Dr. J's Blog

What do you believe about your life now? What do you believe about your potential now? If you reflect upon the number of recent tasks, projects, or goals you've begun, how many did you complete? How many from that list did you begin and then set aside, thinking there was not enough time, resources, support, or too many barriers to overcome?

If you have a record of not completing projects or tasks, do you place the responsibility upon yourself, or is it always a matter of external conditions, be it people or something else? These are important questions to consider while you begin to contemplate what it means to accomplish what's important and meaningful in your life. This is especially true for goals. If you have set goals for yourself, it means there is some outcome you hope to...

What causes a student to want to learn? Is it the same reason why students want to seek out course-specific knowledge?

The standard formula in higher education is to add students and an instructor to a pre-built curriculum, and the result is the creation of a learning environment. To bridge the gap between students and the learning process are planned activities, along with resources to help students engage with the activities. But intellectual curiosity, a process which cannot be controlled, is either inherent or prompted by completion of planned activities or involvement of an instructor.

Learning within a formal classroom environment can be an intellectual activity. When the intellect of a student is engaged, cognition is elevated from automatic thinking to higher...

The field of distance learning continues to evolve, not just from a technological perspective, but also by the mode of delivery for online classes. When this field was first developing in the early 2000s for higher education, one of the primary concerns was related to the ability of this form of teaching to replicate traditional classroom learning.

Over time most online schools included some form of instructor-to-student interaction as part of the curriculum, typically through asynchronous discussions, thereby making it possible for students to still experience many similar elements of a traditional classroom. If there were still any lingering doubts left today about an ability to learn effectively in a virtual environment, the pandemic has helped to eliminate them. 

Now...

As an educator, do you believe the process of grading or evaluating students' work is always completed in a fair manner? Are you able to maintain a strict sense of objectivity as you evaluate learning activities completed by your students?

I've thought about this recently as I reviewed the levels of a scoring guide given to me to complete for a written assignment. While the wording was seemingly different between these levels, there is still an element of subjectivity to the process. For example, is there really that much of a difference between "explains" and "completely explains" a concept? And who would be able to audit what an educator has assigned, as the score for a particular criterion, without injecting their own sense of subjectivity when attempting to interpret what...