Group items tagged

Michael Feldstein says that "there is a moral imperative to protect students' privacy" - but then rightly questions whether we're "protecting" privacy by taking choices away from students.

Sometimes our talk about student creativity verges on treating it like a magic "special sauce". Here are some concrete exercises which we can teach students to seed or spark creative approaches.

It seems odd to consider meeting your Kenyon students through an online video chat - until you consider winter weather, cold and flu season, or the various other reasons you might not be able to meet in person. This article suggests some benefits and hurdles to videoconferencing with students.

Admittedly this example covers engineering students and is limited to just two semesters worth of data from a large, public, research university. However, the results are encouraging if you ever wondered whether or not students might actually watch the screencast videos you are making (or plan on making).

If the point of online discussion boards and collaborative projects is to get students discussing course ideas with each other, does it make sense to move those discussions to the social media venues they're already using?

Many students don't know who the real audience is for their course evaluations. Brian Croxall has an interesting solution for that - tell them that the audience is the students in the next class.

What do classes look like as you move from infrequent, high-stakes assignments and exams to frequent grading of low-stakes activities? Warnock makes a number of claims, backed up by the literature - students become more confident and motivated, there's less incentive to cheat, the dialogue between students and faculty improves. I particularly like the last half of the article, where he talks about the practical elements of increasing informal writing or quizzing in a course.

This is the second of two MOOC-related stories in the Chronicle yesterday. I am "taking" a MOOC at the moment, which is taught by a professor at Duke University. I do get the feeling that he is treating me (and all the students in the MOOC) with respect, but I can imagine a situation in which this may not be the case. The conveners of the meeting that drafted this "Bill of Rights" clearly want to send the message that online educators should have the best interests of their students FIRST and foremost in their minds. I stress FIRST here because the drafters of the document want to avoid having MOOC students become a commodity that can be sold such as with social media participants (e.g., Facebook).

The authors describe ways in which design thinking gives students a chance to practice interdisciplinarity and engage with big questions. What if students were encouraged to bring those skills to bear on campus issues?

Students tend to hate group work, and I've come to believe it's because we have an unrealistically high expectation of students' skills at working in a group. Walking the students through the skills which the group task requires, and accurate assessment of their abilities and team composition, seems like a good step in teaching students what group work will be like in the working world (as well as positioning the students for success at the course work).

A list of 10 points to remember in helping students in crisis. From The Guardian, the list uses UK terminology, but the points apply on both sides of the pond. I particularly like the bookends: "find out about the support services your university offers" and "lead by example and take care of yourself too."

Much of the information about undergraduate research is written by professors for professors. This article gives the students a voice, as 5 students from the University of Central Florida give their insights on what practices made their research experiences worthwhile.

It's a common complaint that our students aren't comfortable taking risks, and don't deal well with setbacks. This article provides a set of classroom techniques, from showing your own struggles with disciplinary material to celebrating success when it finally comes, which will help students get used to "fail more, fail better."

A worthwhile read as we near course evaluation time. Especially with our online system's new ability for faculty to write their own questions, it might be worthwhile to ask students if the question they answered is the question you meant to ask!

The ECAR survey is an interesting national perspective on students' attitudes towards technology in higher education. This Chronicle article pulls out a couple of interesting findings.

This Chronicle blogger concedes that "modularity" will not work at residential colleges -- at least not for all courses. Personally I think this reductionist trend is going too far. Students choose a major discipline. Students (often) choose a sub-discipline. Students choose which courses to take among all the possibilities. Students choose from among professors teaching those courses. The post takes this down to the level of the 10-minute video (or lecture). Really? What can one learn in ten minutes that stands alone so much that ALL the related knowledge can be ignored. Here's an example. A student watches a 10-minute video on coral reefs and learns that reefs are in danger due to rising ocean temperatures. Fine. But what is the reason? Does the threat to coral stem from the fact that they build their skeletons out of calcium carbonate? From the fact that modern corals are aragonitic and not calcitic? Does the symbiotic nature of corals and zooxanthellic algae play a role? Is there something else involved here? A combination of factors? Factoids? Do we really want our future generations making decisions about important matters based on what they remember from a 10-minute lecture or video?

An interesting page of resources from DePaul, mixing resources for health and counseling with some classroom approaches which can help students process the learning components of their late-semester stress.

Many institutions are finding that the analysis of data about student behavior allows them to identify at-risk students earlier and offer interventions which improve academic success. Most of the case studies are being done at larger institutions with lower graduation rates than Kenyon, but the possibilities and risks involved in the process are worth keeping an eye on.

Two interesting approaches to getting students to regulate their cell phone use in class. What do you do to help students learn to focus?

Some interesting ideas in this article about why students do and don't use office hours, and ways to make your office hours more convenient and less threatening. The idea of offering topical group "office hours" struck me as particularly interesting... maybe office hours would seem less threatening if they weren't always one-on-one.