“The best time to learn mathematics is when the student wants to learn rather than when the instructor wants to teach.” –Carol Twigg
On occasion, I get emails from my students at 2am. “Why are they up?” I ask myself. Then I look at the next email and it is from a faculty member, just a few minutes later. I guess this is just the expanded timescape of academia!
I have enjoyed having and look forward to continuing conversations about how we can begin to implement models of online learning to best serve our students in the current moment and into the future. I want to pause to give a few specific examples of how we can track what, how, and even when students are learning by increasing our use of technology. Using your learning management system you can:
- Track which students are accessing the digital course readings (and how long they spend with them).
- Have students take a reading quiz before class and then use class time to review the parts of the reading that students did not understand.
- Allow students to pose/post questions as they read to help you guide preparation of your lecture and class activities.
- Give access to recordings of class lectures for students to review on their own time (works with Panopto lecture capture, where you can also track how many students are viewing the lectures and when).
- By using digital assignment submissions, students can submit their papers when they are ready (no printer issues!) and you can automatically run a plagiarism check (in this age of cut and paste). This saves faculty time!
I offer these as a reminder that we have a host of tools available to facilitate better learning for our students and potentially better use of our always-limited time. I will close with another poignant phrase from Carol Twigg, who notes that a “single menu” of learning resources and activities is sure to fail some students:
“One of the strongest reasons for using information technology in teaching and learning is that it can radically increase the array of learning possibilities presented to each individual student.”
Technology is just one mechanism for expanding the learning possibilities. More to come.