Getting Students to “Do the Readings” (Hint: Don’t Assign Readings)

Original article posted on The Teaching Professor here. A lot of professors assign readings as follows: students read a piece of text, respond to it in some way, and

Read More

Making Mental Health More “Visible” in Your Course

Six students failed my child development course this past semester. Out of 25.That’s right, almost one-quarter of them did not pass.I’m certainly not proud of it. In fact,

Read More

Teaching Online: What Do Students Wish You Knew? (2021 Edition)

If you follow my blog, you’ve heard of my series, What Do Students Wish You Knew? Each semester, I ask my students what they wished their professors would

Read More

A Low-Tech Document Camera for Teaching Online

When teaching online, do you ever need to write on the virtual chalkboard? Or show your hands and materials on a table? I do. Since I teach math

Read More

Teaching College Tip #6

Provide an optional final. This is a collection of questions pulled from the weekly quizzes. It your course is scored out of 1000 points, this final could be

Read More

Teaching College TIP #03: Let Students Choose the Breakout Room

When students are synchronously working on an assignment or task, give them a choice as to how they want to work. One way is to create different breakout

Read More

TEACHING COLLEGE TIP #07: Less Tests, More Interviews

Going forward, I’ll share some of my readers’ best tips for teaching online. They will be short and random (I won’t start at #1) . . . AND I

Read More

“Touching Your Students”: No, It’s Not What You Think

If you’re teaching online, you WILL lose students. Some will engage less. Others will disappear. Why? Many reasons, of course. But today, I’m focused on one: Because online,

Read More

Getting Students To Show Their Faces On Zoom (Part 2)

The big concern professors have about Zoom (or any web conference platform) is: Should we require students to turn on their webcam? Or Why do so many students

Read More

Should Students Show their Faces on Zoom?

Last week I conducted classes virtually and in real time on Zoom, Google Hangouts, and Collaborate Ultra (Blackboard’s videoconferencing feature). And the whole time all I could focus

Read More