Ask a Tech Teacher

APRIL 28, 2025

This shift raises critical questions about the future of education: How will teachers adapt their roles? This shift raises questions about the efficacy and long-term viability of conventional education methods. As a result, your role involves creating a learning atmosphere that encourages questioning and exploration.

Hybrid Learning 128

Hybrid Learning Learning Styles Study Critical Thinking 128

Cult of Pedagogy

APRIL 27, 2025

rapid retrieval: During a lecture, stop every 10 minutes or so to ask a question about a topic you’ve covered. To make the tents more useful, students are then asked to answer a retrieval question on the back of the paper and turn it in at the end of class. “Present students with a multiple choice question.”

Multiple Choice Questions 80

Multiple Choice Questions Teachers Writing Questions 80

Faculty Focus

MAY 15, 2025

This project started with a deceptively simple question: What arent our students telling us? I wanted to change thatnot just by asking better questions, but by building an open-access platform that would amplify student voices and inform actionable change. Not because they lacked courage, but because they didnt feel invited to speak.

Disabilities 53

Disabilities Course Design Students Lecturing 53

Cal Matters

JUNE 26, 2025

Why would students write anything themselves, instructors wondered, if a chatbot could do it for them? Brill-Wynkoop heard the same pitch back in the early 2000s: Instructors could catch a student turning in a peer’s paper from a previous semester with Turnitin. billion as of June 2025. I trust you.

Plagiarism 118

Plagiarism Assignments Academic Integrity Writing 118

Faculty Focus

JULY 15, 2025

A costly misconception is that pedagogical approaches in higher education must be lecture-based and teacher-led. The fundamental question becomes: How can educators plan for and deliver instructional content that is relatable and meaningful?

Assignments 60

Assignments Art Critical Thinking Motivation 60

Cal Matters

JUNE 25, 2025

Some questioned whether they even belonged on a college campus, said UC Riverside Dean of Students Christine Mata. A professor lectures students during class at Sacramento State University on Oct. One of her few in-person classes was a math course, but it was held in a large lecture hall and required students to wear masks. “I

Math 88

Math English Lecturing High School 88

Edsurge

MAY 25, 2020

What’s the Use of Lectures? Yet that discomfort also raises opportunities to question prevailing assumptions about how teaching and learning occurs. Let’s start with one of education’s most hallowed traditions: the lecture. In his 1971 book “ What’s the Use of Lectures? Many things did not translate well online.

Lecturing 206

Lecturing Questions Learning Attention 206

Edsurge

JANUARY 10, 2023

SAN MARCOS, Texas — Live lecture classes are back at most colleges after COVID-19 disruptions, but student engagement often hasn’t returned to normal. To see what teaching is like on campus these days, I visited Texas State University in October and sat in on three large lecture classes in different subjects.

Instructors 213

Instructors Lecturing Students Textbooks 213

Edsurge

JUNE 7, 2019

Dan Levy had long considered himself an equitable instructor in terms of calling on students to participate in class discussions. So in 2014, the senior lecturer in public policy at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government decided to test that assumption. Instructors can have biases toward picking particular students.

Lecturing 161

Lecturing Participation Instructors Beliefs 161

Edsurge

NOVEMBER 1, 2018

It’s a question that some higher education instructors have asked before, and one that two Penn State University educators sought to answer on Wednesday at this year’s EDUCAUSE conference in Denver. An instructor can type in a concept or idea, such as “industrial design,” into the tool his team built, called Eureka!,

Instructors 160

Instructors Intelligence Quizzes Textbooks 160

Edsurge

MARCH 19, 2020

That’s the view of Jesse Stommel, a digital learning fellow and senior lecturer at the University of Mary Washington. “I Except—striving for continuity may be a bit delusional right now. Or it may be an effort that betrays misplaced priorities. I don’t want there to be ‘continuity.’ I want my students to deal with their lives,” he says. “I

Grades 217

Grades Questions Instructors Motivation 217

Scholarly Teacher

NOVEMBER 13, 2024

At times, however, that stone may feel like a boulder, especially to research faculty who are used to delivering lectures and to whom the switch to activity-based learning may seem like a daunting and demanding venture into unfamiliar territory. 2023; Hsu & Goldsmith, 2021; Venus & Sharma, 2024). Two birds with one stone.

Lecturing 98

Lecturing Active Learning Activities STEM 98

Faculty Focus

FEBRUARY 2, 2025

So then, why do so many educators lecture and click through PowerPoints for 30-,40-, or even 60-minutes at a time with no breaks or learning activities? Reflecting on my experiences as a student, I know how tough it is to pay attention during these longer lectures and wish instructors had a different way to deliver them.

Lecturing 104

Lecturing Attention Students Discussions 104

Edsurge

JANUARY 11, 2021

Yet as instructors in the new world of online education, we have access to ever-increasing amounts of data—from recorded lecture videos, electronically submitted homework, discussion forums, and online quizzes and assessments—that may give us insights into individual student learning.

Teaching 213

Teaching Instructors Quizzes Intelligence 213

Edsurge

JANUARY 14, 2021

As the pandemic has forced more teaching online, plenty of instructors have been trying to figure out the best way to keep students’ attention and interest with lecture videos or Zoom sessions. It’s almost like this symphony that the instructor is the heart of.” That’s not to say that the transparent whiteboard is ineffective.

Instructors 218

Instructors Lecturing Teachers Attention 218

eSchool News

MAY 26, 2016

A growing number of today’s instructors also fall into this group. Turn lectures into a 2-way conversation. Students who are used to highly interactive communication often have difficulty adjusting to traditional classroom lectures, where they are expected to silently take notes while the instructor speaks.

Gamification 198

Gamification Lecturing Instructors Communication 198

Faculty Focus

FEBRUARY 2, 2025

So then, why do so many educators lecture and click through PowerPoints for 30-,40-, or even 60-minutes at a time with no breaks or learning activities? Reflecting on my experiences as a student, I know how tough it is to pay attention during these longer lectures and wish instructors had a different way to deliver them.

Lecturing 96

Lecturing Attention Students Discussions 96

Edsurge

JULY 27, 2023

But pulling off these “assignment makeovers,” as some instructors are calling them, turns out to be challenging, and what works differs significantly depending on the subject matter and type of assignment. Some of those instructors are using tools that attempt to detect text written by bots, such as GPTZero and a new tool by Turnitin.

Instructors 148

Instructors Assignments Writing History 148

Edsurge

APRIL 22, 2020

Option 1: Paper-based teaching Point a camera at a piece of paper, write on it and lecture. And here’s what your student will see: Option 2: Whiteboard or easel teaching Point a camera at yourself while lecturing in front of a whiteboard or easel+paper pad. Schedule lectures at the assigned time slot for the class 3.

Teaching 210

Teaching Lecturing Instructors Disabilities 210

Edsurge

FEBRUARY 22, 2024

After all, in-person was seen as the gold standard, and the question was whether that could be faithfully reproduced online. And now that campuses are back from pandemic restrictions, many instructors are trying to incorporate those remote practices into their in-person teaching.

Teaching 218

Teaching Lecturing Blended Courses Instructors 218

Faculty Focus

MAY 11, 2025

As the capacity of AI grows to complete increasingly complex tasks, we (as college instructors) may wonder what we can offer our students in the age of AI. Why College Instructors Matter: A Student’s Perspective I had a conversation with one of my students recently about this exact question. Schoeder, 2024).

Instructors 113

Instructors Motivation Critical Thinking Students 113

Edsurge

MARCH 11, 2020

First, the tips: The Simplest Way to Go Online is to Shift to a Video Conference Platform Stachowiak says that just lecturing to a webcam instead of an in-person class isn’t the best way to teach online, but it is the easiest way to switch. Or read the highlights here, edited and condensed for clarity and readability.

Instructors 206

Instructors Teaching Multiple Choice Questions Ethics 206

Edsurge

MARCH 18, 2022

In the pandemic many higher ed faculty, forced onto Zoom and other videoconferencing platforms, have continued teaching online just as they always did face to face, delivering lectures over streaming video as they did in person. In fact, many college instructors have been downright grumpy about having been thrown into a new teaching format.

Teaching 182

Teaching Lecturing Instructors Learning 182

Edsurge

OCTOBER 22, 2020

To stave off this potential defection, how can we instructors promote virtual community? One of the most empirically supported best practices of online education is for the instructor to “be present.” In an online-only world, it’s imperative for students to see you as a human being, not merely as an instructor.

Instructors 210

Instructors Lecturing Course Evaluations Feedback 210

Edsurge

FEBRUARY 16, 2023

Since the pandemic, more instructors at schools and colleges appear to have embraced “flipped learning ,” the approach of asking students to watch lecture videos before class so that class time can be used for active learning. Finally, instructors assess the student work and give feedback. “I

Lecturing 213

Lecturing Learning Instructors Failure 213

eSchool News

JULY 21, 2016

Flipping your class by having students watch lecture videos for their homework can lead to richer discussions about the content, but only if students come to class prepared. It also makes sure teachers are prepared to address students’ key questions and areas of confusion—without creating more work for the instructor.

Lecturing 189

Lecturing Textbooks Instructors Discussions 189

Edsurge

APRIL 8, 2020

As professors and K-12 teachers adjust to the sudden move to online teaching, one question keeps coming up: How much of class time should be done live—known in education parlance as “synchronous” teaching—and how much should be done so that students can do the work at their convenience—or “asynchronous” teaching.

Teaching 218

Teaching Instructors Distance Learning Lecturing 218

Edsurge

OCTOBER 27, 2020

That question is the topic of a new book out this month by James Lang, called “ Distracted: Why Students Can’t Focus and What You Can Do About It. One of the things that I talk about in the book is the presence of the instructor, and how felt that presence is in the actual space of a classroom. So what are educators to do?

Instructors 218

Instructors Attention Education Lecturing 218

Faculty Focus

JUNE 18, 2023

In a face-to-face class, students see the instructor and other students and, even if not interacting with them directly, know they are not alone. But asynchronous courses, and especially asynchronous independent study courses, present a different scenario with challenges for both instructors and students. Who is my instructor?”

Instructors 105

Instructors Syllabus Assignments Feedback 105

Edsurge

APRIL 27, 2023

The tech itself raises a host of challenging questions. He points to research that shows that some students learn better from male instructors, while others learn better from female ones. He says initial results show that students responded more positively to computer-generated instructors that read as female.

Lecturing 188

Lecturing Instructors English Textbooks 188

Edsurge

NOVEMBER 19, 2021

The most controversial new tech tool for colleges since the start of the pandemic is automated proctoring, which aims to detect cheating on online exams by using algorithms that watch students via their webcam and look for suspicious patterns of behavior—often sending clips of questionable moments to professors for later review.

Exams 188

Exams Lecturing Instructors Academic Integrity 188

Edsurge

JUNE 25, 2020

There are still many unanswered questions about what that might look like in practice, as colleges try to balance safety through social distancing while making teaching and other campuses experiences meaningful and effective. These were the questions tackled this week during a live online discussion, part of our monthly EdSurge Live series.

Lecturing 174

Lecturing Instructors Communication Questions 174

Edsurge

OCTOBER 19, 2023

Even vocal proponents of HyFlex admit it’s not widely popular among college instructors. He says instructors who felt forced to quickly allow for remote options or teach remotely are now eager to get back to what they consider normal. As one instructor wrote in an essay last year , “everyone lost something in HyFlex courses.

Teaching 208

Teaching Instructors Lecturing Blended Courses 208

Edsurge

NOVEMBER 8, 2024

These days students can have tools like Google’s NotebookLM turn their lecture notes into a podcast , where sunny-sounding AI bots banter and riff on key points. It’s not as simple as assuming that students are all cheaters, the instructor stresses. And those summaries aren’t just a series of quippy text in bullet points.

Study 214

Study Lecturing Instructors Students 214

Edsurge

SEPTEMBER 7, 2023

As college classes start up this fall, instructors are handing out syllabi and pointing students to official platforms for turning in assignments and participating in class discussions. But because these online platforms are easy to hide from instructors and are available 24/7, they can be trickier for students and professors to navigate.

Exams 204

Exams Instructors Students Lecturing 204

Edsurge

FEBRUARY 10, 2022

Student-centered approaches such as active learning , in which faculty facilitate opportunities for small-group collaboration and minimize lecture time, have been linked to improved student performance. Another version of this approach supplements large lectures with smaller interactive sections.

STEM 217

STEM Lecturing Math Beliefs 217

Edsurge

AUGUST 1, 2024

Many teachers and professors are spending time this summer experimenting with AI tools to help them prepare slide presentations, craft tests and homework questions, and more. As more instructors experiment with using generative AI to make teaching materials, an important question bubbles up.

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Teaching Education Ethics Instructors 217