Inspire Blog Tag: groups

The Group Project Paradox: Everyone Thinks They Did the Most Work

The Skill Students Resist, and Employers Expect I have a confession. When I was earning my M.S.Ed. online, I dreaded seeing “group project” on a syllabus. I juggled coursework with a full-time job, logged in at odd hours, and did most of the work on every collaborative assignment. My standards were higher, my contributions more substantial, my late nights longer. I carried the team. Here’s the awkward part: so did everyone else. Researchers have been studying this phenomenon since 1979, when psychologists Michael Ross and Fiore Sicoly found that group members consistently overestimate their own contributions (Ross & Sicoly, 1979). When you ask everyone on a team to estimate their percentage of the work, the numbers don’t add up to … The Group Project Paradox: Everyone Thinks They Did the Most Work
by · April 15, 2026

Let’s Get Active: Adding Active Learning in Your Online Course

By Susan Fein, Instructional Designer, susan.fein@oregonstate.edu In my role as an instructional designer, the faculty I work with are often looking for ways to increase student engagement and add a “wow” factor to their online course. One way to do that is to add or increase active learning practices. Active learning requires students to do something and think about what they are doing, rather than simply listening, as with a passive-learning lecture (Bonwell & Eison, 1991). Active learning brings positive and lasting outcomes to students, including better retention and grasp of concepts, and is particularly evident when students work together to develop solutions (Chickering & Gamson, 1987). Tackling Discussions In 2019, I worked with an instructor developing a biochemistry/biophysics course … Let’s Get Active: Adding Active Learning in Your Online Course
by · March 1, 2021

Canvas Resources and Guides

With the migration to Canvas comes many new features and methods for facilitating your course. The Canvas Guides provide a lot of information, but you may be wondering, where do I even start? Here at Ecampus, we’ve put together a few guides to help you become familiar with some of the tools in Canvas. First, if you’re wondering, “I did this in Blackboard, but I can’t find it in Canvas; how do I…?”, we’ve created a few design options for that. These design options explore how to adapt features that you’ve used in Blackboard to the new Canvas environment. Design Options – Adaptive Release Design Options – Blogs Design Options – Discussion Boards Design Options – Folders and Items Design Options … Canvas Resources and Guides
by · February 10, 2015