Teaching, Assessment, and Pedagogy for Faculty: Teaching that Engages Students

Engaged students become more active learners. Help set learners up for success by teaching in a more interactive and immersive way. In this course, professor and instructional designer Karl Kapp explores teaching strategies that engage learners and make learning stick—whether you're teaching face-to-face or in an online classroom setting. Explore different lesson formats and activities that increase cognitive engagement, knowledge retention, and collaboration. Dr. Kapp explores both time-tested and cutting-edge tools, including index cards and charts and digital tools such as wikis and blogs.

Active learning in the classroom can be quicker involve, simple or complex. At one end of the spectrum you can use an activity or two five to 10 minutes max to break up a long lecture. Near the middle of the spectrum you can alternate between mini-lectures and activities around 20 to 30 minutes long. At the other end of the spectrum, you might have a flipped classroom environment where students have reviewed content before arriving and then engage in activities for most of the class period. That might be 45 minutes or more, depending on how much time there is. In all cases, the goal is to use your time with the students differently, balancing their first exposure to new concepts with activities designed to help them make sense of those concepts.

Provides several successful practices for beginning a case discussion. How do you begin the discussion? What questions can you ask to engage students in the discussion? How do you bridge from the previous class? What measures of success do you use in your case discussion?

Asks instructors to think about the questions they use to begin a class and the questions they use to engage all students in the case discussion. A distinction is made between open and closed questions, and how to rephrase questions to allow more active debates.

Provides strategies for ending a class discussion and addresses some key questions: Who should do the wrap-up? When should you begin the wrap-up? How do you handle an incomplete wrap-up? How do you bridge to the next class?

Blended learning is all about the students: combining instruction with digital resources to help increase student achievement and engagement. In this course, Chris Mattia explores the various aspects of blended learning, and provides guidelines to create a blended classroom that meets students' diverse learning needs. The techniques rely on technologies such as Google Apps, Android and iOS devices, video, learning management systems (LMSs), and open-source tools such as WordPress to promote sharing and collaboration.