10 Effective Practices for Digital Teaching
Tip 8: Integrate Current Events and Examples into your Course
Students enjoy seeing the “real-world” relevance of what they are learning and how that links to current real-world application and events. Offering authentic learning with real world implications increases student engagement and success.
How do you do this?
- When possible, build in opportunities throughout your online discussions and provide links to current events in your weekly announcements.
- Enlist students in generating relevancy and in engaging with current trends. These resources can be posted in the discussion board to be used in future semesters. Ask students to provide links to current events relevant to the weekly/class topics.
- Investigate and implement options for experiential learning and internships, providing where possible real-world and authentic application of the concepts and topics students are learning in your course. Show them how learning gained in your course will help them in their future roles.
- Build relevance into your course. Connect unit material to current affairs and events. Encourage students to seek out and share news happenings and resources with each other using the discussion board, Padlet or even Flip. Highlight student responses that connect material from assigned readings to current events in Weekly Announcements.
- Challenge students to think about new topics from different perspectives. Ask them to find differing opinions on the same topic. Help students read critically to distinguish between the true and the questionable. Set up discussion board forums, set up conversations on a course item, use the blog tool, Padlet or Flipgrid to collect perspectives and resources and create online debates.
- Work with your GVSU library liaison to help find new resources or subject specific library guides that can be imbedded in your Ultra course to support current events. Your GVSU library liaison can even be added to your course as a teaching assistant.
