When faced with uncertainty, prioritizing hope can serve as a guiding force for both instructors and students in higher education. Pursuing hope allows educators to connect to their values and maintain a transformative vision, fostering deeper relationships with students and strengthening the academic community. By engaging in reflective practices, collaboration, and creative thinking, we can create meaningful, hopeful futures.
Students thrive in our classrooms when they connect with each other, with the subject matter, with themselves and with us (Quinlan, 2016). Positive connections motivate student engagement and improve academic performance. This was true before the pandemic, when we could…
We’ve all become Zoom experts in the last 10 months. But we’ve also gotten used to the platform and how we use it. Could we be more creative? What could we change about how we use this tool to create more meaningful synchronous experiences for our students?
For some of us, the COVID-19 pandemic is one of the deepest experiences of trauma we’ve had. Trauma can be defined as “any experience in which a person’s internal resources are not adequate to cope with external stressors” (Hoch et…
Heidi Olson managed paper-based correspondence courses in the ’80s, supported UAF’s first online offerings in the late ’90s, and has handled thousands of online courses since. She retired last week. Read her reflections on these changes over time and advice on giving students the best possible learning experience.
Research shows that the relationships between students and their instructors in a university-level course is “one of the most important factors' contributing to student success. Use student conferences to give and receive feedback and build relationships that will improve everyone’s engagement in the course.
Give everyone a break from the stress of traditional finals and infuse a new sense of purpose in your final assessment with these suggestions for alternative final assessments.
As the semester settles into a rhythm, the more daunting but less urgent projects that we’ve put off are beginning to demand attention. But where to start? Make a plan, commit to a practice and voila, the only work you’ll have to do is the work, not the managing of the anxiety about the work.
If we learned anything this summer, it’s that working under conditions of uncertainty and crisis makes it hard to get the work done. This is equally true for students, and it is true at the macro-level of statewide budgeting as…
We learn better when we are involved in constructing our own knowledge. Some of us know this from experience — it’s why we do research, why we collaborate, why we ask our kids questions when we read to them. But…
With all the logistics that go into wrapping up the semester, it’s hard to think about almost anything else — painful to think about the whole semester that you’re just trying to move beyond. But of course, as teachers we…
An agenda creates transparency in the classroom. If these are qualities you strive for in your teaching, consider these principles for creating open class agendas.