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Non-Disposable Assignments and Why You Should Use Them
This post originally ran on the Open Education at the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF) website and is reposted here under a CC-BY license. By Jen Moss, Instructional Designer and Adjunct Faculty at UAF The idea of the non-disposable or reusable assignment has been around for a while. The last couple years may have brought new practices and strategy to your teaching and new thoughts about assessment strategies. Perhaps some of those thoughts revolve around designing assessments connect meaningfully with the community outside the classroom bubble in some way. This is one of the fundamental points of open pedagogy and something that can be accomplished through the reusable assignment. David…
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How do you know when you need Experiential Learning?
Summary: Identify when your teaching can benefit from experiential learning to boost student engagement with practical, real-world applications. Date of Publishing: September 22, 2022 Experiential learning (EL) is not a new approach to teaching, but in recent years has become increasingly common in higher education. It is an engaging approach to teaching and learning that can be extremely beneficial for students, especially as they start their careers. Due to practical limitations, EL can’t always be used, which leads to the question: when should you use EL? Situation 1: When students are learning a skill that is important in the real world Some skills taught in university courses are critical for…
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Efficient Feedback
Struggling to learn something? Trying something complex or hard? There is nothing like feedback to help you learn well. For many of us teaching in higher education, however, providing feedback is an aspiration. We know it is important, but we struggle to provide it early or sometimes at all, particularly in large classes. Even when we have specifically designed an activity where students have an experience in an authentic context, we struggle to give timely feedback that students can use to improve their learning. Most of our feedback comes at the end when learning is done (e.g., final paper). It’s laborious, and we question if students are even using it. …
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Grading reflection
Giulia Forsythe, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons Summary: Reflect on grading practices to enhance student learning and equity. Discover how thoughtful assessment can drive better educational outcomes. How can you determine if someone’s reflection is good enough, and how can you signal that to students so they reflect well and understand the feedback and grades they receive? Date of publishing: September 2, 2022 We want students to reflect as a part of the learning process, because it helps them to consolidate what they have learned, think about why it is important to them, and be able to apply what they have learned later. But when we get ready to grade that…