Teaching and Learning at Vol State

Affordable educational resources for students take various forms. Faculty may link to library subscription resources or refer students to credible websites. Free is good, but copyright restrictions and licensing may limit their use. Using open access journals and books prevents the door from being closed in the future. Or for a wide-open door with no lock, consider open educational resources (OER). The concept of open is not new. The public domain , works that are not protected by intellectual property laws and are free to use without permission, is a familiar source to many.  Works enter the public domain in a variety of ways. A public domain work may initially come with a public domain license or it may be based on the age of the work. Open access (OA) is a publishing model for scholarly communications that removes financial, legal, and technical barriers to accessing research articles. According to the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition  (SPARC) “open...

Differentiated Instruction in an Online College Classroom Differentiated Instruction: Providing students opportunities to learn content using different resources, employing varied strategies, and/or allowing students to demonstrate their learning in different ways based on their individual learning needs and interests. --Natalie Milman, Differentiating Instruction in Online Environments Are we still thinking about differentiated instruction now that we're online? It's a core instructional principle that we all believe in, but in an overwhelming race to digital learning, it can easily be pushed to the side in a to-do-later-pile by even the very best and the brightest. How can we make an online learning environment engaging for our students while maintaining the integrity of the academic content and without further complicating the process? Creating an engaging course is as easy as focusing on the 3 main principles: Course Clarity, Student Communication, and Timely Student Feedba...

By Star Boe, Senior Instructional Design Specialist  Objectives can go by many names. Learning Objectives, Outcomes, Learning Outcomes, Student Learning Objectives (SLO), Student Learning Outcomes (also SLO) are just some of the terms you will hear. While some educators feel strongly about one term over another, I am going to just proceed with the generic term "objectives." Let me explain what I mean when I use the term objective. Dictionary.com defines objective as "something that one's efforts or actions are intended to attain or accomplish; purpose; goal; target." The connection to effort and intention go well with the expectations we have for students as they engage with our material. However, I don't like the connection that is drawn to "goal." Instructors often start with a goal. Goals are broad and often aspirational, such as:  Students will appreciate art from a wide variety of time periods, styles, and techniques. Students will acquire an ...

The year 2020 has been an extraordinary and challenging year, to say the least.  However, as educators teaching chemistry, a subject that requires problem-solving and critical thinking, we were abruptly forced to solve the problem of delivering course content for lecture and lab amid the pandemonium of a pandemic, COVID-19.  A year ago, neither of us would have thought it was possible to deliver an online version of chemistry that was equivalent to our on-ground course.  However, the silver lining of the pandemic was the innovation, collaboration, and modification as we agreed we will not do our students a disservice in the continuation of a quality education. March 2020, as we departed campus for our annual spring-break we never imagined what was to come; NO ONE CAN RETURN TO CAMPUS?  We had a week to get our courses ready to be completely online. But did online have to mean the traditional format that so many of our students refer to as “teaching themselves” (asynchronou...

It’s no big secret that you as a professor you are most likely passionate about the subject that you teach. That’s why you dedicated countless amounts of hours and money to your content area. However, despite how passionate you may be about your topic area, your students may not share your same enthusiasm. Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Marcus Lucas, II, and I teach Spanish. Although the need for being bilingual continues to grow in our nation, the desires of people to make that change have not grown. Each year I am presented with students rolling their eyes, attitudes, and trying to convince me why my course was irrelevant to their lives. I quickly learned that if students were going to learn my language then I must first speak theirs. My first step in speaking their language was to change the name of my course from a Spanish course to a money course. Throughout the year, I showed my students how to use what they were learning to increase their income. I noticed that the o...