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The basics Promoting inclusion and supporting a diverse student body is a core responsibility of instructors. The fulfillment  of that responsibility is dependent on an instructor’s ability to recognize and mediate the impact of systemic inequity on student learning. Online teaching can certainly present unique challenges to equity and inclusion. However, many challenges to equity […]

The basics Although accessibility needs to be at the forefront of an instructor’s mind when designing a course, it is also important for instructors who are teaching a course. Even if it has not been designed to be intentional about making the learning experience accessible to all students, there are important checks and decisions an […]

The basics Multiple choice questions often can’t tell an instructor everything they want to know about students’ learning. Thinking about what you, as an instructor, want to measure about student learning can help you design creative and authentic assessments to align with your learning objectives. Assessment is a term that tends to have a lot […]

The basics We know students may struggle to engage with assigned readings. To help remedy this, social annotation tools offer collaborative opportunities for reading, highlighting, and discussing texts online. What is social annotation? Social annotation (SA) is a peer-to-peer activity that allows students to collaboratively read, highlight, and discuss texts online. With advanced planning (and […]

The basics When designing about the activities and assessments your students complete, both for practicing new skills and to demonstrate what they’ve learned, make sure that those activities map directly to your learning objectives. The verbs you used in your learning objectives are clues as to what kinds of assessments will tell you, and your […]

The basics How do you know how much work is in a credit hour? For many of us, credit hours indicate how long and often your class meets in person. What happens when that “classroom” moves online? Regardless of how we are teaching (face-to-face, distance, or online) student engagement and workload should be relatively even […]

The basics Regardless of whether your course is online or face to face, you will need to provide feedback to your students on their strengths and areas for growth. Rubrics are one way to simplify the process of providing feedback and consistent grades to your students. What are rubrics? Rubrics are “scoring sheets” for learning […]

The basics Once you have decided to record some of your own content, it’s time to make some decisions on how to record them. Recording lecture content can be on a spectrum from incredibly simple (and cheap) to a substantial investment in time and materials that could produce re-usable materials for years to come. How […]

The basics The first step in learning the differences between online and face-to-face teaching is understanding that one is not necessarily ‘better’ than the other. There are numerous aspects of traditional teaching practices that are extremely valuable to distance education. However, online teaching requires facilitators to take the knowledge they currently have and expand upon […]

The basics Emergency remote teaching In March of 2020, the University of Michigan went online due to the COVID-19 pandemic. While the delivery of classes took place online, it was not the same as the type of learning experiences that come from a typical online course. You may have experienced feeling overwhelmed with the planning […]