Category: Articles

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?

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.