Timeless Teaching Tips: Our Top Blog Posts Still Shaping Learning Today

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As we begin a new term, our office is reflecting on the history and impact of our blog. This blog has been in operation since 2009, when it was started by a group known as the Center for Instructional Technology (CIT). Even today, some of our posts published 10 or more years ago are still frequently visited, showing that the teaching and learning ideas are still important and valuable. Here I review the eight most commonly visited blog posts from at least 10 years ago and reflect on their relevance to the work we do today.

Online Discussions

Three of the most popular blog posts focus on using online discussions in class:

Together, these posts highlight how discussion boards are a great tool to provide space for students to interact with each other and the instructor for a course. When presented with a meaningful prompt, discussions can encourage critical thinking from students, and an effective way to encourage participation in the discussions is to grade them using a rubric.

Discussions are still a great tool to use in your course to have students engage with you and their classmates. Beyond allowing students to interact with and learn from each other, they can also be used to provide students with different avenues for participating in class. Not all students are comfortable speaking up in class, so providing an online discussion as a complement to your class session can enable quieter students to participate more fully in class. This practice also aligns with the principles of Universal Design for Learning.

There are a few different tools you can consider using to run discussions in your course. Canvas, the Learning Management System (LMS) used at Duke, has its own discussion tool that provides a lot of flexibility in how discussions can be run in your class. They can be graded or ungraded, anonymous or not, and you can control how students can respond. 

Ed Discussion is another tool you could use. It integrates into Canvas, and is especially useful for discussions involving equations or code. Regardless of the tool you use, some best practices for discussion boards include making students write their own response before they can see what others have written, and writing prompts that require reflection and problem solving.

Use of Technology

Four of our popular blog posts focus on different ways of using technology in our educational spaces.

‘Project a PowerPoint show & see notes on your laptop’ focuses on updates to Powerpoint and Windows made in 2010 that allowed for simultaneously showing a slideshow on a projector while seeing speaker notes on your laptop. In 2024, this is still a very useful feature in many different contexts. Not only can it be useful when presenting lectures to students in a physical classroom, the ability to see speaker notes separately from the slides also works well when presenting slides over Zoom – a much more common occurrence since 2020. However even when presenting over Zoom, you’d still need a second screen to show the notes separately from the slides.

Powerpoint has changed in numerous ways since 2010, but one exciting feature that we can now use is automatic captioning. When this feature is enabled, Powerpoint will produce live captions at the bottom of your slideshow. This is an amazing accessibility feature that creates a more inclusive presentation experience for audience members who are deaf or have difficulties hearing. Transcripts and captions are also available through tools like Zoom and Panopto.

‘Educational uses of QR codes’ overviews what QR codes are, which were relatively new in 2010, and shares numerous examples of how they can be used in educational settings. These examples are still very relevant today as QR codes have become more common. Now, most smart phones are automatically equipped with a QR code scanner within the camera app, so most people no longer need to download a separate app to scan QR codes. Other avenues for sharing content quickly have also been developed, including URL shorteners like tinyURL or Duke.is for Duke-specific content.

Instructors can use QR codes to easily facilitate active learning. For example, instructors can create questions in Wooclap, Duke’s licensed polling tool, to help build community in the classroom, provide opportunities for formative assessment, and collect feedback from students. Students can easily scan a QR code with their phone to answer these types of questions in class. See our post on using Wooclap for Active Learning to learn more.

In ‘Kahoot! As Formative Assessment’ one instructor details her experience using Kahoot! – a “game-based digital learning platform” – in an undergraduate classroom to provide students with an avenue for testing their knowledge while playing a game as a class. This is a great example of active learning techniques being used in the classroom to improve student learning. It is also an example of a small-scale change towards gamification of learning, a topic highlighted in one of the sessions at our 2023 Emerging Pedagogies Summit. Kahoot! has expanded and is not free anymore, so Wooclap can be used to achieve similar results in class. While it is not structured as a game, instructors could still come up with a gameful design for Wooclap use in their classes and reap similar benefits to using Kahoot!

‘Using an Android tablet with active stylus to create screencasts easily and inexpensively’ covers what screencasting is, why it’s useful, and how to begin screencasting. While screencasting hardware and software have improved since 2014, the recommendations around screencasting remain relevant and useful. Creating short videos showing how to solve a problem step-by-step by writing on a screen can positively support student learning. These types of videos can be especially useful in online classes or flipped classes where students may be doing a fair amount of learning on their own time. One tool available at Duke for screencasting is Panopto.

Learning Objectives

The last of the top eight most popular blog posts from 10 or more years ago was written in 2014 and focuses on Learning Objectives in Massive Open Online Classes (MOOCs). The Learning Experience Design team in LILE supports the creation of many MOOCs at Duke through Coursera. This post discusses findings around the progress students made on specific learning objectives as a result of participating in a Coursera course. The data show that students, regardless of whether they completed the course or not, reported making significant progress on learning objectives at both the lower-levels and higher-levels of Bloom’s taxonomy. One takeaway in the blog is that we need to carefully consider how we define success and metrics of completion because learners can still have meaningful engagements and learning accomplishments without fully completing a Coursera course. This idea can be expanded to all of the types of courses that are taught at Duke – do our traditional metrics of success and completion truly reflect student experiences and achievements in our courses? How do we design our courses in ways that recognize the milestones that learners are constantly reaching? Considering alternative grading approaches is a great place to start.

Learn More

For additional resources, visit our Teaching Guides and our pages on Learning Technologies.

If you have questions or potential ideas for a blog post, contact us at lile@duke.edu.