Volume XLII, No. 37 | October 1, 2020 Concept Building: A Systematic Approach for Improving Instruction In 2017, my book Concept Building was published, which explores teaching based on systems theory. There are three components to concept building: concept learning, object learning, and the instructor acting as a catalyst. Each part [...]
Volume XLII, No. 36 | September 24, 2020 Using Job Instruction Breakdown Techniques to Facilitate Learning in the Classroom Every day, people start new jobs or get promoted to positions that bring new sets of responsibilities and duties. In an effort to train this workforce, some organizations use Job Instruction Breakdowns [...]
Volume XLII, No. 35 | September 17, 2020 Business Simulations Enhance Student Engagement and Experiential Learning Simulations provide students with an opportunity to make decisions, operate equipment, and apply theoretical knowledge to specific, real-world scenarios. Simulations can be live, involving real people operating real systems; they can be virtual, involving real [...]
Volume XLII, No. 34 | September 10, 2020 Battlefield of the Mind: A Closer Look at Test Anxiety Tests and evaluations are an inescapable part of our world. While an assessment's primary goal is to evaluate a student’s aptitude and identify the need for improvement, it is also a standard tool [...]
Volume XLII, No. 33 | September 3, 2020 Brackets Are for More Than March Madness: Using a Snowball Pitch Activity to Foster Student Engagement and Learning Game-based, competition-based, and project-based activities have been found to positively impact student learning. The Snowball Pitch, an activity that combines game-based, competition-based, and project-based learning [...]
Volume XLII, No. 32 | August 27, 2020 Problem Solving for the Future: Teaching Using Scenarios and Backcasting Depictions of the future in popular media tend to focus on humanoid robots, space travel, and other new technologies, but “the future” encompasses much more than these developments. Thinking about the future includes [...]
Volume XLII, No. 31 | August 20, 2020 Humility and Humor: A Holistic Approach to the New Online Reality When the world went into lock down this spring, everything changed for educators and learners alike. The initial panic took instructors into overdrive to ensure course content could be wrapped into a digestible [...]
Volume XLII, No. 30 | August 13, 2020 Mastering the Third Culture: Helping Students Navigate the Technology-Based, At-Home Learning Environment In a widely circulated Youtube video, a troubled student pours out his difficulties with online, learn-from-home modalities. He fears the pandemic and feels trapped in the house. He is frustrated with how [...]
Volume XLII, No. 29| August 6, 2020 From Onsite to Online Proctored QuickBooks Certification Exams As instruction shifted remotely this spring, the accounting department at Dallas College Brookhaven Campus needed to find a way to administer QuickBooks certification exams to accounting students. As an accounting instructional specialist, I worked with the department’s [...]
Volume XLII, No. 28| July 30, 2020 Food for Thought: Redesigning Required Courses for Student Engagement, Relevancy, and Retention As educators, we share the annual challenge of keeping our students engaged and retained. Engagement and retention issues have been amplified by COVID-19. Many instructors lost students during the immediate shift to online [...]
