APPLYING NEW KNOWLEDGE
You will get a range of reactions when you bring up the subject of online group activities. As Gregory Wells notes, "The skills learned by participating in a group project are applicable to nearly any career that a student is currently interested in or will be interested in at a future date. It is rare in today’s global economy that an individual will work independently on a project. Therefore, it is important that opportunities are provided to students to not only learn content, but to apply that content in a practical, near real-world environment." So how can you improve the process to satisfy you and your students? Read more here.
THE PURPOSE OF HIGHER EDUCATION
Cathy Davidson has a really interesting post on the HASTAC website. She writes that if we cannot change higher education as rapidly as we would like, we can change our classrooms to reflect our values. At a recent workshop, she asked the participants to answer the following questions, "Maybe you cannot change the world but, for most of us
teaching in classrooms, [what] are ways of making changes in one's own
class that can make a difference--to one's students, to one's own role
in replicating inequity, and as a model to our institutions seeking to
"transform higher education?" She admits that "what we are advocating is almost the opposite of 'outcomes' thinking; it is structuring empowerment at the input level, designing a syllabus that acknowledges structural inequality by countering it." Read more here.
STOP CHEATING
Taylor Massey writes "Detecting plagiarism may be an endless battle for instructors,
but avoiding it is sometimes easier said than done for students. For
many college students, knowing when and how to cite correctly is the
biggest challenge. With only so many hours in a semester, writing and
citation instructions are not always able to be covered in-class.
To give students an idea of where to begin, share these tips with
them for easily avoiding plagiarism." Want to see tips offered to help prevent and catch plagiarism, click here.
