How do I manage end-of-semester grade change requests?
Aggie offers tips to reduce end-of-semester stress associated with students’ grade change requests.
How can I make my content more relevant?
Aggie provides suggestions on making your content more relevant (and engaging) to students.
New Year's Teaching Resolutions
Aggie shares some ideas for teaching resolutions that will maximize your teaching impact without draining your teaching batteries or testing your sanity.
Dear Aggie, how do I document my teaching?
Aggie provides tips for effectively documenting your teaching.
Dear Aggie, I am buried in grading!
Aggie discusses rubrics as a way to streamline your grading, keep your grading consistent and make your expectations clear to your students.
Does having students make predictions help them learn?
Aggie discusses the power of predictions in your class
Staying up-to-date on teaching and supporting students
Aggie welcomes folks back to campus and offers resources to help navigate a successful semester.
How can I start using AI in my teaching?
Aggie helps a professor ease into the world of AI.
How can I apply best practices in my online courses?
Aggie shares ideas on applying best teaching practices in online courses.
How can I teach my students habits of thought that will last a lifetime?
Aggie recommends a book and a workshop for professors who want to make an enduring impact.
How can I encourage my students to incorporate the feedback I provide them?
Aggie discusses a way to have students incorporate the feedback you offer them.
How can I energize my classes and better understand what the students are learning?
Aggie discusses a simple method that allows you to engage your students and find out what they know.
How can I add variety to my classes?
Aggie discusses why variety is important for student learning and offers a simple method that will allow you to diversify your teaching.
Aggie discusses the forms of evidence used in evaluating teaching effectiveness and offers some suggestions for reflecting on your teaching.
Is active learning really better?
Aggie reviews evidence that active learning supports all students in your classes, and provides resources for identifying effective active learning strategies.
Are my students seeing my Canvas announcements?
Aggie offers suggestions to make sure that students have all the information they need to be successful in your course, including upcoming deadlines.
Do I always need to provide video captions?
Just because you don't have formal accommodation requests for closed captioning doesn't mean you shouldn't still caption any class materials. As Aggie points out, there are many reasons that all students can benefit from closed captioning.
How can I make it to the end of the semester?
Aggie offers some tips to help a stressed-out reader make it to the end of semester. Read on to learn about Incomplete grades, determining the date of last attendance and more.
What do I need to know about stereotype threat?
A Dear Aggie reader wants to know a little more about stereotype threat and why it might be important to know about for their teaching.
How can I use Canvas for TA coordination?
Dear Aggie explains how non-academic courses in Canvas can be great resources for coordinating many TAs across many sections.
How can I get all students to contribute to group work?
A Dear Aggie reader has heard a lot of buzz about growth mindsets and wanted to learn more about them, and whether it is possible to help students develop a growth mindset.
A Dear Aggie reader has heard a lot of buzz about growth mindsets and wanted to learn more about them, and whether it is possible to help students develop a growth mindset.
How can I help my students really master the material?
As a follow-up to the Feb. 9 post about avoiding cramming, Aggie offers another suggestion for helping students really master the material. Interleaving is an approach that promotes problem-solving skills, long-term retention and transfer of skills and knowledge to new situations.
How can I convince my students not to cram?
While many students can pass exams by cramming hard the night before, cramming does not support long-term learning. There are things that you and your students can do to support long-term learning, including more testing (!). Aggie provides several suggestions for students and your course design.
How can I establish an instructor presence, especially online?
In the age of AI bots (we've all heard of ChatGPT by now), how can I make sure that my online students know that I am a real person? What can I do to make myself seem more present with my online courses? Aggie offers some ideas to establish your instructor presence.
Is learning my students' names important in college?
Have you ever wondered if it is important to learn your students’ names? And if you have a large class, have you wondered how you can do that? Aggie discusses some research around using students’ names and provides some tips for learning their names.
Where can I find support for course design and redesign?
I have to design or redesign a course and don’t know where to start or what changes to make. It always seems to take so long. Where do I even begin?
Why should my assessments align with my course learning objectives?
Assessing student learning is the second step in backward design. Dear Aggie's guest columnist, Chadrhyn Pedraza, builds on her previous post about learning objectives by discussing the importance of aligning assessments with your course learning objectives.
Why do I need learning objectives?
Learning objectives may feel like one thing too many when developing your course. However, they can be really useful to both you and your students. Our Dear Aggie guest columnist, Chadrhyn Pedraza, offers some great information about learning objectives in this week’s column.
How do I choose a course delivery format?
There are so many course delivery formats (e.g., flipped, blended, hybrid). Dear Aggie describes some of these, and why they may (or may not) be right for you and your students.
How do I encourage and monitor attendance?
Dear Aggie suggests useful Canvas tools to help busy instructors with taking and grading student attendance when necessary.
How can I keep track of student information in Canvas?
Do you struggle to keep track of information about your students? The Canvas gradebook "Notes" feature is a great way to handle this. Here are a few Aggie tips for taking advantage of this Canvas tool.
What is the difference between DAS accommodations and OIE supports?
The office of Disability Access Services (DAS) and the Office of Institutional Equity (OIE) both work to support students. You may receive requests for accommodations or supports from both offices. Dear Aggie shares a brief overview of both the DAS accommodations and the OIE supports.
How do I interpret all these NMSU acronyms?
Like many institutions, NMSU uses a lot of acronyms. Dear Aggie helps demystify some of these, and offers some links to some of our great resources.
How do I determine the date of last attendance/participation?
Instructors are required to report the date of last attendance for students who earn a non-passing grade. The actual requirement is to report the last date of meaningful participation. Dear Aggie explains how to use built-in Canvas tools to help you do this.
Why do I need a Canvas development shell?
You may not have a development shell yet, but you may discover that you actually want one. A Canvas development shell (often referred to as a “sandbox”) is a Canvas course shell that is never available to students. There are (at least) four reasons that you may want to have a development shell. Read on!
How can I streamline my grading feedback?
Do you find yourself giving common feedback and wishing that there was a “rubber stamp” feature in SpeedGrader? Look no further! The comment library is a great way to generate and then draw from a library of grading/feedback comments in Canvas.
Quality assessment involves more than merely assigning points to student work in Canvas. Get practical tips on staying sane while still giving students the kind of meaningful instructor feedback that boosts their learning outcomes.
What are your pandemic silver linings?
What things (practices, lessons learned, approaches) will you be keeping from our “COVID” semesters? What have we learned since March 2020 that will improve our teaching and learning into the future? Read on for some of Dear Aggie’s silver linings
If you have a teaching question for Dear Aggie, please e-mail her at dearaggie@nmsu.edu
Contact Information:
Phone: 575.646.2204
Fax: 575.646.1330
Email: teaching@nmsu.edu
Directions
Mailing Address:
NMSU Teaching Academy MSC 3TA
2915 McFie Circle
Milton Hall Room 50
Las Cruces NM 88003–8001
Hours:
M-F 8am - 12pm & 1 - 5pm
