Teaching and Learning
Help Your Students Move Beyond Passive Listening (Beckie Supiano, Chronicle of Higher Education, August 18, 2022): A discussion of Susan Hrach’s Minding Bodies: How Physical Space, Sensation, and Movement Affect Learning: knowledge is constructed through embodied experience.
Learning in Uncertainty (Dave Cormier, Teaching in Higher ed, August 18, 2022): A podcast (40 min.) on what helps students learn in the context of ambiguity.
Simple Ways to Strengthen Your Students’ Writing (Steven Mintz, Inside Higher Ed, August 17, 2022): What instructors can learn from AI and Machine Learning-powered essay autograders.
Building Student Confidence in Oral Communication: The Importance of Low-stakes Presentations (Elizabeth Dunham, Faculty Focus, August 17, 2022): Recognizing that her students lacked confidence to orally present, the author developed a new goal of helping students feel more comfortable standing up and presenting to their peers.
It’s Not (Always) the Students’ Fault (Eric Vanden Eykel, Inside Higher Ed, August 17, 2022): How faculty members’ failings can become opportunities for positive change.
Is Higher Ed Really Ready to Embrace Hybrid Learning? (Rebecca Koenig, EdSurge, August 9, 2022): New study shows colleges may need to hire more digital experts and better prepare students to learn online.
The New Semester
NBC News/Generation Lab Summer Survey (Ben Kamisar, NBC). An NBC poll of 1700 rising college sophomores found that nearly two-thirds found themselves either “pretty” or “super” pessimistic about the future of the United States and the world while they remained very optimistic about their own lives. 42% don’t trust the Supreme Court “at all.”
Give Your Students a Homeric Welcome This Semester (James M. Lang, Chronicle of Higher Education, August 15, 2022): Don’t underestimate the importance and power of hospitality on the first day of class.
Six Steps to a More Inclusive Syllabus: A tip of the hat to the Center for Learning and Teaching at Denison, and Lew Ludwig, for pointing us to this document from the University of Northern Colorado.
How to Hold a Better Class Discussion: Advice Guide (Jay Howard, Chronicle of Higher Education): Effective class discussions — much like effective lectures — are the result of careful planning. Students must do their part by coming to class ready to participate. But there are ways to increase the likelihood that they will be prepared, and to avoid the frustration of a sea of impassive faces.
Higher Education Faces Challenges
Higher Ed Must Change or Die (Jason Wingard, Inside Higher Ed, August 16, 2022): Consider this Wingard’s “burning platform” memo for higher ed. Wingard is the president of Temple University.
How Higher Education Lost Its Shine (Jon Marcus, Hechinger Report, August 10, 2022): Americans are rejecting college in record numbers. Among the concerns: anti-elitism, anti-institutionalism, a perception that cost is out of control, not to mention demographics.
Equity and Justice in Higher Ed
What Happened to Black Enrollment? (Oyin Adedoyin, Chronicle of Higher Education, August 18, 2022): Black enrollment this past decade tumbled at an alarming rate.
How Academic Technologists Can Bring Anti-Racism into Our Work (Louise Delagran, Cristina Lopez, Asa Olson, Sara Schoen, and Tracy Thomas Wilson, Educause, July 15, 2022): The authors came to recognize that anti-racism is not just a personal responsibility but also a professional one. Instead of waiting for central administration to lead the conversation, they wanted to explore what we could do in our professional roles to confront racism.