In Uncommon Sense Teaching: TEACHING ONLINE we’d like to help you to move toward fresh approaches to online teaching that build on the latest insights from scientific research. We’ll use insights from movie-making—not to mention from odd visual tricks in Barb’s kitchen—to see how students learn, both independently and together. We all know, for example, that social learning is valuable in helping students grapple with tough concepts as well as in making learning more fun. But if you understand what is happening in the brain during social learning, you can also understand why certain approaches commonly used in online learning, such as discussion forums, can sometimes pose a challenge. As you will see, we can use insights from neuroscience not only to motivate our students, but to help them change their very identity.
Uncommon Sense Teaching: Teaching Online
This course is part of Uncommon Sense Teaching Specialization
Instructors: Dr. Terrence Sejnowski
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There are 4 modules in this course
A major challenge in teaching—especially teaching online—is how to motivate your students. This week, we’ll introduce the concept of schemas—those frameworks in long-term memory that help form our very identities. As we’ll see, increasing our motivation can involve changing our identities—a process that good online teaching can spur. What is good online teaching? It’s teaching that avoids “checkbox” approaches that seem to satisfy all the requirements, but in reality, produce poor online learning experiences for students. There are many paths past these challenges—dive into the details with us in this week’s videos!
What's included
7 videos4 readings3 assignments1 discussion prompt
Habits form a surprisingly important role in our online teaching. This means we can learn of simple practices for good online teaching—yet ignore them when it comes time to actually implement them. But as we explore this week, there are ways around this challenge. We will also explore how slightly different camera settings and angles, lighting, and above all, sound quality, can have a surprisingly beneficial effect on our students. Finally, we’ll take a plunge into what movies can tell us about how to teach effectively online. As we will discover, theoretical techniques that can work well in traditional classrooms don’t necessarily transfer to the online world!
What's included
10 videos2 readings2 assignments1 peer review
Today’s online learners have no time to waste. How can you ensure that students learn as deeply and well as possible, in minimal time? That’s the focus of this week’s videos. We’ll dive into specific popular applications that can enhance students’ ability to retain the material—and also help you see at a glance how well your students are understanding what you are teaching while you are teaching. Our octopus and flocks of birds will also be at hand as metaphors that can help us understand, in surprising ways, how key concepts come together in the brain. As we’ll see, online teaching can give us a great platform to encapsulate key concepts by turning them into tight events that are easier to retrieve.
What's included
10 videos2 readings2 assignments
One of the great features of the online environment is that it allows you to use simple attentional tricks that are virtually impossible to do in real life. And your friendly moving image on the screen can provide for a social partnership that becomes very real—and very encouraging—for students. This can happen even when you have classes so large that you don’t have the ability to interact individually with your students. But, perhaps surprisingly, attention isn’t ALWAYS important—creativity thrives when attention wanders. There are specific tricks in the online environment to encourage this. Learning also thrives when students can interact with one another—not only because of the exchange of mental models and of schemas, but also due to interaction with familiar faces who share eye gaze. As you’ll see, this gives us important insights related to online discussion forums. Finally, we will learn how learning itself changes the brain in therapeutic, uplifting ways. This means online teaching can provide resilience for societies through good times and bad. All this and more in our final week of Teaching Online!
What's included
12 videos3 readings2 assignments1 peer review
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