Category: Articles

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?

Emojis and memes are pervasive in modern communication and have even made their way into commercial advertisements. However, we as educators can use their informal nature to our advantage. Emojis and memes can be used as Icebreakers, a tool to demonstrate concepts, a visual way-finder, and a means to promote readability and accessibility.

Virtual escape rooms have become quite popular in higher education. They’ve been used in education, business, healthcare, and many other disciplines. In general, as defined in the education context, a virtual escape room is a computer-based problem-solving activity that uses puzzle rooms and game-like components to educate and engage learners. Escape rooms are an excellent way to engage students by gamifying your lessons and making them fun to learn, while reinforcing existing knowledge. In this article, we discuss the process of planning and developing your own escape room.

This was a great year for the Learning and Educational Center. Once again, we enjoyed working with our amazing faculty on their courses, hosting a variety of workshops with University partners and NSU faculty members, and exploring new ground. Our LEC Advisory Council formed a subcommittee to host a Teaching and Learning Conference for all NSU employees and the event was a huge success. Additionally, the LEC Advisory Council helped form a competency framework for NSU educators. Our Faculty Studio continued to serve faculty who wanted to add high-quality video content to their courses and because of the tremendous response of students and faculty alike, we continued our Thank a Professor initiative, the results of which will be shared during the new year.

Team members from across the LEC drafted and published several articles in 2022 with topics ranging from Considering Course Design for Affective Learning to 15 Ways to Engage your Students. In addition to the articles, LEC team members produced short informative videos on the educational technology platforms used at NSU. We promise that you will find something new in the Learning with the LEC Video series. These articles and videos published throughout the year might deserve a second read or second look.

Thanks to the vision and perseverance of our dedicated LEC Advisory Council this year we held our inaugural Teaching and Learning Conference. We are so grateful for the commitment of our presenters and participants that made the event successful. In the coming months, you will hear more about our other new initiative, the NSU Educator Competency Framework. We also can’t wait to share the many thank you notes that students submitted for this year’s Thank a Professor initiative.

Students and teachers can now create and share their personalized video experiences using Kaltura Interactive Video Paths, a newly acquired learning tool on SharkMedia. Interactive Video Paths allow learners to “choose their own adventure.” Interactive videos can quickly offer a guide or “hotspot” to a specific topic for information. Students can personalize their own viewing experience, rather than scrubbing through a vast video timeline and inadvertently missing valuable information which makes for a more user-friendly experience. Kaltura Interactive Video Paths offers some exciting new features including: Allowing viewers to play an active role by choosing their preferred actions and learning paths. Building choice-based video paths that increase engagement. Tracking views to better understand behavior and gain valuable insights through choices made.   Interactive video paths give students the opportunity to control the story.  Interactive video paths can transform the learning experience from a passive learning activity to an exchange of information where students take an active role. If learners can determine or control “what to what to do next” then, they are more likely to engage in learning. Interactive video increases learner-content interactivity. Here are a few suggestions for creating interactive video paths. Group Activities Video paths can be used […]

Group assignments are a useful way to bring students together and give them important real-world experiences. They can take the form of projects, presentations, or collaborative papers. This article includes some strategies that can be used to successfully manage group projects.