Technology & Instruction for UNEX

I have found the Tomorrow's Professor email list from the Stanford Center for Teaching and Learning and MIT to be a good source of information about teaching in higher education. It comes out a couple of times a week and consists of short articles or excerpts relevant to teaching. You can also find the entries at the Tomorrow's Professor blog . A recent entry, Teaching for Transformation: From Learning Theory to Teaching Strategies , offered some practical suggestions for instructors: No matter what you teach, you face the challenge of bringing students from point A--what they currently know-to point B--the learning goals of a course. In many courses, the distance between points A and B is huge, and the path is not obvious. Students must not only acquire new skills and information, but also radically transform their approach to thinking and learning. This newsletter explores theories and teaching strategies that address this universal teaching challenge.

If you subscribe to the feed for this blog in iTunes, in addition to getting any podcasts, you will also automatically receive any PDF attachments. This could be a handy way to keep people up to date on materials available for instructors. It might not do too much for anyone who doesn't want the PDFs, but the files are not that large. For the most part, these guides are specific to UC Riverside, although the ones for the discussion and the control panel might work for other people as well. Here are the completed how-to guides so far: Student Login Student Login (alternate) Participate in Discussions Instructor Login Managing Course Control Panel Managing Course Control Panel (alternate) Using Wikis Using Blogs Feedback or suggestions are welcome either through the comments or via email to breilly at ucrx dot ucr dot edu .

I interviewed Jon Kindschy of UCR Extension last week about the use of distance learning in the Sciences courses here at Extension. The podcast is a little under 9 minutes long. Click here to play the podcast or subscribe through the button in the sidebar.