In this "Distance Learning" Special Issue, Errol Craig Sull introduces "Try This," a series of articles to assist distance instructors with Overcoming Teaching Challenges. This article "Teaching the Online Upper Level Student," identifies students who for the most part take courses in their major track and have a…

Engaging and motivating students in undergraduate statistics courses can be enhanced by using topical peer-reviewed publications for analyses as part of course assignments. Given the popularity of on-campus therapy dog stress-reduction programs, this topic fosters buy-in from students whilst providing information regarding the importance of mental…

To challenge resistance to required literature courses, instructors quiz students regularly on the readings; they also require examinations that ask students to define key terms, to answer background questions focused on authors and dates, to identify key passages by author/title/speaker, and to explain the thematic significance of each quotation.…

College students continue to navigate powerful literacy myths that impact their writing education, especially the belief systems that uphold standard, monolingual uses of language. In this article, the authors describe "English 391ml: Multilingualism and Literacy in Western Mass," a course that raises students' critical awareness of…

Students who understand their writing process and see themselves as writers are more likely to successfully tackle unfamiliar genres and writing tasks. In this self-study, a college English professor and two first-year college students make a case for an extended-metaphor assignment that helps students build stronger identities as writers.…

This article, as a practical guide, introduces pedagogical strategies to PETE faculty on how to teach PETE students to develop quality instructional objectives. Specifically, this article presents three pedagogical strategies: (a) Bloom's taxonomy to differentiate objective categories and their hierarchical levels, (b) Action-Condition-Criterion…

Content area literacy has an important role in helping students understand content in specific disciplines, such as mathematics. Although the strategies are not unique to each individual content area, they are often adapted for use in a specific discipline. For example, mathematicians use mathematical language to make sense of new ideas and…

Reform efforts in college teaching emphasize the importance of using innovative pedagogical approaches to make online learning more meaningful and successful. The authors present individualized project-based learning (iPBL), an innovative pedagogy derived from a traditional project-based learning (PBL) method. They describe their design model…

Access to high-quality education at scale is limited by the difficulty of providing student feedback on open-ended assignments in structured domains like programming, graphics, and short response questions. This problem has proven to be exceptionally difficult: for humans, it requires large amounts of manual work, and for computers, until…

The paper considers the particular value of focusing on the look as a medium when studying visual cultures. This focus is helpful for coming to terms with distinct understandings of the visual. To address the look as a medium, four analytical dimensions are introduced for distinguishing among separate but closely interrelated visual phenomena: the…

This essay shows how one professor teaching "Introduction to Buddhism" sought to counteract his students' view that Chinese and Tibetan forms of Buddhism represented a deviation from a "pure" Indian Buddhism rather than worthwhile forms of creativity and religiosity in themselves. A simple comparative assignment that asked a…

Student writers labeled "underprepared" by colleges often have trouble imagining themselves as scholars. Challenges these students routinely encounter include difficulty forming original insights and translating ideas to the page. Although the usage of the term "underprepared" varies across institutional contexts, the…

Artificial intelligence (AI) text generators, such as ChatGPT and Copilot, have been used for various purposes such as creating written content, writing or debugging computer code, answering questions, providing information, and improving written communication. This robust functionality of AI text generators along with the high rate of use…

Effective science instruction involves opportunities for all students to do science, including engaging in the NGSS Science and Engineering Practices through inquiry-based learning. Many students with learning disabilities have the accommodation of shortened or reduced assignments in their Individualized Educational Programs to allow them equal…

The development of the skills to read and understand scientific literature is crucial to the future success of students. A literature review project was introduced into an organic chemistry laboratory course, in which undergraduate students were asked to acquire the skills of scientific literature searching, reading, and summarizing. The course…