Active Learning – Teaching Hub

Teach Your Students Active Reading: Assign Texts in Blackboard with Hypothesis

December 6, 2021

by Lauren Horn Griffin, Department of Religious Studies Your Blackboard course menu includes Hypothesis on your “build content” menu. Hypothesis works with files you add to your course. It also works with any website. Hypothesis is a teaching tool that allows you to have your students “show” how they are reading your course content. With the Hypothesis tool, anyone in the course may add annotations with text, images, websites, and LaTeX equations. Anyone in the course can reply to those […]

Webcameras that Facilitate Better Conversations Virtual Guests: Perhaps “OWL” Being See You…??

November 8, 2021

by Nathan Loewen, Department of Religious Studies What is this? Have you tried using a basic computer web camera to capture conversations in a classroom? Prof. Loewen has experimented with dozens of methods since 2009. With the arrival of the REL digital lab at UA’s Department of Religious Studies in 2021, things have changed. Among the digital tools being collected by Prof. Jeri Wieringa is the OWL Pro, which is a 360-degree camera, mic, and speaker combined into one device. […]

Teaching Graduate Students: The Public Value of Their Work

October 4, 2019

by John Giggie, Department of History In this faculty blog on graduate teaching, I would like to share a few observations on possible ways to help graduate students in American history think about the public value of their work. My hope is that as students broaden their identities as public intellectuals they will deepen their commitment to their craft and discipline. My ideas are based most recently on my experience working with graduate students to co-design and co-teach a new […]

Surprise! Experiential Learning Course Design Assists Academic Integrity

March 21, 2019

by Karen Hollingsworth Gardiner, College of Arts & Sciences I attended my first International Center for Academic Integrity (ICAI) conference in 2016. Fellow attendees repeatedly recommended James Lang’s Cheating Lessons (Harvard U P, 2013), which I found so eye-opening that the next year I applied for and became a Learning in Action Fellow. What’s the link? An explanation: Lang suggests that we “add one final element to our courses” to help students connect to our coursework in “authentic ways over […]

Rethinking How We Teach Pathophysiology: Bringing Games and Simulations into the Classroom

March 27, 2018

by Megan Lippe, Capstone College of Nursing Which sounds like a more exciting way to learn about the functions of the immune system: listening to an instructor lecture for three hours or playing a game of Risk: The Game of Strategic Conquest? I would imagine most individuals would prefer the board game option. That is the thinking behind a major course redesign currently underway for NUR305: Human Pathophysiology. As part of the first semester of the professional nursing coursework, Human […]

Marshmallow Launchers Spur Student Writing

February 8, 2018

Students firing marshmallow launchers on the Quad

by Donna Branyon, Department of English For the final project in EN 102 (freshman composition) and EN 319 (technical writing), we do versions of the marshmallow launcher project. Students are presented with an imaginary rhetorical situation: The UA Writing Center provides snacks for clients and consultants. They would like to be known as the most congenial department on campus, so they want to provide snacks as quickly as possible. Because the Writing Center is woefully understaffed, consultants can no longer […]

Increasing Student Participation

December 5, 2017

Teach students to collaborate before expecting success. Doing group work, peer review, and other collaborative activities without prior training can lead to confusion and dead time in class. For maximum success, teach collaboration skills before starting group projects. ONE IDEA: Introduce peer review workshops at the beginning of the semester using a Fish Bowl approach. Then ask students to critique the modeled peer review session and create a set of class rules for peer review. Use Quick Writes to fill […]

Overview of Flipped Learning

October 10, 2017

by Jessica Porter, Office of Educational Technology (eTech) Flipped learning is a blended learning model that reverses the typical order of content dispersal and acquisition. In a traditional, lecture-based class, the instructor delivers the basic material in class, and students practice new concepts on their own time. In the flipped model, students encounter new material at home, usually via reading and lecture videos, and then they use class time to discuss and apply what they have learned. During class, the […]

Overview of Active Learning

October 10, 2017

by Jessica Porter, Office of Educational Technology (eTech) Active learning requires students to participate in class rather than sitting and listening to lectures. Techniques include, but are not limited to, discussions, brief question-and-answer sessions, writing and reading assignments, hands-on activities, and peer instruction. In other words, active learning promotes a deeper, more engaging learning experience, and it establishes a much-needed feedback loop for students. Rationale According to recent studies, the average attention span of a typical student is between 10 […]

Class Provides Music Therapy to Local Community

September 1, 2017

student playing classical guitar as part of a musical therapy program

by Ellary Draper, School of Music As music therapy faculty, I am fortunate to teach multiple courses that include service learning opportunities. Service learning courses provide music therapy majors with opportunities to apply information from the classroom to clinical settings. These ‘real life experiences’ help students learn if music therapy is truly their desired career path, choose which clinical populations they prefer, and prepares students for their 6-month clinical internship. Service learning experiences are embedded in all four years of […]