Category: Articles

This year our initiatives kept us engaged with the faculty, where together we hosted the third annual Teaching and Learning Conference. We connected with faculty through DesignLink to help them improve course design and we also shared Thank You Notes with faculty from grateful students. Click the title above to learn more about these initiatives.

In 2023, we were fortunate to host workshops and presentations with faculty on topics like Generative AI, formative assessment, gamification, and interactive video tools while still continuing to share fundamental content on EdTech tools that NSU provides faculty. We were particularly proud of the Summer Sizzler Series where faculty members shared their best suggestions on Engaging Today’s Learners and Thank a Professor recipients unpacked their effective teaching techniques. Click on the title above to learn more and get links to the videos for these presentations and more.

Every day new Artificial Intelligence (AI) stories are in the news, on social media, and in your email promoting new “AI-driven” products. With the introduction of ChatGPT, Microsoft Bing, and Google Bard, more than likely, you have been unable to avoid hearing about AI, but do you really know what it is? How will generative AI affect education, your job, your life?

Now that generative AI (gAI) has become available to the wider public, there has been a lot of discussion about the implications of these tools on the world of higher education. One of the interesting areas for exploration is the ability to leverage the use gAI for coursework such as assignments, activities, and assessments. Ideas are continually emerging, and the possibilities seem endless. This article provides a few examples and starts to answer the question of how can gAI be used as both a student tool for learning and a faculty tool for designing learning.

Educational videos have become an important content-delivery tool in higher education. Video learning can be a great supplement to traditional learning methods in higher education. Passive engagement with videos is insufficient for learning. In this article we share several tools that you can use to create more active engagement with your video content that are available from NSU.

Choosing appropriate instructional content for a course can be a complex and time-consuming task. For many subject areas, there are far more potential instructional materials that could, or should, be part of what a course will include. Because we recognize this challenge, we are providing some useful tips that can help to narrow down and select the appropriate instructional materials for any course.

Our digitally connected world may be changing how people learn along with their need to retain information. Since technology makes it easy to stay connected, it is becoming increasingly difficult to function without accessing the Internet for tasks like checking emails, social networking, settling arguments, shopping, and almost every day-to-day activity. The internet has also increasingly become a place where people go to learn. The increasing desire to be socially connected and have an awareness of the world around us creates constraints on our time which have encouraged the growth of microlearning. Technology has made it simpler to offer and access small pieces of educational content through a well-known instructional design technique known as chunking (Gobet, 2005). Because of this shift, microlearning has become appealing in some learning environments.

Jihong Tang, one of our excellent Instructional Designers entered a contest hosted by the eLearning software developer iSpring Solutions. The competition sought to have designers create an eLearning activity that utilized some features of the software while incorporating interaction and engaging users.

As educators, we want students to be successful. So how do we define “success”? At the most basic level, it would be accomplishing a course’s stated learning objectives and getting a good grade — eventually doing that enough times to graduate and get a degree. But how many instructors and students feel engaged and motivated by that? And what kind of learning-awareness and real-world skills does that develop in our students?