Course Design Spotlights highlight innovative projects that members of the Teaching and Learning team work on with DCE faculty through the Teach Partnership program. This spotlight highlights a partnership with an introductory instructor to practice the chemistry concepts they need to succeed in class.
"It really means caring enough that your teaching is accessible to your students and recognizing the fact that your students are a diverse audience." Max Krasnow is an instructor at Harvard Extension School. In this Instructor Spotlight, Dr. Krasnow shares his thoughts on Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and provides tips on how to include UDL principles in his class.
Course Design Spotlights highlight innovative projects that members of the Teaching and Learning team work on with DCE faculty through the Teach Partnership program. This spotlight highlights a partnership with Perkins School for the Blind to design a branching scenario that allows learners to make choices and experience possible consequences in a low-stakes environment.
What is the purpose of the assessments in your course? This is a simple question that can be hard to answer, particularly when the assessments we include in our course are ones we inherited from previous courses, textbooks, or ways we learned the content ourselves. Instead, I encourage you to ask yourself: What do I want to know my students can do after they’re done taking my course? Do they have space to practice those skills in class?
Receiving feedback is an essential part of student learning and improvement. There are many approaches to how you give feedback to your students in your course, and the approach you choose should be an approach that suits your teaching style and the needs of your students.
Harvard Extension School classes will be fully online for the 2020-2021 academic year. While the Extension School has provided online learning opportunities for our students for decades, we also know the experience will be much different this year. Many of you will be teaching from spaces you weren’t expecting to teach from and using technology you’ve never used before. The reason why we’re online — a global pandemic — means you and your students alike will be juggling many things in their lives. What does all of this mean for your class?
Above all, it means listening to and asking for feedback from your students is especially important this semester. On a regular basis (weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly), survey your students about what is going well in the course, what they’re struggling with, and what else they’d like to tell you. You’ll learn more about your class then you ever thought possible. It’s also likely you’ll be doing something for the first time this semester and student feedback is useful as you adjust your class for this fully online world.
Your Harvard Extension School course has a Canvas site that goes hand-in-hand with your class sessions. Think of Canvas as the door to your classroom — it’s a unified space for you to share resources, communicate with your students, and assign grades. It’s a space for your students to submit their assignments and access readings. Above all, Canvas gives your students access to you, your teaching staff, and classmates. Here are some reasons using Canvas essential features helps make a course successful:
HELIX Classroom allows your students across the world to feel fully included in your classroom. HELIX Classroom enables you to connect meaningfully with all your students, but what happens when your course is big? In this series, we’ll discuss best practices for teaching in a HELIX Classroom with a large number of students.
If a lot of your students are joining over Zoom, you may be able to see some students raise their hands via video but not all. Here are some ways you can manage participation when a lot of students are joining your class via Zoom.
HELIX Classroom allows your students across the world to feel fully included in your classroom. HELIX Classroom enables you to connect meaningfully with all your students, but what happens when your course is big? In this series, we’ll discuss best practices for teaching in a HELIX Classroom with a large number of students.
The classic active learning technique, the think-pair-share, can work just as well in your HELIX Classroom. In think-pair-share, you pose a question to your students and invite them to turn to their neighbor to discuss the answer. The class then discusses the question together. While teaching in HELIX Classroom, you can have your in-person students turn to each other and break your Zoom students into breakout rooms.
Course Design Spotlights highlight innovative projects that members of the Teaching and Learning team work on with DCE faculty through the Teach Partnership program. This spotlight highlights a partnership with an introductory instructor to practice the chemistry concepts they need to succeed in class.
Course Design Spotlights highlight innovative projects that members of the Teaching and Learning team work on with DCE faculty through the Teach Partnership program. This spotlight highlights a partnership with Perkins School for the Blind to design a branching scenario that allows learners to make choices and experience possible consequences in a low-stakes environment.
Your Harvard Extension School course has 
HELIX Classroom allows your students across the world to feel fully included in your classroom. HELIX Classroom enables you to connect meaningfully with all your students, but what happens when your course is big? In this series, we’ll discuss best practices for teaching in a HELIX Classroom with a large number of students.