Reading Time: 2 minutes Attending a conference was fun but also cognitively demanding. Rob McDole, Jared Pyles, and I attended three full-day sessions at the AECT annual convention in Orlando in October. Every morning after three sessions, I felt I was experiencing mental fatigue. Interestingly, one session I attended was a study conducted by Inan Fetching from Texas Tech University on how course workload and perceived course value would impact students’ mental fatigue. In Fetching’s study, he collected data from student surveys of over 500 online students who enrolled in undergraduate online courses. Among the participants, more than 60% were employed (32% were employed full-time and 30% were employed part-time). A…
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Is Online Proctoring a Good Solution for Teaching and Learning?
Reading Time: 3 minutes Higher education institutions have implemented many technologies in the past three years to support online and blended teaching and learning activities. Since exams are one of the main forms of assessment in higher education (Barrio, 2022), one of the challenges is to keep online exams valid and reliable. Kimmons and Veletsianos (2021) did a survey on 2,155 colleges and universities in the United States and Canada in November 2020. They found that nearly 63% of higher education institutions in the United States and Canada mentioned proctoring software on their websites, indicating they were likely using one of the proctoring services on the market (Kimmons & Veletsianos,…
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Adding Existing Outcomes to Your Canvas Rubrics
Reading Time: < 1 minute In the previous post Adding Existing Rubrics to Your Canvas Course, we’ve talked about finding an existing rubric and using the rubric in your assignment. Today, we’re talking about adding existing outcomes to an assignment rubric. Step 1: Add existing outcomes to your course Click the Outcomes link in the course navigation to open the Outcomes page. Click the “Find” button to open the Find Outcomes window. In the Find Outcomes window, choose Account Standards -> Cedarville University. Here, you will find the outcome folders provided by Cedarville such as Oral Communication and Written Communication. Click the outcome folder that you want to add to your…
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Servant Teaching: Listening and Learning
Reading Time: 2 minutes I was so grateful to have the opportunity to teach a face-to-face section of the ITM-2100 Database Management course this semester. When I was assigned to this class earlier this year, I thought that the pandemic would be gone by then. However, this was not the case. Thanks to Dr. John Delano, who designed the course to be hybrid and flexible so I could adjust the course for this semester quickly. But the challenge continued … This semester I had 24 students in the class. Students were from a variety of majors—accounting, economics, finance, IT management, etc. During the first couple of weeks, the class focused on the SQL query which is fundamental for data processing and management. I received many questions from the students and noticed two major problems: “Am…
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Best Practices for Online Quizzes
Reading Time: 2 minutes Moving from paper-and-pencil quizzes to online quizzes brings many benefits to students, instructors, and the institution. However, instructors may be concerned about offering online exams for fears of test security, especially for high-stakes quizzes. Some fear a scenario in which students are no longer using the information provided by the instructor to enhance their learning but rather online sources, such as Quizlet, to achieve the high marks they desire. An Inside Higher Education article (McKenzie, 2018) quoted a student’s tweet, “Today I graduated and I couldn’t have done it without God and Quizlet.” In this post, we will talk about some strategies that can be used…
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How to Write Learning Objectives
Reading Time: 2 minutes A learning objective is “a statement that tells what learners should be able to do when they have completed a segment of instruction” (Smith & Ragan, 2005, p. 96). A precise, concrete, and specific learning objective is valuable to the course designer, instructor, learners, and reviewers. In this post, we will focus on module-level or lesson-level learning objectives that are subordinate to the course level objectives. We will use the learning objectives generator to assist in the objective writing process, using the who+verb+goal+condition pattern. Who: Describe the Learner When you are working on module-level or lesson-level learning objectives, the target learner must be identified for the…