Online instructors are tasked with creating meaningful learning assignments, but they may struggle with balancing their teaching workloads. This article includes five strategies for creating assignments and activities that promote learning without overwhelming instructional workload, including anticipating student questions when writing…

The theories of international relations (IR) are often difficult topics for students to understand: What are these and how are they useful? This is especially true among students who have likely never taken a political science class, are not political science majors, and are attending a rural regional university with limited exposure to the world.…

As academic programs relative to sport continue to grow and evolve, college and university faculty are tasked with developing innovative curricula to enhance the overall experiences of their students. A viable option to facilitate this charge is complementing traditional courses with domestic study away opportunities. This article adds to the…

What should activist-scholars teach in the social problems classroom? In this conversation, I challenge the assertion that advancing a sociology of social problems is an overly academic enterprise of little use to students and other publics. I introduce the potential of a pedagogical framework for promoting social problems literacy: a set of…

Creating an online music course afforded developers at Ocean County College an opportunity to build learner-centered, media-rich lessons and assessments. Guided by constructivist learning theory and using free resources, Music Fundamentals was designed to introduce students to music notation while demonstrating real-world application of concepts.…

While primary and secondary teachers are legally required to adhere to inclusion guidelines for students experiencing disabilities, instructors in higher education have had more leeway to operate under a more traditional paradigm which can marginalize rather than include students in the classroom. Furthermore, students experience exclusion for…

Majority of learners in our classrooms are digital natives or Millennials--a category of learners who tend toward independence and autonomy in their learning styles. The primary challenges then facing instructors include: How do digital natives learn and how do you teach them? The answers to these questions will help instructors to: (a) identify…

The article discusses the implementation of the "constructivist approach" in ESP teaching to university students. This approach creates opportunities for students to "construct" their own target language communication skills meant for use in their professional intercourse. The way of achieving such an effect can be seen in…

As new media emerge in the common culture, the authors recommend that art educators adopt those media to facilitate deep understanding of visual culture and literacy. They report here on applications of an online image gallery that helps users develop ways to interpret what they see and compose. Over the past few years the authors have…

We used Problem-Based Learning (PBL) as a new pedagogy in an intermediate composition course. Our course design was based in constructivist pedagogical practices, which suggest that knowledge is co-created through social interactions. Although professors have much to offer students, students can also learn important lessons through interactions…

We describe the use of rapid game prototyping as a pedagogic technique to experientially explore and learn requirements discovery, modeling, and specification in systems analysis and design courses. Students have a natural interest in gaming that transcends age, gender, and background. Rapid digital game creation is used to build computer games…

This paper firstly introduces the concept of constructivist learning which advocates that students actively construct knowledge themselves with teachers' assistance. Based on the six important elements of constructivist learning and teaching planning approach, detailed examples of designing the six constructivist elements of situation, groupings,…

Achieving foundation-level practice behaviors to develop social work core competencies involves integrating learning across a curriculum. This article focuses on two phases of foundation-level course redevelopment aimed to support graduate students in accomplishing this outcome. The first phase involved restructuring the course to become a…

Blogs provide a dynamic interactive medium for online discussion, consistent with communal constructivist pedagogy. The author of this article describes and evaluates a blog assignment used in the teaching and assessment of a small (40-60 students) introductory economics course. Using qualitative and quantitative data collected across four…

High school teachers who engage students through active learning in their classrooms can more fully understand this instructional practice by examining the theories and strategies underlying the cognitive perspective of educational psychology, which addresses the development of knowledge in the individual mind. Two theoretical explanations,…