Inspire Blog Author: viegerr

Take the sting out of grading

“…expertise is learned from prolonged experience with good feedback on mistakes.” – Daniel Kahneman Students are eager to receive meaningful feedback quickly. With hopes of improving their class performance, timely and substantive feedback is essential to helping students get on track before it is too late. Yet, knowing this doesn’t change why feedback and grading sometimes gets put off, despite our best intentions – it can appear daunting and time consuming. 8 ideas on how to take the sting out of providing feedback: Self-checks Not all feedback requires your intervention or even a grade. Can you set-up an activity where students can check their understanding and get immediate feedback? A simple solution is to create a short practice activity (e.g. … Take the sting out of grading
by · October 18, 2018

Sign on the Virtual Line: Group Contracts as a Tool to Promote Accountability

If you’d like to adopt group work in your online course, but want to ensure accountability among your students, consider asking your students to create a group contract to guide their work. Beginning online group work with a mutually agreed upon contract creates a blueprint for the project, and it facilitates the process of students establishing norms and expectations within their group. These norms help to remove the instructor as the sole authority figure, and instead give the team the power to hold one another accountable, according to the guidelines they agree upon, rather than just personal opinions or perceptions. One way to help your students begin to think about what to include in their group contract is to initiate … Sign on the Virtual Line: Group Contracts as a Tool to Promote Accountability
by · November 15, 2016

Assignment Tool Kit: Student ePortfolios

If you’re searching for an engaging, authentic, and personalized way to assess your students’ learning, consider developing an ePortfolio assignment for your online course. The benefit of ePortfolios, or digital collections of student learning artifacts, is twofold: you can formatively assess your students’ learning over time, and you can help your students craft a personalized, customizable end product that serves as both a networking tool and a professional presentation of their skills and abilities to showcase to future employers in a more humanized way than a standard resume. There are multiple approaches to structuring an ePortfolio assignment. One method is to ask your students to gradually add to their ePortfolios each week. This allows you to assess your students’ work over … Assignment Tool Kit: Student ePortfolios
by · December 30, 2015