Reading Time: 3 minutesI have always been a little skeptical of online courses. I have never taken an online course and have never taught one either. But as I’ve seen them grow in popularity, especially among dual enrollment and homeschool students, I started to reconsider: maybe they do have an important role to play in the higher education ecosystem? I decided to suspend judgement and spend 3 days with the Center for Teaching and Learning in early January to learn more about online learning and how one of my favorite courses to teach, CY-1000 Introduction to Cybersecurity, could be taught online. By the end of those 3 days my perspective…
-
-
Transform Your Teaching: Servant Teaching with Dr. Quentin Schultze, Part 3
Reading Time: < 1 minuteIn this episode, Dr. Rob McDole and Jared Pyles conclude their interview with Dr. Quentin Schultze. Dr. Schultze—who has written several books, including one on servant teaching—talks about recording yourself teaching. Check out this episode to hear their conversation about how those recordings will benefit both you and your students. Podcast links Show notes There is always room for improvement in our teaching. Being reflective about how we teach is an excellent way of finding areas for improving our instruction. Recording—video, audio, or both—our teaching can be an opportunity to reflect on our teaching and make adjustments. You’ll usually see the major flaws right away, but…
-
Transform Your Teaching: Servant Teaching with Dr. Quentin Schultze, Part 2
Reading Time: 2 minutesIn this episode, Dr. Rob McDole and Jared Pyles continue their interview with Dr. Quentin Schultze. Dr. Schultze—who has written several books, including one on servant teaching—talks about cheating and how to discourage cheating. They also touch on the topic of using ChatGPT effectively in a course. Check out the episode to hear their conversation about the relationship between respect and cheating. Podcast links Show notes Many students will cheat without realizing that they are cheating. They could be citing sources incorrectly or asking a student about a test they just took. Other students will cheat intentionally, doing things like acquiring completed assignments. The truth is that…
-
Canvas Updates: Rich Content Editor
Reading Time: 1 minuteIt’s been a bit since we last wrote about Canvas updates, but some cool things have been happening. Canvas is always working on tweaking or adding things (you can keep up with them in the Canvas Release Notes!), but today we’re focusing on what’s changed in the Rich Content Editor (RCE) over the past few months. Access to detailed word/character count statistics The RCE displays word count at the bottom of the editor, but it’s expanded that functionality a bit. Now when you click on that word count, Canvas will pop a window and show you detailed word and character count. Dragging-and-dropping/pasting of content Previously, to add…
-
Transform Your Teaching: Servant Teaching with Dr. Quentin Schultze, Part 1
Reading Time: < 1 minuteIn this episode of “Transform Your Teaching,” Rob and Jared welcome Dr. Quentin Schultze into their continuing conversation on servant teaching. Dr. Schultze—who has written several books, including one on servant teaching—talks about potential obstacles to being a servant teacher and provides practical solutions for overcoming those obstacles. Check out the episode to hear their conversation about how knowing our students will make us more effective servant teachers. Podcast links Show notes Students have a life outside of being a student. So, how can we see our students as a “whole person”? How can we empathize with our students? Knowing our students will make us more…
-
Transform Your Teaching: The Philosophy of Servant Teaching
Reading Time: < 1 minuteIn this week’s episode of “Transform Your Teaching,” Rob and Jared introduce a series on servant teaching with a discussion on the philosophy behind it as well as the biblical basis for being a servant teacher. Check out the episode to hear their conversation, including three practical ways to start with servant teaching. Podcast links Show Notes We define servant teaching as “empowering learners by removing barriers, building on their unique strengths, and providing opportunities to succeed.” Everyone has a philosophy of education that is born from their personal philosophy. Consider questions like: What’s real? What’s right, and how do we know it’s right? What do we…
-
Is Online Proctoring a Good Solution for Teaching and Learning?
Reading Time: 3 minutesHigher 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, 2021).…
-
Introducing the “Transform Your Teaching” Podcast
Reading Time: < 1 minuteWe are excited to announce the launch of a new resource hosted by the CTL – the “Transform Your Teaching” podcast. In this pilot episode, Rob and Jared introduce the purpose of “Transform Your Teaching” – a podcast where we’ll encourage you in your teaching as we discuss innovative teaching practices. They also discuss some of the themes that will be covered in future episodes, including our next series on Servant Teaching. Links for all major podcast platforms will continue to be added to this post as as they’re available. In the meantime, you can listen to the episode here. Podcast links Want to never…
-
ChatGPT: Issues in Teaching and Learning
Reading Time: 2 minutesStanding at my trusty stand-up desk, I again pondered the beginning of this post. Yearning to recapture the muse from my last blog post, I leveled up my music selection to Snarky Puppy’s Trinity and again directed my web browser to chat.openai.com. After acknowledging ChatGPT’s stability warning due to heavy usage, I asked my question: “what are the top three teaching and learning issues with ChatGPT?” ChatGPT provided the following: 1. Bias and ethical considerations: ChatGPT is trained on large amounts of text data from the internet and can reflect the biases in that data. This could potentially impact the accuracy and fairness of responses provided by…
-
ChatGPT: The New Frontier
Reading Time: 2 minutesSitting at my stand-up desk, I mused about the beginning of this post. Thwack! The idea came to me like a bug playing tag with my windshield on a South Dakota interstate in the middle of June. I would use ChatGPT, a freshly minted artificial intelligence (AI) chat robot. I asked Siri to play the theme from the movie Inception and carefully steered my browser to http://chat.openai.com. With Hans Zimmers’ electronic sound garden in the background, I placed my cursor in the chat box and typed, “Write a 300 word introduction to Servant Teaching.” ChatGPT began working on the query and produced, word-by-word, six paragraphs. I will…