Resources

Becoming a Reflective Teacher

As an instructor, you never teach the exact same class twice. Different students bring different interests, values, expectations, and abilities that require you to adjust what you do and how you do it. Over time, you also adjust as you learn more about what makes for an effective and engaging educational experience. Adding an intentional reflective component to the changes you make can be a powerful way of helping you understand the impact of what you do in the classroom.

Canvas Scavenger Hunt

This scavenger hunt is designed to get you thinking about the challenges that students may face when navigating your Canvas course.

Instructor Bias Self Reflection

Being an inclusive educator requires thinking critically about the role that your personal biases may play in the classroom. This self-reflection is designed to help you analyze how student characteristics such as race, gender, disability status, or age might be affecting your interactions with students.

Effectively Using Students' Cognitive Resources

Reducing cognitive load is effective for everyone's learning but is particularly important to improve learning for students who bring a higher level of cognitive load with them to the classroom.

Promoting Equity in the Classroom

Promoting equity in the classroom is essential to fulfilling the university's mission of educating all students. There are a number of structural and societal systems in place that can make classroom equity challenging unless instructors are intentional about implementing strategies to increase equity. Below are instructor-, student-, and course development-focused strategies instructors can implement to help better ensure that their courses are educating all students.

Classroom Practices

Inclusive teaching tends to improve learning for all students, even when used to address a specific goal or challenge.

Infusing Diversity and Inclusion Related Content

These strategies can help you thoughtfully and meaningfully integrate diversity and inclusion in your courses to both deepen students' understanding and enhance their sense of belonging.

Designing Effective Discussions about Diversity

These strategies help conversations about diversity, equity, and inclusion be more effective.

Dealing with Incivility and Microaggressions

Ways to reduce and address incivility and microaggressions in the classroom.

Supporting Specific Groups of Students

To be truly inclusive, we need to encourage students to bring their full selves into the classroom.

Trauma-Informed Practice

Trauma-informed practice intentionally creates space for equitable academic achievement and success for all students..

Assignments and Assessments

Thoughtfully designing assessments and using inclusive grading practices can substantially impact student success.

Relationships and Academic Belonging

Fostering relationships with your students and creating opportunities for students to connect with one another is often an essential precondition for learning to occur.

AI Exchange Blog

AI Exchange is a blog modeled on an open access journal aiming to support discussion at UNL about the use of AI in teaching and education. It will contain articles, essays, tutorials, along with any feedback, e.g., “letters to the editors” in response to any of the postings.

We hope that readers and writers will find and share ways to use AI for the benefit of their students and themselves.

Flexibility: What to consider in attendance policies

There are many types of attendance policies - use this guide to learn more about options and understand policies may impact students.

Flexibility: What to consider in late work policies

Late work policies depend on factors such as the discipline, course level, enrollment size, and instructor educational philosophy.

UNL Learning Analytics Inquiry

The aim of this page is to connect you with the right people and the right data.

Developing course policies around A.I.

Key considerations and examples for creating an A.I. policy for your course(s).

At Scale: Organize Content Well

Over the course of a full semester, the quantity of course materials students must navigate is significant and students often struggle to find important information, even when it seems obvious to their instructor. In fact, even instructors familiar with their naming and organizing conventions lose track of where things are from time to time.

At Scale: Use Engaging Activities

In the stereotypical high-enrollment class, one finds disengaged, bored, unmotivated students who feel lost in a crowd. This is because it is more difficult to create connections with students, and to keep them engaged, in this type of setting. But it is by no means impossible. Indeed, some high-enrollment classrooms are far more lively and engaged than a smaller class could ever be. But that is not the default experience - instructors plan carefully to create that type of experience.

At Scale: Support Students and Treat them with Respect

Because of the high student-to-instructor ratio, it is easy for students in large courses to feel under-valued. This is not always just a perception: very often, the instructor will not, in fact, know a given student's name or notice if the student exhibits signs of struggling. Likewise, because the students often do not get to know the instructor, it is easy for them to dismiss the instructor as harsh or uncaring.

At Scale: Create Practical and Effective Assessments

Common assessment and feedback challenges faced in large-enrollment classrooms include the following:

At Scale: Use Technology Intentionally

Using new, or different technologies in your class may bring a learning curve for you and your students, the potential for additional financial costs, and a variety of other challenges. However, when selected with care and purpose and implemented throughtfully, technology can help you with the heavy lifting involved with teaching a large group of students; it might help get students more engaged with lessons; and it might help you provide better support to students who need it.

At Scale: Inclusive Practices and Equitable Policies

Despite the importance of putting equitable policies in place, it is not always easy. For example, if it is seen as too difficult logistically to offer make-up exams for a large class of students, then one might implement a policy of no make-up exams: show for the scheduled exam or take a zero. Even a more moderate policy of requiring a doctor's note before one may make up a high-stakes exam, is inequitable because not all problems preventing students from attending class come with a doctor's note.

At Scale: Leverage Teaching Support

Sometimes things you want to do for pedagogical reasons can be infeasible for practical ones - very often because you cannot supply the amount of labor that would be required to complete the corresponding work. Consider one-on-one meetings. These can be a great way to get to know your students, to help them feel connected and supported, and to provide assistance tailored to exactly what each student needs.

At Scale: Strategies and Techniques for Large-Enrollment Courses

Despite an often-negative reputation, high-enrollment courses can be a positive learning experience for students and positive teaching experience for instructors. Each practice in this resource is a general response to one or more challenges of large-enrollment courses. Each section contains links to more specific guidance and actionable strategies. For assistance in implementing any practice, contact an instructional designer assigned to your college.

At Scale: Manage the Course Efficiently

This principle sounds basic and obvious, but many of the challenges instructors face in high-enrollment courses stem from management missteps, not pedagogical approaches. If something causes confusion for students, it can more easily become a problem for the instructor in a large course than in a smaller one. Imagine that 5% of the students in a course decide to message the instructor because they are unclear about instructions. In a 40-student course, this is only two students. In a 400-student course, this is 20 students.

Accessibility and Universal Design for Learning

Creating accessible digital content allows everyone, including students with disabilities, to participate in the learning experience more fully.

Support Transgender and Non-Binary Students

March 31 is Transgender Day of Visibility. Here are five key ways to support your transgender and nonbinary students.

Request your history with the CTT

If you can't quite remember which events you attended, what year you participated in that program, or which courses instructional designers helped you with, request your CTT interaction history. We'll send you what we have on file for you.  The email address below must match the one we have on file for you. If your email address has changed, please contact ctt@unl.edu. 

What is Contract Grading?

A type of standards-based grading incorporating the use of a contract between the student and the instructor on what must be completed and to what level of mastery to earn a specific grade.

What is Specification Grading?

Specification grading integrates aspects of mastery grading, competency-based grading, and contract grading to ensure students meet the learning objectives for a course.

What is Mastery Grading?

The key underlying principle of mastery grading is that all students can learn, but different students will learn at different rates and need different strategies and supports to assist them in their learning.

Alternative Grading for College Courses

Explore other ways of giving feedback because traditional grading systems do not increase student motivation or interest in learning and can have negative impacts on student performance.

What is Competency-based Grading?

Competency-based grading is a type of standards-based grading that incorporates aspects of mastery grading while structuring learning into bundles or tiers that are associated with specific grades.

Teaching and Generative Artificial Intelligence like ChatGPT

This resource helps instructors think through how AI may (or may not) be used in their courses.

What is Generative Artificial Intelligence?

Generative Artificial Intelligence is a program that can create “new” content by using and referencing existing material.

What Does Generative Artificial Intelligence Mean for Higher Education?

Questions we will try to address based on the state of AI at this moment: “What does this mean for my course?” “What does this mean for my students?” and “What does this mean for academic integrity?”

How to Explore ChatGPT

A guide to getting to know ChatGPT and what one might do with it.

Classroom Implications

Generative AI may impact the workflow of both students and instructors.

Impact on Assessment Practices

As you explore various generative AI tools, you’ll notice that they are more successful with some aspects of writing than others.

FAQ

In this guide, we have detailed the responses that we think will be most helpful in responding to this tool. This section includes some additional questions you might have.

Implications Outside Higher Ed and Future Development

The reality is that generative AI will only get better and is likely to become more interconnected with the technologies we already use.

Promoting Equity in the Classroom

Intentional and thoughtful ways to implement strategies to increase equity in the classroom.

Infusing Diversity and Inclusion into Course Content

These strategies can help you integrate diversity and inclusion in your courses to deepen students' understanding and create a more inclusive classroom environment.

Fostering Relationships and Academic Belonging

Fostering relationships with your students and between students in the classroom may seem unrelated to learning but can often be an essential precondition for learning to occur. 

Inclusive Online Teaching

The principles of inclusive teaching are particularly essential for online courses because students are more likely to feel less connected with others, less engaged with class content, and less motivated.

Syllabus and Course Policies for Inclusive Teaching

The information that we include, the language we choose to use, and the expectations we set all send implicit signals to our students about our values as instructors.

Inclusive Teaching

These resources focus on ways to create a more inclusive and equitable learning environment for students.

Peer Review of Teaching

In academia, peer review is the standard for evaluating research to ensure that only high-quality research is published. Similarly, instructors give students feedback in classes because they recognize the value of students receiving feedback from an expert in the field to foster learning and skill development. With appropriate structure and intentionality, peer review of teaching allows instructors to benefit from expert feedback in the same way as students and researchers.