Last month I watched the IDEAS Seminar on “Beyond the Classroom: Creating Engaging Educational Videos” (Yurchenkov, 2025). If you have read some of my previous blog posts you may noticed several about video lessons. However, several points jumped out at me that I thought I would share specifically about the length of videos (note the … Read more
Feedback: “Nice job. I enjoyed reading this. A-“ I took a cohort program for my master’s and had the same instructor for 4 or 5 courses. Each assignment was an essay. On every essay I got exactly the same feedback – absolutely no comments on grammar or specific ideas, but rather the generic “Nice job. … Read more
ITEEA, Gagné, Cafarella, and others provide a procedural flow for a unit/lesson. The differences are primarily on focus – the ITEEA 6E model is focused on project- and case-based unit design and so the language of their model is based on student activity. Of course, the instructor is still designing the unit, based on how … Read more
Why do it: Research has repeatedly shown that adding emotional elements to images/videos can improve student’s study time (length paying attention), and help them learn, retain, and transfer the learning more. The Cognitive Affective Theory of Learning with Media (CATLM) assumes that emotion can impact motivation and motivation can impact cognitive engagement (Wong & Adesope, … Read more
Last month I compared and combined three articles on the principles for multimedia instructional videos. One of the common principles was about color use. This month I reviewed over a dozen articles on color use in instruction and found the following: According to Misanchuk & Schwier (2009) The following are extracted from a list of … Read more
In this blog, I compare three articles on best practices/principles for designing instructional videos and provide a list of matching principles that may help you design your instructional videos. These can be applied with the WCAG accessibility guidelines and general good design principles. There are dozens of research articles about the Cognitive Theory of Multimedia … Read more
A few months ago, I provided a list of basic support areas that will help you prepare for each term. Now, here is a list of other support areas that you may need in an emergency. Under the assumption that you may not have time to search online for the correct information, you may want … Read more
We talk with our students about plagiarism, but how do we fare ourselves? When we are creating documents, webpages, slides, etc., do we consider the sources for our images, videos, or sounds? It is tempting to take an image we see in Google and copy and paste it where we want it. Chances are pretty … Read more
During your stay at each institution, you will need certain information such as the term calendar, promotion and tenure policies, and course learning outcomes/objectives. In addition, you may want some help improving your course, moving your course to a new format (such as project-based learning), or implementing a new technology. Unfortunately, it isn’t always easy … Read more
As mentioned before, on more than one occasion, I have been assigned a course to teach with less than two weeks’ notice. As I had never taught this course before, this didn’t give me enough time to plan the entire semester (in one instance I hadn’t read the assigned text and didn’t have a copy!). … Read more