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Category: Ideas and Resources

Is your IHE truly teaching-focused? It probably isn’t, and if you teach, you’ve seen the signs.

Posted in Academic Life, Higher Education, Ideas and Resources, and Trends and Change

In last week’s Chronicle Teaching Newsletter, reporter Beth McMurtrie offers a thoughtful reflection on the valuing, and devaluing, of teaching within higher education. Sparked by a conference put on by a high-profile national organization, her points echo ones I’ve heard,…

Revisiting the cognition-motivation connection: What the latest research says about engaging students in the work of learning

Posted in About Minds Online, Academic Life, Ideas and Resources, Student Success, and Trends and Change

I sometimes tell a story about my first solo book, Minds Online: Teaching Effectively with Technology, involving a crisis that hit about 2/3 of the way through writing it. I forget what topic I’d originally planned to cover in chapter…

Tending, befriending, and coping with upending: Takeaways from the first month of mass emergency remote education

Posted in Academic Life, Cognitive Psychology and Learning, Higher Education, Ideas and Resources, Technology, and Trends and Change

About a year ago, I experienced what we all do sooner or later in the course of our face-to-face teaching careers: something terrible and unexpected happened in class. In my case, a student collapsed and became unresponsive*.*The student was okay,…

Neuroscience in translation: Why use it or lose it is a bad idea

Posted in Cognitive Psychology and Learning, Higher Education, and Ideas and Resources

Is there any truism about cognitive capacity that is more familiar than “use it or lose it?” Of all the things we could talk about in applications of neuroscience, this is one that shows up surprisingly often, even in the…