Category: Articles

Faculty and students at NSU now have access to Adobe Express for Education, a cloud-based platform for creating visual presentations, graphics, multimedia projects and more. The platform includes thousands of templates that can be utilized, “remixed”, and assigned as a starting point for assignments, along with access to Adobe stock photos and generative AI features, giving your students creative tools to demonstrate knowledge in ways other than written text.

There are many intriguing technology resources that are available for teaching and learning. Psychology professor Richard Mayer, whose research on The Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning, explores how blending various forms of media can help learners with retention. The integration of video, audio, and images in online course design offers alternative avenues for student engagement, particularly for those who face reading challenges or may benefit more from visual and auditory learning modalities.

As educators, we are often exploring the science of how learning works, and how teaching can be most effective. Naturally, we want our students to absorb and retain information at the highest rate possible. It is therefore valuable to explore the science of memory and retention of information. When do the things we learn become encoded in our memory and how can we maximize retention through our understanding of how the brain works? It turns out that the brain needs to be in a period of restfulness in order to have the capacity to consolidate new information.

Did you know that you have access to resources that you can use to make your course content more relevant and interesting? Sometimes available resources get lost in the mix, so we’d like to highlight a few of them for you now. 

We most often think of testing as a way to assess what was learned by a student. And it is. But it is also more than that. The act, itself, of being “tested” also produces measurable learning and long-term retention of material and may even be more effective at long-term retention than studying is. The following article explores this idea, and gives insight into how testing can be used to improve learning in the classroom, as well as improving outcomes for students studying on their own.