Digital Learning Blog
Inclusive Teaching and Beyond: The Need for Institutional Change
"Inclusion" has become a post-pandemic buzzword in many universities, highlighting historical inequities within a broader crisis in higher education. As universities face record levels of student despair and disconnection, campuses across the country report...
Abundant Learning: How Online Courses Build Equity and Access
The story we've been told about higher education is changing dramatically. What was once seen as the clearest path to a successful career, the college degree now is being closely examined for its role in deepening inequalities and being out of reach for many...
Pedagogies of Possibility in a Post-Pandemic Classroom
Educators everywhere remember the pandemic as a period of cataclysmic upheaval, the effects of which are still being felt today. For many longtime educators like me, the events of 2020 meant not just a sudden switch to new modalities but also a reexamination of...
Critical University Studies: Rethinking Academia from Within
In 2024, as debates intensify over the legitimacy, fairness, and value of higher education, a new academic movement is bringing analysis and balance to a discourse increasingly vulnerable to partisan posturing. “Critical University Studies” (CUS) looks at the...
Learning Assistants as Peer Educators in Large Online Courses
Following the graduate student worker strike of 2023, many faculty members like me were caught off guard by the sudden need for alternative instructional support. The term "learning assistant" initially brought to mind images of undergraduates serving merely as...
ChatGPT FAQs 6 Months In: A Campuswide Message from OVPTL and the Campus Writing & Communication Coordinator
This message is designed for instructors of undergraduate writing at UC Irvine (UCI), not primarily for students, staff, or field experts. It is distilled from conversations and projects happening on campus and beyond. If you...
What is College Anyway?: Supporting First-Generation Students at UCI
I still remember one of the first moments of my college orientation at UCLA in the summer before my freshman year. As a first-generation student, this was one of my few times on a college campus—it all seemed so intimidating. I felt nervous as my fellow students...
Reframing Assessment and Grading Design to Focus on Mastery Using Specifications Grading
Steve Mang Associate Professor of Teaching Department of ChemistryIn this faculty spotlight blog, I had an opportunity to interview Steve Mang, an Associate Professor of Teaching in the Chemistry department, who teaches upper-division physical and analytical...
Encourage Active Learning with Google Docs New Drop-Down Menus!
Do you love using Google Docs for creating collaborative worksheets and active learning activities for your students? Great news! Google Docs has recently released a powerful new feature that allows you to create drop-down menus (or what they call drop-down chips)...
Why we should embrace active learning
Why we should embrace active learning Three good and three bad reasons to embrace active learning, with reflections on a changing world. Many of us have either heard or experienced how active learning is a more effective way to learn compared to passive learning....