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Formal writing requires sustained focus on content and close attention to detail. For these reasons, written assignments can be an effective assessment tool in graduate courses when they are thoughtfully and purposefully designed. This guide provides recommendations for faculty who are looking to harness the pedagogical benefits of written assignments.

Sharing information via PowerPoint presentations is a long-established strategy in higher education. Designing PowerPoint presentations for online courses can pose unique challenges; however, best practices can help overcome these hurdles. With time and attention, faculty and instructional designers can create engaging and purposeful presentations with lasting value.

Many online courses focus on written communication skills, featuring discussion posts, papers, and case study reports among other assignments. However, oral communication and presentation skills are just as integral to students’ success, and, indeed, many employers list presenting as one of the most desirable skills for job candidates (Suhadi et al., 2021).

Universal Design for Learning (UDL), which has roots in Ronald Mace’s concept of Universal Design, is a pedagogical framework that supports diverse learning needs. According to CAST, the creator of the framework, UDL seeks “to improve and optimize teaching and learning for all people based on scientific insights into how humans learn” (2018). UDL is not a step-by-step curriculum plan, but rather an approach to pedagogy and curriculum development that aims to make the learning environment as accessible as possible for as many learners as possible (Derer, 2021; CAST, 2018).

Employing a variety of modes of instruction and assessment, as recommended by Universal Design for Learning (UDL) principles, can enhance the learning experience for students in quantitative courses. Diverse elements such as visual aids, interactive features, and real-world applications can complement, extend, or replace traditional lectures and exams. Since classes consist of students with varying learning preferences and strategies, using multiple modes of representation in a course promotes deeper understanding, engagement, and skill development. This piece details design elements that can be particularly impactful in quantitative courses.

Office hours, blocks of time designated for faculty and student interaction outside of any regularly scheduled class sessions, are routinely incorporated into university courses (Briody et al., 2019; Hsu et al., 2022). Such sessions are often semi-structured and optional for students, allowing faculty to provide customized support to individual learners when needs arise. This form of faculty-student interaction can support academic achievement, retention, and engagement (Griffin et al., 2014; Guzzardo et al., 2021). That office hours attendance is often at the discretion of individual students, however, can result in underutilization of this valuable supplement to required course sessions and contents (Briody et al., 2019; Griffin et al., 2014; Smith et al., 2017). The purpose of this blog is to delineate empirically guided strategies for optimizing the inclusion of office hours in university courses. In particular, we focus on office hours hosted online, as the online modality can be advantageously employed not only for courses delivered online but also for those delivered residentially.

Multimodal courses allow for exciting opportunities in course content and activities but can be, by design, less flexible than asynchronous courses and less predictable than synchronous courses. These opportunities thus come with needs for additional logistical support and flexibility, as students need both to be able to take advantage of the opportunities of synchrony and asynchrony equitably. How can you best support students in a multimodal course, providing guidance through multiple forms of interaction? This piece gives insight into what kinds of support benefit students in multimodal courses and how to provide them. We’ll end with five quick tips for supporting students that apply to almost any multimodal course.

Faculty often express concern over how to maintain personal relationships with their students in an online course space; incorporating optional synchronous elements to an online course can help “put a face” to a name. Zoom, the video conferencing tool that allows you to create synchronous experiences for their students, has become ubiquitous in educational and businesses in the past two years.

Designing a successful multimodal course means, at each step of the process, considering what each format does well—structuring the course such that each piece of content, each activity, each interaction uses the most effective delivery method available. But what does that look like in practice? This piece describes three approaches to structuring a multimodal course. In each model, asynchronous and synchronous time complement one another and further module and course objectives. Where the models differ is in the relative importance of asynchronous activities in enabling students to complete synchronous activities and vice versa.

If you’re developing a course with synchronous and asynchronous elements, you have a host of options for engaging students and delivering content. Research suggests that incorporating multiple modalities increases accessibility, engagement, and learning (Mick and Middlebrook, 2015; Margolis et al., 2017). With that said, it is important to be intentional about multimodal course design. Both synchronous and asynchronous methods of delivery are effective, but activities can be better suited to one or the other modality and synchronous time is often limited. Delivering selected content asynchronously can support students’ understanding of how information is organized and leave more time for interactivity in synchronous sessions.