to demonstrate their engagement with the course. Most of these more… »
Mixing up Group Projects with Individual Components
Group Projects are an exciting and engaging way to both drive and assess student-learning while building community in our classrooms. However, assigning a group grade for one or more major assessments in a course can elicit anxieties on behalf of both the instructor and the students. Did every student meet the learning objectives? Did students more… »
Progressive Presenting: Building Presentation Skills Over Time
One of my main goals in my courses is to prepare students to be better at presenting information to a particular audience. Communications skills are always “more important than ever.” I find our majors often lack experience in verbal presentations of the sort I do all the time professionally, and my friends out of academia more… »
Recording Video or Audio Feedback (Instead of Written)
Online learning tends to lean heavily on the written (typed) text for content and feedback. In some instances, I’ve turned to using audio or video feedback to give my hands and wrists a break. This works best when I’m giving formative feedback on student work – drafts of projects or ideas that don’t require me more… »
