Use of the World Wide Web in Mathematics Instruction

Many mathematics instructors may find they can use the World Wide Web to distribute information and facilitate discussion and interaction in their classrooms, while actually reducing their administrative workload. Here is a discussion of some of the benefits (including better student understanding!) which an instructor might enjoy from taking the plunge

How Interactive can a Lecture Become?

The uses of technology have been well documented and many people have tried to use the available technology. In an age of increasingly idevices dependent generation where on average students check their portable devices at least every 15 minutes for 15 seconds, the way students engage with the lecture and the lecturer has changed. The dynamic environment of the lecture is one which can be very enjoyable, demanding and noisy. It requires the attention of the student, note taking skills, teaching techniques, audio visual aids and timing of the lecture to work seamlessly. However, not only the student attitudes have changed but also their approach to learning and demands for more summarized information. They want less to read, eBook style information but mostly in the form of PowerPoint rather than books. They want access to the Google search engine and the algorithm to generate the correct answers in the very first search results. Unfortunately the standard social media interfaces are not particularly designed for lectures and there is always the temptation to read and answer the threads on your Facebook. A pilot study has been implemented in order to facilitate the use of social media, portable devices, forums and the good old chalk and talk technique to bring the big lectures back to life. Improve the student experience and the learning by engaging everyone. The dynamic environment of the lectures would be enhanced by allowing interaction on all levels from delivery of the unit to questions and answers to setting and sitting examinations and assignments. Even the feedback mechanism would need to change. The research would require a huge shift in the way everything is done and the cultural consequences of the change may be more of effect towards the academics, especially ones with longer teaching experience

Teaching Visually Impaired College Students in Introductory Statistics

Instructors of postsecondary classes in statistics rely heavily on visuals in their teaching, both within the classroom and in resources like textbooks, handouts, and software, but this information is often inaccessible to students who are blind or visually impaired (BVI). The unique challenges involved in adapting both pedagogy and course materials to accommodate a BVI student may provoke anxiety among instructors teaching a BVI student for the first time, and instructors may end up feeling unprepared or “reinventing the wheel.” We discuss a wide variety of accommodations inside and outside of the classroom grounded in the empirical literature on cognition and learning and informed by our own experience teaching a blind student in an introductory statistics course

Spartan Daily, September 18, 1980

Volume 75, Issue 13https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/6649/thumbnail.jp

College Algebra – Online Section Versus Traditional Section

The 21th century is considered to be the electronic age. This electronic age brings opportunities for new ways to deliver a lecture or a whole course in higher education. By offering courses online, universities are trying to reach the population of students that cannot attend classes on campus. Professors also utilize technology in a variety of ways to help them teach traditional classes. Valdosta State University (VSU) offers a variety of courses online including College Algebra (Math 1111). While we are trying to reach more students through the online courses, we should also examine the impact to student learning and success in College Algebra. In the fall 2016 and spring 2017 terms, VSU offered the first online sections of Math 1111 with 27 and 23 students, respectively. The course retention rate and the students’ performance on the departmental final exam for the treatment group, online section (OS), versus the control group, traditional section (TS) of 350 students, were compared. The OS had a statistically significant higher departmental final exam average, but there was no statistically significant difference in retention rate

Instructor Impermanence and the Need for Community College Adjunct Faculty Reform in Colorado

This policy letter, prepared for the Colorado State Board of Community Colleges and Occupational Education and submitted in January 2018 reports on the occupational conditions of adjunct faculty in the Colorado Community College System. The document describes the adverse employment and instructional conditions present in the CCCS, arguing that current conditions threaten the quality and integrity of the General Transfer Pathways program (GT-Pathways) in Colorado. The letter advances a range of practical policy reforms for the consideration of Board that, if adopted would improve current working conditions for adjunct faculty and strengthen quality of community college instruction in Colorado

The instructor presence effect and its moderators in instructional video: a series of meta-analyses

Researchers disagree on the extent to which social cues in instructional videos influence learning and learning-relevant outcomes and processes. The instructor presence effect states that visible instructors in instructional videos lead to increased social presence and higher scores in subjective ratings like motivation, social presence, or affect, but do not improve learning outcomes. In contrast, the Cognitive-Affective-Social Theory of Learning in digital Environments outlines how social cues not only enhance social, emotional, and motivational processes, but they also potentially promote learning outcomes. We conducted a series of meta-analyses to explore the effects of instructor presence in instructional videos on retention, transfer, social presence, motivation, cognitive load, affect, and visual dwell time. The meta-analyses include 35 studies, which contained 46 pair-wise comparisons and 6339 participants. Results revealed a small, statistically significant positive effect of including a visual instructor on retention outcomes, but no significant effect on transfer performance. A visible instructor also significantly enhanced social presence, affective, and motivational ratings. Furthermore, we found that a visible instructor significantly reduced dwell time on relevant visual material but also reduced subjective perception of extraneous cognitive load. Significant moderator effects could be found regarding prior knowledge, the instructional domain as well as the size of the instructor

Volume 10, Number 02

Full text of Volume 10, Number 02 of Reaching Through Teaching.https://digitalcommons.kennesaw.edu/rtt/1027/thumbnail.jp

A high school physics instructor\u27s website: Design, implementation, and evaluation

In order to test the ability of the Internet to supplement classroom instruction, an instructor-authored WWW site crashwhite.com was developed for two Berkeley High courses: Advanced Placement (AP) physics, and college-prep physics class. The website was intended to supplement classroom instruction by making classroom materials available to students and parents outside the classroom, and to facilitate increased teacher-parent, teacher-student, and student-student communication