From the category archives:

Pedagogy

Peer mentoring: Strengthening student learning

July 28, 2009

Bryanne Young has written a tip sheet on curricular peer mentoring, a program that “enables students to work together to delve deeper and more analytically into course content”. Peer mentors are not TAs, but students who can help guide their peers through the learning process. Some of the benefits of peer mentoring are:

Deeper student learning
Facilitating [...]

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Some guidelines for implementing active learning strategies

May 19, 2009

After sitting through a couple of workshops that used active learning strategies with varying success, I drafted the following guidelines for facilitators. Feel free to add your own to this list:

Icebreaker activities are a great way to build community and allow students to get to know one another before implementing other active learning strategies.
[...]

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Teach large classes

April 23, 2009

Large enrollment classes have always been a challenge for instructors who try to implement active teaching and learning strategies and activities. Lectures, often contrasted to active learning, appear to dominate large size classrooms today. From the conversations that I had with some instructors, I have the impression that a lot of instructors would try a [...]

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Links from George Siemens’ Presentation

March 11, 2009

George Siemens (Associate Director of the University of Manitoba Learning Technologies Centre) was on campus on March 11 to give a presentation at the Teaching & Learning Centre, on “The Social Technology Revolution – Tensions and Solutions”. He talked about a pretty wide range of things, and I wanted to capture some of the links [...]

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How to get students to find and read 94 articles before the next class

February 2, 2009

Professor Michael Wesch, of Kansas State University, recently described how his students distributed the tasks of finding and reviewing articles, and then sharing their summaries so that in effect, all students were aware of the content of all articles summarized.
The key:
All summaries were due 36 hours before the next class period, leaving those final 36 hours for [...]

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