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
Recently, I was looking for a web-based tool to create quizzes to use in class as polls. I found the 2020 Typology of Free Web-based Learning Technologies written by Bower & Torrington and published in the EDUCAUSE’s digital library. This typology has a LOT of interesting tools listed in 14 categories, with links to each … Read more
What is a Backchannel Backchannel communication is basically a minimal- or non-verbal response. Traditionally, these have been puzzled or bored looks, nods, smiles, or ‘yeah’, ’huh’, and ‘hmm’. While these are very beneficial, you may not be able to see all of these or interpret them correctly. In a large classroom and in remote/online courses, … Read more
Comparison Grids to Help Decision Making One of life’s joys and pains is making choices between options. Talking with someone recently, it occurred to me that some instructors may not be familiar with comparison grids that can make this type of decision making easier, so here are some basics… (These are sometimes referred to as … Read more
Although some people refer to active learning and transformational learning as the same thing, I think we should differentiate… Active learning [emphasis added] is generally defined as any instructional method that engages students in the learning process. In short, active learning requires students to do meaningful learning activities and think about what they are doing… … Read more
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, I didn’t have enough time to plan the entire semester (in one instance I hadn’t read the assigned text and didn’t have a copy!). To give myself breathing … Read more