Tuesday, March 12, 2013

Tip Sheets

As we near the end of the quarter and students are busy working on final papers and projects, I thought now would be a great time to share with you a tip that Jennifer Stevens uses in her classes.

According to Jennifer, she provides "tip sheets for challenging assignments.  This helps students know what I'm looking for and allows me to give them examples that might be useful.  Instead of just telling them to incorporate the information from the text, I'll provide an example of how to do that (with proper citation, of course).  These sheets allow me to elaborate on the rubrics for the assignments with specific examples.  I've found it useful for APA citation issues as well."

I think this is a fabulous approach that Jennifer uses and I encourage you to carve out 20 minutes of your time this week to create a "tip sheet" for the final paper, project, or even exam that may be in your class.  Sharing this with your students this week will allow them to use that tip sheet to compare their final work to before final submission.  I think you'll find positive results and improved submissions overall.

Give it a try and let me know how it goes!

Thanks,
Heather Thomton-Stockman
Online Instructional Specialist

Monday, March 4, 2013

Discussions & Resources

Are you looking for ways to re-energize your unit discussions, why not try something that Shelly Baker, one of our adjunct instructors, has had great success with in her classes...implement current articles or videos relating to the unit and topic into the discussion itself.  By posting a thread of your own where you share a video link with a question or a current article that offers a different perspective on the topic at hand, for example, you are helping students to see and begin looking for these course connections outside of the class itself.  This knowledge extension helps our students see their education in a larger and more practical fashion.  In fact, Shelly mentioned that many of her students have begun to share and post videos or articles of their own. 

I have done this in my own classes and have great successes with it too.  In fact, in one of my sections this quarter alone, almost every single unit has a post from a student sharing a resource or link for the whole class to learn from - and I should add this is not a requirement I have in place, nor is it the same student that has posted these resources/links each time.  Rather, simply through starting it myself at the beginning of the quarter, students followed suit.

I encourage you to give it a try yourself and let me know what kind of results you see in your discussions.

Thanks,
Heather Thomton-Stockman
Online Instructional Specialist