Category Archives: Pedagogy

Classroom of engaged college students using laptops, with bold text overlay reading "Increase Students' Engagement Through Feedback."

Increase Students’ Engagement Through Feedback

As instructors, we know the importance of feedback and checking for students’ understanding of course material. However, we often rely on traditional methods of assessment, like essays and exams. These methods are effective but don’t always allow for timely and constructive feedback. Giving feedback to students in real time helps them identify areas for improvement, deepen their understanding of course material, and develop essential critical thinking skills. Below I’ve shared some strategies to solidify your students’ knowledge prior to a high-stakes assessment. Continue reading →

Beginning to Integrate a Framework for AI Literacy Into Existing Heuristics
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Beginning to Integrate a Framework for AI Literacy Into Existing Heuristics

Within education, we are likely familiar with the many cognitive models and heuristics used to depict learning stages or provide frameworks for approaching the art and science of teaching. Bloom’s Taxonomy, Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development, Vygotsky’s Zones of Proximal Development, and many other models and theories provide conceptualizations of individual steps, thoughts, stages, or actions to be taken in the internalization and mastery of concepts in education, both for students and instructors. It seems a natural progression then that a similar framework would begin to develop in the age of artificial intelligence that helps instructors and students alike understand the stages of development or work to be done in understanding, testing, and applying AI workflows to our current states of learning and teaching. Continue reading →

Teaching and Learning Through Tabletop Games

Teaching and Learning Through Tabletop Games

As someone deeply rooted in the intersection of game design and pedagogy, I’m always on the lookout for ways to engage students through games and play. “Tabletop game” can mean a lot of things, but at the most basic they’re exactly what they sound like– games you play on a table. The most common examples of tabletop games are poker games and tabletop roleplaying games (TTRPGs) like Dungeons & Dragons. If you also want to play other games like mahjong, then you may check out mahjong slot here. Whether they’re used to build social familiarity, develop communication skills, enhance critical thinking, or simply break traditional lectures’ monotony, tabletop games have carved out a niche as powerful educational tools. Continue reading →

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An OLA’s Guide to Class Engagement Over Zoom

Foreword

Today’s blog post is brought to you by representatives from our team of Online Learning Ambassadors (OLAs). In 2020, like countless other institutions, DePaul University moved classes online in response to the growing COVID-19 pandemic. To help instructors unfamiliar or uncomfortable with the transition to Zoom, the Center for Teaching and Learning created a new team of student employees designed to help support students and instructors. Although we’ve returned to campus now, some of the new online modalities remain, so the need and appreciation for the OLAs remains as well.
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Bridging the Gap: Cultivating Soft Skills in Students for Lifelong Success 

In my interactions with faculty, a recurring concern emerges: the challenge of fostering essential academic skills in students. These skills encompass, among others, timely submission of assignments and effective communication. Often referred to as soft skills, they form the cornerstone of both academic and future professional success.    Continue reading →

Small Steps, Big Impact: Micro Experiments in Teaching
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Small Steps, Big Impact: Micro Experiments in Teaching

Our students are changing…and so should our teaching

I think we are all finding our long-held assumptions about how to create an assessment with safeguards against cheating, “make” students do the weekly readings, and engage students either online or in-person are increasingly proving to disappoint.  Our students are changing and evolving. Jenny Darroch’s Inside Higher Ed “Students Are Less Engaged; Stop Blaming COVID”, asks us to reframe college students as “knowledge workers.”  Peter Drucker first coined the term “knowledge work” in 1959.  He identified six factors that motivate “knowledge workers” to be productive, including a sense of autonomy, opportunities for continuous learning, and an emphasis on quality of work vs quantity.  We need to adapt our teaching and learning strategies, but how do we know what is going to work?   Continue reading →

Turning Deadlines From Enemies to Energizers
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Turning Deadlines From Enemies Into Energizers

In a recent Chronicle of Higher Education piece, James M. Lang and Kristi Rudenga discuss combining intrinsic motivation strategies with extrinsic motivators that have come under scrutiny, like deadlines, grades, and punitive course policies. 

These recommendations speak to the moment many educators find themselves in: We’re no longer in the acute phase of the pandemic, where instructors and students are doing the best they can amidst historically challenging circumstances that necessitated changes to many educational norms. Now, we’re grappling with a gray area that’s just as challenging, as we try to decide which educational norms need to be reinstated and which “pandemic lessons” should be integrated into our practice moving forward.

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A Meditation on AI and the Faculty Member

Once in a while, something new appears that monumentally changes the way we as a society do things. It is met with a mixture of fascination and panic, as some wholeheartedly embrace it, while others see the end times coming. 

For many years, we have seen warnings about artificial intelligence: what could happen if it went wrong somehow? What if the machines started to replace us or took control? What about our jobs, our careers, our lives? 

That question is being answered, as of last November. Sometimes AI is used for good and sometimes not. But there is no question—it’s here to stay. Continue reading →

Revamping Office Hours

I have a hard time getting students to come to my office hours. When I do have one-on-one conversations with students outside of class, they almost always feel like a breakthrough of some sort, especially when meeting with my online students that I rarely chat with synchronously. As I start to wrap up this quarter at DePaul and make my inevitable list of all the things I want to do differently next quarter, I’m looking for ways to see more students during my office hours. 

I’m not the only one trying to figure this out. Derek Bruff and Beckie Supiano reference the same study led by Jeremy L. Hsu at Chapman University. In Spring 2021, Hsu and his team surveyed 500+ STEM students and 28 instructors to figure out what they think about office hours. Students and instructors both identified “Ask questions or review material, including going more in depth into related concepts” as the top reason to use office hours. 

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