Curriculum, Assessment & Teaching Transformation Blog

Embark on a transformative journey with Dr. Jeffrey Kohler as we tackle the mid-semester crescendo of higher education. Our enlightening discussion promises to arm you with the strategies you need to navigate midterm assessments while keeping your students engaged and on track.

As the close of the academic year arrives and students complete their coursework, we turn our attention to the importance of end-of-semester evaluation. Course evaluations often carry misconceptions that can influence both teaching and administrative practices. In this blog post, we unravel several prevalent myths about course evaluations, providing insights that can help instructors better understand and utilize this feedback mechanism effectively.

Story is one of those elements encountered around every corner, embedded into our lives so deeply that we may not always notice it. It powers every successful advertising campaign and drives our purchasing habits, inspires dinner table conversation as well as the subsequent family arguments, and designs the visuals that flood our sub-conscience as we close our eyes each night.

If 2020 has taught us anything, we’ve learned to be flexible, to roll with the punches and to realize that at any point in time, our lives can be upended. As teachers, we have found the move to teaching online has brought along with it many conundrums, from the more obvious concerns about having the right technology, stable internet connectivity, and scheduling to a range of issues that stem from simply not being together in the classroom.

A great conversation on the use (or overuse) of Discussion Boards emerged from CATT’s Design and Build Academy. The questions and concerns raised in class by the faculty ranged from how to effectively use Discussion Boards and over usage of Discussion Boards in online learning, to how to effectively manage Discussion Boards when they become overwhelming and do Discussion Boards really engage students. Below are some resources, tips and tricks to master the online staple, Discussion Boards.

A typical semester is grueling. An atypical semester during an ongoing pandemic is even more so. While I’ve appreciated the short commute to my “home office” and replacing the early morning coffeemaker conversations with family breakfasts, it’s exhausting being on hours of daily Zoom calls. Working in isolation is a daily challenge that we are all experiencing, especially our students.

In my previous blog post, I made my case for improving the quality of our online educational videos. I know you read it, and in fact have probably committed it verbatim to memory. So now that we’re in agreement that it is highly beneficial to take production values into account when producing our online videos, let’s get started.

Have you created a test, presentation, assignment or group assignment that you don’t want all your students to see? Do you want to manage or limit who gets access to some tasks? You can do that in UB Learns using the Adaptive Release tool.

As one of the Learning Designers at UB's Center for Educational Innovation, I have the great opportunity of teaching faculty course design and best practices. I often get asked by faculty when and how to consider using pre-recorded instructions for asynchronous delivery. I begin by stating that video by no means can replace you as the instructor, nor should it in my opinion. I advise that you use video sparingly. However, videos can be made quite effectively when some basic rules are followed.

Today’s traditional students do not remember when video production and distribution was reserved for skilled professionals. Those days are gone, and over the past two decades we have seen a proliferation of consumer video technologies that allow anyone with a cell phone or webcam to create and stream (broadcast) endless amounts of video content.

The good, bad and best practices... Student engagement has been at the forefront of many conversations as of late, but is not a new topic in higher education. With the onset of lockdowns across the board, remote teaching and some uncertainty of what academia will look like in the future, finding the right balance in student engagement is imperative.