Educational Pedagogy

Asking students to engage with every answer choice can foster critical thinking and productive failure.

Group fitness enthusiasts often credit social support as why they return to classes, but competition may be a bigger factor.

Even a single workout may make our brain’s memory centers, like our muscles, more fit.

The first day of class is crucial both for your students and for you. This guide will help you make opening day as effective as possible.

No matter if you enjoy taking or just watching images of space, NASA has a treat for you. They have made their entire collection of images, sounds, and video available and publicly searchable online. It’s

Teaching and learning scholars from the around globe give their opinion on the future of the traditional lecture

The mistake we make when thinking about how higher education changes.

First, pedagogic strategies (the ones instructional designers talk about) are based on general learning theoretical concepts: Behaviorism, Instructivism, Cognitivism, Constructionism, Constructivism, Socio-constructivism, Situated learning, etc.  There’s often an overlap between these theories that explain how people learn and how one could bring people to learn. But I have seen over the years, we often put this under the one catch-all category, or banner of Constructivism, but it’s much more than that. It’s kind of like saying ‘Pedagogy’ when it’s so much more that that.

Second, design of strategies draws a lot from general pedagogical theory, but also from specialized research, such as understanding Heutagogy, Paragogy, Andragogy, etc. And these help us to understand how we will implement different technologies to meet our learning goals.

Third, educational technology has been a driving force to develop new strategies, with the basic assumption that educational technologies can facilitate pedagogical scenarios, but often we have tried to fit the pedagogy in after the fact, not as the reason for adopting a particular tool. It’s been kind of like putting the cart before the horse (please excuse my photoshop skills).

An American study last month showed that students who slept for eight hours a night performed better in final exams. One from the University of Michigan in October found that a lack of sleep affected memory and job performance in fields as varied as baking and surgery.