This Week for Faculty: ✨ Innovations to Maximize Student Learning
As you plan ahead for Fall 2022, consider integrating Columbia-developed innovations into your teaching and your students’ learning.
1) Quiz for learning with QuizCon
Traditional multiple choice quizzes can leave students anxious and guessing. Quizzing with Confidence offers an alternative, letting you build and assign quizzes in which your students demonstrate learning by indicating certainty in their answers.
The online application lets you construct “confidence-weighted” multiple-choice quizzes and assign them to students within CourseWorks. This quiz type asks students to indicate their certainty in one of three choices, and includes an “I Don’t Know” option if they are completely unsure. This alternative approach to multiple-choice testing is shown to reduce student anxiety, minimize guessing and more accurately assess knowledge.
Learn more about QuizCon and how to add it to your CourseWorks course: QuizCon: Multiple Choice Quizzing for Learning
2) Integrate map-based learning activities with Locus Tempus
Get your students working with maps to visualize patterns across space and time. Engage your students as repository builders, researchers and curators.
Locus Tempus is a platform developed by the CTL that integrates into CourseWorks. It is designed to facilitate map-based learning activities across disciplines in course context. Locus Tempus features tools for authoring maps, inviting collaborators, and analyzing data spatially and temporally.
Learn more about Locus Tempus and check out the Faculty Spotlight of how Professor Christopher Harwood uses Locus Tempus in his courses.
3) Get students to analyze media
Mediathread is a multimedia analysis environment that is integrated into CourseWorks. It has helped learners to closely study multimedia objects from across the web.
Mediathread allows instructors to set up course-specific sites, in which students collect videos, audio files, and images from sites across the web and library databases. Students can then clip, tag, and annotate collected media in direct response to instructor assignments, organize and share media selections in their personal collections, and embed media selections into multimedia essays and discussions.
Learn more about teaching with Mediathread and visit the site.
4) Engage students with “From Books to Bytes” as they conduct research
“From Books to Bytes: Navigating the Research Ecosystem” is a set of online resources, created by the Libraries at Columbia University in partnership with the Center for Teaching and Learning, that provides students with practical strategies to manage their scholarly research, and guides them through the vast resources available at Columbia.
Access the six multimedia-rich modules via CourseWorks. Explore the Instructor Toolkit, collaborate with a librarian, and learn how to best leverage the series in your class.
Learn more about “From Books to Bytes” by visiting the Columbia University Libraries site.
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