Digital Article Archive

Every month we will be updating our new digital library with new articles covering the hottest topics in education including remote teaching, student support, anti-racist education, faculty support, and more.

September 2020 News

Remote Teaching in the News

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This month, we have found several articles about remote teaching that we would like to highlight. We highly recommend looking through the articles below:

Virtual Learning Will Be Better This Fall. Right?: Whether they like it or not — most of them don’t, and some of them are still insisting it’s not the case — I’m convinced that the vast majority of American colleges and universities are headed toward a mostly or entirely virtual fall. Those that don’t start out that way will, as they did in the spring, have to pivot. COVID-19 will almost certainly demand it.
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The Secret Weapon of Good Online Teaching: Discussion Forums: Author Flower Darby writes: “People often ask me to name my favorite online teaching tool. My answer is always the same: Hands down, it’s online discussion forums. As a veteran online teacher, I view discussion forums as the meat and potatoes of my online courses. They are where my teaching happens — where I interact with students, guide their learning, and get to know them as people. The joy I’ve come to find in online teaching stems directly from those interactions. Covid-19 has all of us preparing for a fall semester unlike any we’ve ever seen.”
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Student Satisfaction and Learning Outcomes in Asynchronous Online Lecture Videos: Abstract: “Our study identified online lecture video styles that improved student engagement and satisfaction, while maintaining high learning outcomes in online education. We presented different lecture video styles with standardized material to students and then measured learning outcomes and satisfaction with a survey and summative assessment. We created an iterative qualitative coding scheme, “coding online asynchronous lectures” (COAL), to analyze open-ended student survey responses. Our results reveal that multimedia learning can be satisfying and effective. Students have strong preferences for certain video styles despite their equal learning outcomes, with the Learning Glass style receiving the highest satisfaction ratings…”
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Options for Online Undergraduate Courses in Biology: Abstract: “I aimed to document the online undergraduate course supply in biology to evaluate how well biology educators are serving the diverse and growing population of online students. I documented online biology course offerings in the 2015–2016 academic year at 96 American colleges and universities. I quantified differences in variety, extent, and availability of courses offered by different kinds of academic institutions and characterized 149 online biology courses offered. Although there was no relationship between an institution’s enrollment size and any measure of its online biology offerings, I found significantly more online biology course options at 2-year public compared with 4-year public and 4-year private schools…..”

Your Students Will Be Different This Fall

Your Students Will Be Different This Fall

As we begin what will surely be the strangest fall semester in memory, I’ve been thinking about what faculty members can expect when we return to the classroom. I don’t mean whether we’ll be teaching online or in person, but whether the central relationship between instructor and student will be different.

I think it will — and that difference will have everything to do with how our students now view authority after this long, strange, tortuous American summer.

Call it “The Summer of Not My Problem.” The past few months have seen a rapid acceleration of a truly worrying phenomenon: American “leaders” at the federal, state, and local levels washing their hands of responsibility and passing the buck — whether for Covid-19, for racial equity, for violent treatment of peaceful protesters. Closer to home, college administrators — instead of seizing the opportunity this summer to protect students and provide effective online pedagogy — spent countless hours (not to mention dollars) devising strategies for a return to campus that often seemed more like “hygiene theater” meant to raise tuition revenue than anything that would keep students safe.

Weeding Out Inequity in Undergraduate Chemistry Classes

Weeding Out Inequity in Undergraduate Chemistry Classes | Chemical and Engineering News

No academic catalog is going to define an undergraduate class as a “weed-out” or “gatekeeper” course. But these courses can come to define individual career paths, pushing some students out of STEM fields entirely.

The weed-out effect impacts students of all backgrounds, but students from marginalized groups, especially Black and Latinx, are particularly hard hit, and experts say these weed-out courses are part of the systemic racism underpinning the diversity challenges that chemistry and the sciences overall face. In addition, these same students may struggle to develop a sense of belonging in STEM (C&EN, July 20, 2020, page 26).

In an effort to characterize weed-out courses, researchers at the John N. Gardner Institute for Excellence in Undergraduate Education came up with a standard definition of such courses (New Dir. Higher Educ. 2017, DOI: 10.1002/he.20257). They are high-enrollment foundation classes usually taught in a lecture-based format. These classes have high DFW rates, meaning that many students in these classes receive Ds or Fs, often because of grade curving, or withdraw from the course. In the sciences, these classes are required for majors, often in departments other than the one offering the course. Researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder used the same definition for their study Talking about Leaving Revisited, a 2019 update of a study originally published in 1997 (2019, DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-25304-2_7).

September 2020 News

August 2020 News

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