Before class starts, send a welcome email to your students. Starting your course by emphasizing communication and community will help you and your students have a positive experience. Begin with a welcoming and personal note, telling students you are looking forward to meeting them, even virtually, and consider that your email can set the tone for the course. Here are some things you could include: What you enjoy about

How will higher education make the upcoming academic year work? One strategy is to offer new financial inducements to attract enrollment.  This is especially important for campuses concerned about losing students. Such inducements can take several forms.  One is as a discount*, price cut, rebate, or scholarship.  Another is to offer free classes or even semesters.  More creative options may appear. In this post I’d like to track some of

What a year is 2020. Today I’d like to share political forecasting story.  It links elections and the pandemic. It is also a good example of two futures tools, which are also pedagogical practices: gaming and scenarios. Recently a group of politicians, officials, and politically minded people organized by the Transition Integrity Project* played an interesting simulation game.  The idea was to role play politicians and officials during the November

Upgrade On Thursday 6th August we completed the latest Learning Space upgrade to v3.8.4 of Moodle. The new version makes some improvements to the appearance of Forums, and adds the ability to mark Forums. New Group choice Plugin Following requests from academic staff, we have added an activity plugin which allows students to self-select themselves into groups. Grouping students has a range of applications, from filtering content to splitting

How will colleges and universities respond to on-campus infections this fall? Previously I have posited three scenarios that describe how academic institutions might proceed during the COVID-19 pandemic.  One of them, Toggle Term, outlines a semester wherein campuses switch from some kind of face-to-face operations to wholly online instruction, echoing the March 2020 switch to remote education. What would have to happen for an administration to decide to throw the

Digital Bodies Being outside is clearly safer than standing in a crowded bar with your friends during a global pandemic, but running outdoors brings its own set of challenges. Ghost Pacer, an AR running app on Kickstarter, offers ... Read more An AR Running App and Glasses for a COVID-19 World This article An AR Running App and Glasses for a COVID-19 World first appeared on Digital Bodies

Actually, make those plural: billions, holes... In my last post I began to frame a multi-part discussion about the state of play of #edtech and how response to the global pandemic will result in a significant acceleration of what has been a relatively long and drawn out adoption of technology-enabled teaching and learning. And, while it seems an obvious statement – in light of the extraordinary increase in, say, use

By Tom Szigethy I often think of a certain level of stress and anxiety as a given and a constant, but the reality is that it can fluctuate up or down at any moment of the day. We teach people to avoid stress and often leave out the physical practices that can reduce it. The classroom (virtual and physical) can add to stress due to a certain level of

I’ve been wanting to write this for a while now but just haven’t had time. I woke up at 4:30 this morning and couldn’t get these ideas out of my head again. Now they’re out. Maybe I’ll come back later and give them a fuller – and more awake – treatment. Dashboards in educational contexts are usually comprised of visualizations of educational data. For example, dashboards inside the LMS are

How will higher education change in response to this extraordinary year? I’ve been writing and presenting on this topic for a while, and now am delighted to announce a new project addressing it.  I’ve been working on it this summer, alongside a great team. Higher Education’s Big Rethink is a Georgetown University graduate class about how academia is experiencing two huge 2020 developments: the COVID-19 pandemic and the national mobilization