The Innovative Instructor is a print series for articles on teaching excellence at Johns Hopkins University. Written by Hopkins faculty or campus instructional technology experts, the goal is to increase communication about effective teaching solutions and how to achieve them. Through these articles, instructors can share successful teaching strategies, learn what colleagues are doing, and discover new technologies and skills for the classroom or professional development. To learn more about this series or to write an article, contact cerweb@jhu.edu or call Cheryl Wagner at 410-516-7181.
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February 2018
Best Practice #17
Amy Brusini,
Instructional Technology Specialist, Center for Educational Resources
Writing test questions is a daunting task for many instructors. It can be challenging to correctly assess students on the comprehension of course objectives. Multiple choice questions are no exception; despite being very popular, instructors often struggle to create well-constructed questions.
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February 2018
Pedagogy #17
Scott Smith,
Professor, Computer Science, JHU
Grading can be one of the most time consuming and tedious aspects of teaching a course, but it’s important to give prompt and meaningful feedback to your students. In large courses, aligning grading practices across multiple teaching assistants (TAs) necessitates a level of coordination that includes scheduling grading meetings, reviewing materials for correct answers, and calibrating point evaluations, all of which can take up valuable time during the semester.
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February 2018
Technology #17
John Hickey,
PhD Candidate, Biomedical Engineering, JHU
Tcrunch is a mobile application that enables more efficient and frequent instructor-student communication. You can think of it as an electronic version of the teaching strategy called an exit ticket. A traditional exit ticket is a 3x5 index card given to students at the end of class; the instructor asks a question to solicit formative feedback from the students. With Tcrunch you can do the same thing, but the app eliminates the paper, performs all collecting and analyzing activities in real-time, and emails the results to you.
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July 2017
Best Practice #16
Richard Shingles,
Lecturer, Biology Department
Michael J. Reese Jr.,
Director, Center for Educational Resources
Effective teaching starts with thoughtful course planning. The first step in preparing a course is to clearly define your course learning goals. These goals describe the broad, overarching expectations of what students should be able to do by the end of the course, specifically what knowledge students should possess and/or what skills they should be able to demonstrate. Instructors use goals to design course assignments and assessments, and to determine what teaching methods will work best to achieve the desired outcomes.
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August 2017
Pedagogy #16
Marian Feldman,
Professor, Art History and Near Eastern Studies
One of the more challenging aspects in developing a new course is choosing an appropriate educational technology to achieve my learning goals. The material in my course “Creating Sacred Space in the Ancient and Medieval World” lent itself to a visually focused approach to help students understand these sacred spaces and interpret the intents of their creators and builders. The course engaged students with undertaking their own research about ancient spaces and the culture that surrounds them by studying floor plans, technical drawings, photographs, and other relevant images. Ideally, the way to explore broad questions about what makes a place sacred and how it differs from other spaces is to include visual references to provide spatial context that can be aligned with material meaning.
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August 2017
Technology #16
Reid Sczerba,
Multimedia Developer, CER
SketchUp is a three-dimensional rendering application that uses a sketch-based approach for creating models. It may be beneficial to anyone looking to visualize three-dimensional structures, spaces, or objects. With a free-to-use version available for download, SketchUp is an affordable way to develop 3D models. It is easy to learn compared to professional 3D graphic software packages.
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May 2017
Best Practice #15
Reid Sczerba,
Multimedia Developer, CER, JHU
Visual design, in the form of advertisements, entertainment, functional signage, etc., can be seen everywhere. You are constantly processing visual information to make sense of the world and, often unconsciously, you place value judgements on what you see. It is important to consider this when designing or creating visual content for presentation, as there are a number of design strategies that will make that content clear, persuasive, perhaps even beautiful. Visual clarity will help to improve the delivery of the message. This article provides principles that will help you to create clear and concise visual design.
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May 2017
Pedagogy #15
Elizabeth Mendenhall,
PhD Candidate, Political Science, JHU
In the global environmental politics classroom, the problem of student attitude is often acute: students of global environmental governance are particularly prone to negative emotional reactions, including feelings of helplessness and hopelessness, which can engender apathy and cynicism.
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May 2017
Technology #15
Bonni Wittstadt,
Geospatial Service Librarian, MSE Library
ArcGIS is a powerful data mapping application that helps you visualize, analyze, and understand spatial data mapped to a coordinate system. Used in the sciences, engineering, and the humanities ArcGIS can reveal relationships, patterns, and trends related to physical spaces in ways that may not have been initially apparent. In addition to mapping objects on the Earth’s surface, there are 3D solutions that allow above and below surface examination. It is also possible to work on expansive scale, e.g., the universe or on a small scale, e.g., the human body. In essence, if it can be mapped, ArcGIS is the tool to use.
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July 2016
Best Practice #14
Richard Shingles,
Lecturer, Biology Department
Traditionally instructors have used assessments such as midterm exams, final projects or papers, or recitals to measure how much students have learned up to a particular point in time. These are referred to as summative assessments; the goal is to evaluate student learning at the end of an instructional unit. However, many instructors use assessments throughout the semester to help students identify their strengths and weaknesses. These activities are called formative assessments and are generally low stakes, meaning that they have low or no point value. Formative assessments focus on learning and teaching, rather than on evaluation or grading.
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July 2016
Pedagogy #14
Jennifer Kingsley,
Lecturer and Assistant Director, Museums and Society
Humanities scholarship has made progress in examining the usefulness and effectiveness of digital tools for addressing core disciplinary questions and for launching inquiries that stimulate new interdisciplinary perspectives. Fewer models exist for integrating digital research approaches into teaching, particularly around objects. Yet digital technologies have transformed how we create knowledge about and how we experience things.
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July 2016
Technology #14
Reid Sczerba,
Multimedia Developer, Center for Educational Resources
Reveal is a web application for annotating images with multimedia content. Using Reveal, you can create a website where highlighted areas, called hotspots or annotations, placed on an image link to other pages with images, audio, and/or video resources. Because the application allows you to build a hierarchical website, the individual pages created can be annotated further with hotspots that link to ‘child pages’, allowing you to express another level of information. For example, a map of the United States could have hotspots that provide links to pages of regional maps, which in turn may contain their own hotspots. The application is particularly useful for expressing visual relationships and spatial context.
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December 2015
Best Practice #13
Richard Shingles,
Lecturer, Biology Department
Effective teaching depends upon effective planning and design. The first step in preparing a high quality course is to clearly define your educational goals, which are your broad, overarching expectations for student learning and performance at the end of your course. The next step is to determine your learning objectives by writing explicit statements that describe what the student(s) will be able to do at the end of each class or course module. This includes the concepts they need to learn, and the skills they need to acquire and be able to apply.
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December 2015
Pedagogy #13
Anindya Roy,
Postdoc, Department of Materials Science and Engineering
In the fall of 2014 I taught a course, Stuff of Dreams: How Advances in Materials Science Shape the World, in the new Whiting School of Engineering Hopkins Engineering Applications & Research Tutorials (HEART) program. The program introduces undergraduates to engineering research in specific disciplines in a small class taught by advanced graduate students or postdoctoral fellows. The classes meet once a week for two hours for six weeks. The challenge of teaching these one credit, pass/fail courses with no requirement of the students beyond class attendance, is getting the students engaged.
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April 2015
Best Practice #12
Richard Shingles,
Lecturer, Biology Department
Created in 1956 by Benjamin Bloom and his collaborators, the “Taxonomy of Educational Objectives” is a framework to categorize educational goals. It originally consisted of six categories: Knowledge, Comprehension, Application, Analysis, Synthesis, and Evaluation. The categories after Knowledge were presented as “skills and abilities” with the understanding that knowledge was the necessary precondition for putting these skills and abilities into practice.
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April 2015
Pedagogy #12
Kathryn Tifft,
Lecturer, Biology Department
Clickers, also known as in-class polling or voting systems, can be used in large lecture courses as a way to promote active learning. Using a small hand-held device, students answer questions posed by the instructor. Their answers are recorded by a software application on the instructor’s computer and can be shared with the class to provide immediate feedback. Recent educational professional development inspired my colleagues and me to leverage the benefits of clickers by improving, expanding, and diversifying clicker questions to increase student learning in our lecture courses.
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April 2015
Technology #12
Reid Sczerba,
Multimedia Developer, Center for Educational Resources
Piazza is an online question and answer style discussion board that offers useful features for facilitating communication among students, teaching assistants, and instructors. It provides a means to gauge student understanding of course concepts and allows instructors to engage with the students in an intuitive way in real time.
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November 2014
Best Practice #11
Louise Pasternack,
Teaching Professor, Chemistry
Instructors have many tasks to perform during the semester. Among those is grading, which can be subjective and unstructured. Time spent constructing grading rubrics while developing assignments benefits all parties involved with the course: students, teaching assistants and instructors alike. Sometimes referred to as a grading schema or matrix, a rubric is a tool for assessing student knowledge and providing constructive feedback. Rubrics are comprised of a list of skills or qualities students must demonstrate in completing an assignment, each with a rating criterion for evaluating the student’s performance. Rubrics bring clarity and consistency to the grading process and make grading more efficient.
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November 2014
Pedagogy #11
Bill Leslie,
Professor, Department of Science and Technology
Even the smartest undergraduates need to be taught that everything worth knowing won’t be found on a smart phone. Luckily, the Homewood campus offers endless opportunities for teaching from primary sources. The Hamburger Special Collections and Archives has everything from rare books, official university records, and historic photographs to films and artifacts, including a growing collection devoted to undergraduate life. Beyond the library there’s another world of primary documents to discover-artwork, memorials, even the very buildings where our students live and learn. With the right tools, and some help from the Center for Educational Resources (CER), I tried to bring these sources to life for the students and get them out of the classroom to experience the campus in an entirely new way.
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November 2014
Technology #11
Macie Hall,
Instructional Designer, Center for Educational Resources
Prezi is a free, cloud-based, presentation tool that allows users to place content on a screen in non-linear order. Prezi uses a Zooming User Interface (ZUI) to enable navigation and display of content. ZUI is a term used in computing to describe a graphical environment wherein users can change the size of a viewing area by enlarging or reducing it, navigate by panning across a surface, and zoom in and out of content.
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April 2014
Best Practice #10
Richard Shingles,
Lecturer, Biology Department
A course syllabus can be more than a list of class topics and readings. It can give students an immediate sense of what the course will be about, what they will learn, and how they will be evaluated. A syllabus can provide students with an clear understanding of expectations, course support, and proper conduct in class. It is a students’ "first impression" of your course, which will resonate through the semester and excite them about the course content they will soon learn.
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April 2014
Pedagogy #10
Dr. Alexios Monopolis,
Lecturer, Earth and Planetary Science
When I started teaching at Hopkins, Blackboard was offered as the course management system and most faculty seemed to be using it as their primary means of communication with students. Although Blackboard has some useful functions, I was looking for a different set of utilities – ideally, a class communication solution that students would find intuitive, easy to use, and interactive. Facebook is an application that most students are already quite familiar with and have incorporated into their daily lives. It became the obvious choice to help connect and engage my students outside of our formal in-class hours.
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April 2014
Technology #10
Brian Cole,
Senior Information Technologist, Center for Educational Resources
Panopto is a service that enables easy video capture, streaming, and sharing. While traditionally categorized as a lecture capture service, Panopto can do much more.
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September 2013
Best Practice #9
Reid Sczerba,
Multimedia Developer, Center for Educational Resources
The term ‘cloud’ refers to storing files on a remote server. Services such as Dropbox, Google Drive, and OneDrive provide cloud storage that keeps your files secure and backed up, ensuring that they are available when you need them. Access to your files will require an internet connection on your computer or mobile
device. Such services typically offer a small amount of storage for free with fees charged for upgrading the services. Fortunately for Hopkins faculty, students, and staff, IT@JH offers a cloud storage service called JHBox with at least 25 gigabytes of storage per user at no cost.
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September 2013
Pedagogy #9
Mike J. Reese,
Associate Director, Center for Educational Resources
Dr. Julie Schell,
Educational Researcher, Harvard University
Instructors often seek student-centered, active-learning teaching practices. These teaching methods are intended to increase student retention and engagement but the ways in which they are implemented is important for success.
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September 2013
Technology #9
Brian Cole,
Senior Information Technologist, Center for Educational Resources
Turnitin is a web-based service for detecting plagiarism and improper citations in studentsubmitted work. Johns Hopkins University has a multi-year subscription to Turnitin. All instructors in the Whiting School Engineering and the Krieger School of Arts & Sciences are covered by this subscription. There are no limits on the number of classes or number of student papers checked. Over 450 JHU faculty are registered Turnitin users, and in the past year, over 12,000 papers have been submitted to Turnitin to check for originality.
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April 2013
Best Practice #8
Mike J. Reese,
Associate Director, Center for Educational Resources
Instructors choose grading schemes for a variety of reasons. Some may select a method that reflects the way they were assessed as students; others may follow the lead of a mentor or senior faculty member in their department. To curve or not to curve is a big question. Understanding the motivations behind and reasons for curving or not curving grades can help instructors select the most appropriate grading schemes for their courses.
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April 2013
Pedagogy #8
Rebecca Pearlman,
Senior Lecturer, Department of Biology
Getting students to participate in class discussions is a common challenge. Every instructor has faced the dreaded silence after posing a question. Active learning activities can stimulate student engagement, but they can be difficult to implement in classrooms that were designed for lectures - fixed seating inhibits opportunities for collaborative exercises such as group work and discussion.
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April 2013
Technology #8
Amy Brusini,
Instructional Technology Specialist, Center for Educational Resources
VoiceThread is web-based presentation software that allows users to create and share interactive multimedia slideshows. VoiceThread presentations are used to showcase audio, video, images, and documents while allowing users to comment on them in a variety of different ways. The result is a digital conversation that can be easily shared with individuals, groups, and/or embedded into different websites, including Blackboard, the course management system used here at Homewood.
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August 2012
Best Practice #7
Pam Sheff,
Senior Lecturer, Center for Leadership Education
Leslie Kendrick,
Senior Lecturer, Center for Leadership Education
One measure of successful teaching is student engagement. Instructors often find that student engagement increases when active learning strategies are implemented in the classroom. One strategy is to assign problem-based collaborative learning projects. Well-conceived group projects help students develop critical thinking skills, learn how to work in teams, and allow them to apply theories learned in the course to real-life situations, producing an appreciation for how the knowledge gained will be useful once the class is over. The end result is a richer learning experience for the students.
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August 2012
Pedagogy #7
Eric Rice,
Lecturer, Center for Leadership Education
Dr. Peter Beilenson,
Lecturer, Public Health
Eva Smith,
Undergraduate Teaching Assistant, International Studies
Although learning by doing has always been an important pedagogical tool, it may be difficult to implement in courses where the active learning takes place outside of the classroom or lab. Creating course projects that involve the community gives students a chance to affect positive social change, but working outside of a controlled environment involves unpredictable variables that can hamper the active learning experience.
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August 2012
Technology #7
Reid Sczerba,
Multimedia Developer, Center for Educational Resources
As smartphones become more commonplace, the number of small, single-purpose applications (apps) grows. These apps are functional extensions of your smartphone’s built in applications; they are powerful tools that do not require a laptop or desktop computer. While most apps are created to entertain, some are created for productivity, communication, and collaboration; all of which can enrich educational experience.
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September 2011
Best Practice #6
Amy Brusini,
Instructional Technology Specialist, CER
When Blackboard courses are created, access is restricted to members of the JHU community who are enrolled in each course (instructors, TAs, and students) and have working JHED IDs. But with the Guest Management application developed by IT@JH, it is possible to create and distribute guest login accounts that are open to anyone, including those outside of JHU.
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September 2011
Pedagogy #6
Stan Becker,
Professor of Population, Family and Reproductive Health
Nazish Zafar,
4th year Graduate Student in Sociology
In most public health courses, statistical data are central to understanding population and health indicators as they relate to issues such as fertility and life expectancy. However, raw statistical data of one country do not usually illustrate that country’s geographical relationship to other countries or reveal broader global public health patterns. Visualizing the indicators of the countries based on their locations on the map can be difficult, especially since current resources do not usually map the latest data within a global setting, which is essential for contextual and spatial analysis.
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September 2011
Technology #6
Hérica Valladares,
Assistant Professor of Classics
Macie Hall,
Instructional Designer, CER
A wiki is a webpage or website that allows collaborative editing. A wiki invites participants to take part in the creation of the site content. Typically edits are tracked and a history of the contributions can be viewed.
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March 2011
Best Practice #5
Pamela R. Bennett,
Assistant Professor of Sociology
Andrew J. Cherlin,
Professor & Chair of Sociology
Michael J. Reese,
5th Year Graduate Student in Sociology
Assessing student work in large classes can be complicated when several faculty or multiple teaching assistants share the responsibility. In a calibration exercise, multiple individuals work together to score a sample of student submissions before dividing and individually grading the remaining student work.
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March 2011
Pedagogy #5
Kyle McCarter,
Professor, Near Eastern Studies Department
In an epigraphy course students learn to decipher and analyze inscriptions and manuscripts using traditional philological tools. The ultimate goals are to translate and interpret texts, but before they can begin to do those things, students need to become familiar with the physical characteristics of the ancient documents we study, especially the shape and other features of the writing itself. So our first job is to enhance the students' ability simply to "see" ancient writing, and this can be a challenge when using traditional tools.
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March 2011
Technology #5
Richard Shingles,
Lecturer, Biology
In-class voting systems, also known as "clickers," allow instructors to rapidly collect and analyze student responses to questions posed during class. Clickers can make a class more engaging and encourage students, who often refrain from answering oral questions in class, to contribute to class dialog on questions posed by the instructor. Instructors can also obtain real-time feedback as to how well students understand concepts taught in the class.
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September 2010
Best Practice #4
Reid Sczerba,
Multimedia Developer, CER
Image resolution is a concept that always comes up when working with digital images. The resolution of an image has implications for the final output of the image, whether that output is a printed poster or an image on a website. An understanding of image resolution ensures that the end result is clear, crisp, and of an appropriate file size.
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September 2010
Pedagogy #4
Dr. Pier Massimo Forni,
German and Romance Languages and Literatures
Faculty profession of knowledge used to rest on the firm foundation of the principle of authority. Most students granted their teachers respect and sometimes deference as a matter of course. That foundation has been crumbling for at least three generations. The new digital technology has virtually razed it. As college teachers, it is imperative that we realize what this means for our relationship with our students and for the future of education.
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September 2010
Technology #4
Macie Hall,
Instructional Designer, CER
Facebook is an online social networking service, designed to enable users to build communities of people who share interests. Social networking services provide different ways for users to interact online through tools such as virtual bulletin boards, blogs, wikis, e-mail, and instant messaging. Users can also share content, such as photos and videos. The name "Facebook" comes from the term for printed directories of student pictures and information distributed each year to incoming college freshmen so that they can identify each other.
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March 2010
Best Practice #3
Adrienne Lai,
Art Libraries Society of North America Intern
Strategic use of images in the classroom helps engage students who have grown up in a media-rich environment. Digital technology makes images more readily available and easier to incorporate into teaching and learning materials.
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March 2010
Pedagogy #3
Michael Falk,
Associate Professor, Materials Science & Engineering
Applied science programming courses typically involve the instructor writing examples of code during class as students follow along at their computers. Students may occasionally work through simple examples on their own, but they spend most of class passively watching the instructor.
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March 2010
Technology #3
Amy Brusini,
Instructional Technology Specialist, CER
Blackboard is a web-based course management system that allows instructors to present course material and interact with students in an online environment. Depending on the instructor’s needs, Blackboard can be used either to supplement face to face courses or present courses entirely online.
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November 2009
Best Practice #2
Dr. Pier Massimo Forni,
German and Romance Languages and Literatures
If you have been dealing with student attitudes that mix disengagement with disregard, you are not alone. Millions of educators around the world are in your position. One way to improve the situation is to make your expectations explicit
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November 2009
Pedagogy #2
Dr. Stephen Plank,
Sociology
The complementary relationship between teaching and research was integral to President Gilman’s vision in establishing Johns Hopkins. Great researchers bring new ideas and practices into the classroom for the benefit of students, who can in turn contribute to new discoveries by engaging in the research process.
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November 2009
Technology #2
Adrienne Lai,
Art Libraries Society of North America Intern
ARTstor is a non-profit digital image library available through the JHU Libraries. It consists of over a million images, along with essential data, of subject matter relevant to many disciplines. Despite its name, ARTstor isn’t just pictures of art or humanitiescentric. It contains images that are of great value for didactic and illustrative purposes in the social sciences, basic sciences and engineering.
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August 2009
Best Practice #1
Richard Shingles,
Director of the TA Training Institute
The Teaching Assistant Training Institute consists of a team of professionals managed by the Center for Educational Resources to provide general instructional training for full-time graduate and undergraduate students with teaching assignments in the Krieger School of Arts & Sciences or the Whiting School of Engineering
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August 2009
Pedagogy #1
Dr. Elizabeth Rodini,
History of Art, Museums and Society
Many survey courses cover a lot of ground with little time available to probe individual topics in depth. A 200 level introductory course that provides an overview of 500 years of museum history with political, social, and cultural implications, for example, offers few opportunities to explore topics in depth
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August 2009
Technology #1
Mike Reese,
Director, Center for Educational Resources
The Timeline Creator software allows instructors, students, and researchers without multimedia development skills to develop an interactive timeline for teaching or presentation purposes. The resulting timeline can be published on the World Wide Web, through BlackBoard or other content management systems, or presented directly from a computer
