In my previous blog post on Wikis, I mentioned some aspects of collaborative learning that lead me to think about cohorts and whether or not we are fully leveraging their...
Using the Cohort to Drive First-Year Student Engagement
Why Teaching AI Prompting is a first step for First-Year Students
Introduction
In an era where artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping education and the workplace,...
Getting Students Outside of the Box
Persistence rates in higher education haven’t improved over the last two decades and though student retention is obviously a key success factor, alone it isn’t a...
For Collaborative Learning: The Wiki
The collaborative skillset has rightfully taken its place in the upper echelon of transferable skills deemed essential to college graduates of all learning modalities. Indeed, overwhelmingly...
Does Facebook Have a Place in the Online Classroom?
This month we take a look at the overwhelming favorite SNS (Social Networking System) among college students: Facebook (Jumaat et al, 2019). With over 2 billion monthly active users (Aslam,...
Critical thinking and engagement in the political process—Why is it so difficult?
Recently there has been great interest in civics, the notion of our civil society, and stability in politics. In my critical thinking classes I always ask my students how...
I Feel the Need for Speed–How AI can help with creating effective scenarios and case studies for class discussions
I was in a department chat group the other day and we were discussing our fears of and the possible benefits of AI like ChatGPT to help us in the classroom. I shared an...
Confirmation bias—when you can’t see the forest for the trees
Imagine that one day a student approaches you in class and tells you that he or she cannot use the assigned textbook for the class because the author is presenting...
The benefits of taking time—why we should slow down to explore examples in critical thinking
Teaching complex and sometimes tricky ideas like fallacies to students is a challenge that I have found daunting in the years that I have taught critical thinking. I have...
Fear, Anger, and Denial—How do critical thinkers deal with barriers during a crisis?
Have you ever made a bad choice in life? Most of us have at some point and if we go back and analyze what went wrong, we often find that there was some barrier to our...