Online Pedagogy

“Rethinking Education” is an online series focused on using the latest research for enhancing student learning. Presenters provided learning protocols applicable to both online and traditional classrooms. I’ll present both in this post. Using the latest research on brain science to enhance student learning in the online and traditional classroom...

What is an online learning Journal Assignment? Here is a brief outline followed by a more detailed discussion. Each week students choose three ideas, 2 from the online course readings, and 1 from the text. They are required to answer four questions for each idea: 1) What was the one...

Are "trigger warnings" useful for some content in online classes? In the past, I’ve had students in my Film and Politics students informally reach out to ask to be excused from potentially upsetting films. These included combat veterans concerned about war films and religious adherents concerned about language and sexuality...

Face-to-face classes are ideally suited to balance structure and flexibility, particularly when it comes to incorporating real-world political events as teachable moments in a given course. 2020-2022 are arguably historic years. A few examples would be the pandemic, continued threats to democracy, the quest for racial justice, a volatile former...

My CU-Denver political science department colleague Sasha Breger-Bush’s insightful 2020 book, Global Politics: A Toolkit for Learners , is highly useful for instructors teaching any topic and any course format be it face-to-face, asynchronous online, or remote synchronous. As a text it is unique (and democratic) in that it addresses...

In a Chronicle of Higher Education article David Gooblar, a pedagogy columnist and professor of English and gender studies at the University of Iowa, wrote of recent research: “Even more strikingly, the achievement gap between white students and those in underrepresented minority groups (blacks, Latinx, and Native Americans) was nearly...

Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck pioneered work that showed resilience and effort in learning were largely determined by one’s mindset. Dweck divided mindsets into two categories: a fixed mindset - the belief that intelligence is immutable and an inborn talent; and the growth mindset - the belief that the human mind...

Maker assignments provide opportunities for students to frame their inquiry through creative expression. One strength of maker assignments is they often outlive the length of a course because they have meaning and purpose to students. This is termed “a renewable assignment.” “Disposable assignments” only have value in the immediate course...

Technology both makes it easier to plagiarize and easier to detect plagiarism. And both plagiarism and cheating are increasingly commonplace and seen by many students as a necessity to stay competitive with active cheaters. That’s right. In other words, by this logic, one has to cheat, even if one doesn’t...

Thorsten Spehn, who teaches online International Relations and Comparative Politics classes in our department, uses open-book quizzes in place of midterm and final exams in his courses. He believes that this provides structure and accountability for learning in an online environment where “students can easily forget about the course and...