"Tuning the blend" is a phrase that educators hear a lot these days. It refers to finding the correct balance of online activities and face-to-face instruction in hybrid--or blended--courses. Finding a mix that meets the needs of both faculty and students requires experimentation, experience, and constant tweaking. And, as with coffee, the same…

In a flipped classroom, professors assign pre-class homework consisting of brief, recorded lectures and presentations, digital readings with collaborative annotation capabilities, and discussion board participation. This frees up classroom time to promote active learning through collaborative, project-based activities using simple display and…

Advanced capture technology has become almost ubiquitous in higher education: If an institution does nt have it, chances are that it is trailing the competition. Students want it. Tech-savvy teaochers like it. And blended learning environments practically demand it. The most commonly touted benefit of these systems is that they are student…

Blended learning has become a meme. While mixing online instruction with face-to-face time is not exactly new, momentum for hybrid learning has been building ever since a Department of Education meta-study in 2010 quietly announced that traditional education simply does not stack up. In that study, online education was determined to be more…

Two-year institutions are increasingly jammed with students who lack academic readiness--a command of those basic skills that will help them find employment in the workplace or continue on to four-year institutions. That's where remedial--or developmental--classes come into the picture. Community colleges are investing heavily in remedial programs…

Educators know that people learn best by doing. When students are doing something rather than reading or learning about it, they learn better. Immersive environments help students retain more information and speed up their learning. There's an enhancement in the way they learn. Immersive environments--which utilize technologies like simulations,…

Given a blank slate, what should the 21st century college classroom look like, and how should it be operated? Answering those questions is the idea behind setting up "incubator classrooms," spaces dedicated to trying out new technologies and new ways of teaching and learning. By incubating new ideas, faculty members and IT staff discover which…