recent posts
- Hello, World!
- At Play in the Classroom for Thirty-Five Years: Recollections and Recommendations for Keeping Our Spirits—and Our Students—Soaring
- Reaching every student in your General Education class
- Classroom Stories: Teaching Astronomy to Primarily Non-science Students in Group-setting Activities, by Sandi Brenner (Bryant University)
- JWST Carina Nebula
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Category: Classroom Stories
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By Ana Larson Ana Larson, co-author of the Learning Astronomy by Doing Astronomy workbook, returns this week to discuss cheating in online courses. Those of us who have taught introductory astronomy in a classroom are quite aware of the number of ways students can cheat (a one-word catch-all for "academic dishonesty"). None of us should be…
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By Ana Larson This week, we have a guest post by Ana Larson, co-author of the Learning Astronomy by Doing Astronomy workbook, from the University of Washington. First, an introduction: twenty-two years ago (1998), as adjunct faculty, I developed an online course for Seattle Central College (SCC), which was Seattle Central Community College (SCCC) at the…
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By Stacy Palen This fall feels weird. Really, really weird. Watching the pandemic erupt at higher-education institutions all around the country has filled me with anxiety: for my students, for my colleagues, and for myself. I feel very lucky that my University is primarily a commuter campus, so we are insulated from at least some…
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By Stacy Palen I don’t know about you, but I have learned more about my students’ living situation in the last six weeks than I have any right to know. I learned that one of my students was homeless and living in her car. I learned that one of my students is living in his…
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By Stacy Palen We are just past finals here at Weber State, and we have been having a lot of discussions about how the transition to online learning went. Among those discussions is a big piece about student cheating. This was prompted by a faculty member who has taught the online astronomy course for a…
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By Stacy Palen I remember when I was in school, things would occasionally go badly, or at least unexpectedly, and a teacher would often say “It’s a learning experience; it builds character!” Well. Here we are in the midst of a global pandemic, building character all over the place! My university is in finals week,…
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By Stacy Palen Before we all were sent home because of COVID-19, my class completed a short in-class activity that was intended to prepare them for the study of stellar spectra. This activity can also be done by students taking online courses, although the big advantage of doing them in class is that it gives…
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By Stacy Palen Typically, I lecture about light as a wave by showing students images of waves and describing wavelength, frequency, and velocity. Then I tell them that wavelength and color go together; that light of a particular color has a particular wavelength. However, when we would get to the Light and Spectra activity, it…
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By Stacy Palen & John Armstrong This week, we have a guest post from a colleague at Weber State University. John Armstrong is also teaching in the inadequate classroom. He is experimenting with a way to fill the time while he figures out what’s changed about the A/V situation since the last class two days…
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By Stacy Palen The phases of the Moon are one of those topics that has been extensively studied by the astronomy education research community and is well-known to be more complex than most people think. There’s the change of perspective from Earth-view to space-view. There are multiple motions at once (the rotation of Earth and…
Teaching Astronomy by Doing Astronomy 