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Want to help your students avoid cheating? Consider this guide.
Sep. 22, 2021—The folks at EduMed have developed a guide to help students understand and avoid plagiarism and cheating. The title focuses on online students, but the breakdown of different forms of academic dishonesty and how to avoid them can be useful to all students. The descriptions of self-plagiarism, paraphrasing plagiarism, and mosaic plagiarism may be particularly...
Want to signal inclusion to your neurodivergent students? Use this syllabus statement
Jul. 29, 2021— In 2020-2021, a group of faculty met throughout the year to consider ways to promote equity and inclusion in their courses and programs (you can see a brief description of how they got started here). Keivan Stassun, professor of physics & astronomy, committed to developing a statement that faculty can use in their course...
PowerPoint hack: A homemade time tracking tool for meetings and classes
Feb. 12, 2021—by Cynthia Brame Have you ever wanted a timer in class or a workshop that would help speakers track their time—without the stress of an actual clock? I recently found something that served this purpose and think it could be handy for a number of situations where you want a visual reminder of time. See...
New Online Course Visits available
Jul. 17, 2020—Curious about how others are setting up their online courses in Brightspace? Seeing inspiration and ideas? “Visit” courses developed by Vanderbilt faculty Justin Baba, Ghina Nakad Absi, Heather Lefkowitz, and Neil Kelley (with more to come!). See the Online Course Visits page for more information and to sign up.
Structures for flex classrooms: pros, cons, and pedagogical choices
Jun. 23, 2020—By Cynthia Brame, CFT Associate Director As we head into the fall thinking about classes where we may have a combination of students who are physically and digitally present, I’ve been thinking about different ways to structure students’ time “in the classroom”. The first and most straightforward of these is to divide students into groups...
Who’s doing all the work? Who’s having all the fun?
May. 15, 2019—Part 1: Five steps to incorporating productive failure into your course by Cynthia J. Brame, CFT Associate Director Several years ago, I had the distinct pleasure of hearing a talk by Barb Stengel, Professor of the Practice in Vanderbilt’s Teaching and Learning Department. She had a mantra that she repeated throughout the talk to frame her comments: “Who’s...
Physics Forman lecture: YouTube’s ‘Physics Girl’ discusses using videos in science outreach Feb. 28
Feb. 19, 2019—Dianna Cowern, from YouTube’s The Physics Girl, will be featured at a talk on Thursday, Feb. 28, in the Stevenson Center, Room 4309. The event will begin at 4 p.m. and is open to the Vanderbilt community. It is the Department of Physics and Astronomy’s 2019 Guy and Rebecca Forman Lecture in Science Education. YouTube was originally conceived...
Teaching Opportunity for STEM Post Docs
Apr. 16, 2018— Citizen Science at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY is seeking instructors for January 2019. Citizen Science is an innovative program designed to provide opportunities for students in their first year of college to develop their personal science literacy through hands-on, real-world coursework and projects. We ask… What does it...
Rethinking the Presentation of the Teaching Guide
Feb. 11, 2018—by Ryan Bowen, CFT Graduate Assistant When we try a new teaching approach, we may have a sense that there is research that can help us make choices about how to implement it. Often, however, it can be a challenge to find that research. What journals is it found in? What are the right terms...
BOLD program instructional materials reach over 2500 Vanderbilt students, 65,000 others
May. 17, 2017—How do you find your way to safety when you’re sailing and the GPS fails? How do you determine whether a child’s babbling indicates that her language is developing as you would expect? What effect does decreased breathing rate have on blood pH, and why? If you’re designing a heat engine and are choosing between...