In this webinar, you will learn about the Ally Alternate Formats tool available to your students, as well as how to make quick edits to your content to ensure that students can choose their preferred format for engaging with the content. If you type content into a page in Brightspace, upload PowerPoint slides, or upload a reading in a pdf file, your students will have the option to read the content directly in Brightspace as usual, or download an mp3 version to listen to while they read or go for a walk or download an immersive reader version that helps them more deeply engage with the reading improving comprehension.

Join us to learn about some quick fixes you can make to your Brightspace content to take advantage of the Ally Alternate Formats tool to improve the learning experience for all of your students.

Create a free account to try it out. When participants enter a question or response for their chat partner on a challenging topic, Sway will evaluate the message for inflammatory or unproductive content and provide a suggested way to rephrase their post. The Sway Guide will also interject comments and prompts throughout the discussion as a facilitator and provide factual information to learners related to the content when asked.

To see it in action and hear from the developers, register for the February 19 Beyond Bots session listed in the events below.

Check it out here: 

The key finding was that watching lecture videos at up to 2x speed did not significantly reduce comprehension, either immediately or after a delay, compared to watching at normal speed. Notably, students who watched a lecture twice at double speed often performed as well as—or better than—students who watched once at normal speed, particularly on delayed tests.

Interestingly, students’ intuitions about learning did not align with outcomes. While most students believed slower playback was better for learning, their test performance showed that faster viewing was equally effective. This suggests instructors may not need to discourage increased playback speed and could instead help students think strategically about when fast review is appropriate, such as when reviewing for an exam.

For teaching practice, the study suggests that recorded lectures can support efficient learning, freeing students’ time for deeper engagement activities such as practice problems or retrieval exercises. However, the authors caution that results may not fully generalize to highly complex or technical material, where slower pacing or pausing may still be necessary.

Read the full article here:

Murphy, D. H., Hoover, K. M., Agadzhanyan, K., Kuehn, J. C., & Castel, A. D. (2022). Learning in double time: The effect of lecture video speed on immediate and delayed comprehension. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 36(1), 69–82. 

At its heart, teacher confirmation answers the student’s unspoken question: “Do I matter here?”

Instructors demonstrate willingness to engage by signaling availability, openness, and approachability. For example, inviting questions during class without signaling impatience or posting weekly instructor announcements. Instructors demonstrate recognition by showing awareness of students as individuals. For example, referencing a student’s earlier contribution in class or addressing students by name in discussion replies. Instructors demonstrate acknowledgement by validating student contributions, questions, and efforts. For example, paraphrasing student comments before responding or acknowledging effort even when answers are incomplete. Instructors demonstrate endorsement when they express belief in students’ ability to succeed. For example, framing mistakes as part of learning or statements like “This is a solid start—you’re on the right track”.

Teacher confirmation is especially critical in online and asynchronous environments, where students can easily feel invisible or disconnected. In these contexts, confirmation must be intentional and visible, often through written tone, timely feedback, and structured interaction rather than spontaneous in-class cues.

You are invited to  by April Wright, a doctoral candidate in Communication Studies at West Virginia University, that explores this concept by examining how instructors and students experience teaching behaviors that help students feel seen, heard, and valued in face-to-face and online learning environments.

Beyond course design, the IP Toolkit helps faculty support day-to-day classroom practice with concrete tools that promote equity and engagement. For instance, it offers strategies for facilitating discussions in ways that encourage participation from quieter students and prevent dominant voices from taking over. It also recommends flexible assignment structures that allow students to demonstrate learning in multiple ways—an approach that supports a wider range of learning preferences and abilities. Together, these resources make the Toolkit a useful, actionable reference for faculty seeking to improve student inclusion, engagement, and learning outcomes.

Check it out here: 

• Students in the micro-break condition consistently outperformed those in the traditional break condition on end-of-session quiz scores.
• Both groups showed decreases in performance over time (a typical vigilance or attention decline), but micro-breaks helped slow that decline, especially during the middle part of the session.
• Traditional longer breaks produced a temporary boost only immediately after the break, whereas micro-breaks helped maintain a steadier level of performance.

The authors interpret these results using cognitive load theory and spaced learning principles—suggesting that short, frequent breaks help manage working memory and sustain attention better than a single long break.

It’s important to note that there were no delayed tests of knowledge, so we don’t know the effects on retention of knowledge, but this research is promising. Our minds naturally wander every few minutes, so building in these breaks throughout your learning activities encourages students to spend time thinking about the content they just encountered developing more elaborate memories.

Read the full article here:

Sharpe, B.T., Trotter, M.G. &amps; Hale, B.J. 2025. Sustaining student concentration: The effectiveness of micro-breaks in a classroom setting. Frontiers in Psychology 16: 1589411. .1589411.

I used a weekly exit ticket in my courses to develop regular connections with every single one of my learners in all of my course modalities. It included a quick less-than-5 minutes reflection on their cognitive, affective, behavioral, and contextual experiences that week. I set aside 30 minutes on Monday mornings to read and comment on each one and learned a lot from my learners about their experiences in my courses and how I could better support them. This regular communication helped to ensure that no student was left behind, and we got to see our conversation mapped out over the course of the semester.

I made a copy of  for each student and shared it with them privately. If I wanted to ensure they saw my response right away, I could mention them in a comment, so they got an email notification. Feel free to copy and adapt.  to see some of the types of responses that students shared that helped me understand their learning experience

If you have large enrollment classes, you might consider objective-type questions in a Google Form that allow you to see summaries in chart form.

Key Takeaways for Faculty

• Active learning works—even when students doubt it. Students may feel uncomfortable or “lost,” but their actual learning improves.
• Student evaluations may undervalue effective teaching. Feeling of learning and actual learning can diverge; resistance doesn’t mean the approach is ineffective.
• Set expectations early. Tell students that increased effort and struggle are normal—and beneficial—in active learning.
• Support metacognition. Brief reflection activities can help students see their progress and reduce the perception gap.
• Use multiple measures of teaching effectiveness. Pair student feedback with learning assessments or performance data.

Read the full article online:

Deslauriers, L., McCarty, L.S., Miller, K., &amps; Kestin, G. (2019). Measuring actual learning versus feeling of learning in response to being actively engaged in the classroom. PNAS, 116(39). 

The Nine Cognitive Challenges & Our Suggestions

1. Cognitive Challenge: Student mental mindset — students’ attitudes, beliefs, expectations about the course, their ability, and value of the content.
   Our recommendation: Be intentional about student mindset: From day one, communicate clearly the value of the course, the relevance to students’ goals, and emphasize that ability can grow with effort (growth mindset). Setting this tone helps mitigate fixed-mindset beliefs and promotes belonging and self-efficacy.
2. Cognitive Challenge: Metacognition and self-regulation — students’ ability to monitor their own learning, judge their understanding, regulate study behaviors.
   Our recommendation: Support metacognition and self-regulation: Rather than assume students will monitor their own learning, build-in scaffolds (like study plans, exam-wrappers, reflective prompts) that ask students to reflect on what they know, what they need to do, and how they will adjust.
3. Cognitive Challenge: Student fear and mistrust — negative emotions, anxiety, and lack of trust in the instructor or course that interfere with learning.
   Our recommendation: Foster trust and reduce anxiety: Create an environment of openness and fairness; explicitly explain your course policies, offer supportive feedback, allow revision when possible, and express a genuine belief in student capability. For adult learners especially, acknowledge diverse backgrounds and potential anxieties about re-entry, prior experience, or balancing responsibilities.
4. Cognitive Challenge: Insufficient prior knowledge — students may lack the necessary background or foundation to learn new content effectively.
   Our recommendation: Assess and build prior knowledge: Especially for adult learners who may have varied or interrupted educational backgrounds, assess what they bring and fill the gaps early. Low-stakes pre-quizzes, review tasks, or scaffolded assignments help ensure a more even starting line.
5. Cognitive Challenge: Misconceptions — students may hold inaccurate or deeply entrenched beliefs that interfere with learning new concepts.
   Our recommendation: Expose and correct misconceptions: Don’t assume that prior knowledge is accurate. Use diagnostic tools, ask students to predict, observe, explain (POE) experiments, and explicitly challenge common misconceptions.
6. Cognitive Challenge: Ineffective learning strategies — students may use study approaches that are inefficient or counter-productive (e.g., highlighting, rereading).
   Our recommendation: Teach effective learning strategies explicitly: Rather than assuming students know how to learn, model and embed strategies like retrieval practice, spaced practice, self-explanation, elaboration. This is especially useful for adult learners who may default to habits from earlier schooling.
7. Cognitive Challenge: Transfer of learning — students often fail to apply what they’ve learned in one context to new or novel contexts (near/far transfer).
   Our recommendation: Design for transfer — not just for content mastery: Encourage students to apply concepts in new contexts. Use varied examples, encourage analogy, scaffold tasks that require application, and help students reflect on how what they learned in your class might connect beyond it (e.g., their workplace, future courses, real-world problems).
8. Cognitive Challenge: Constraints of selective attention — students’ limited capacity to focus, susceptibility to distractions, multitasking issues.
   Our recommendation: Manage attention and minimize distractions: In online or in-person settings, pay attention to how easily students can become distracted or multitask. Use frequent re-orientation to topic, build in short breaks, keep one clear focus at a time, and design activities that require active engagement rather than passive listening.
9. Cognitive Challenge: Constraints of mental effort and working memory — limits on how much new information students can process at once; cognitive overload.
   Our recommendation: Reduce cognitive load and structure information clearly: Recognize that students’ working memory is limited. Present material in manageable chunks, use advance organizers (outlines, conceptual roadmaps), use dual-modality (verbal + visual) thoughtfully, avoid “seductive details” that distract, and gradually build complexity as students’ automaticity grows.

This framework reminds us that there is no one “best method” for all students and all contexts. Effective teaching involves diagnosing which challenges are most relevant to your specific learners and adapting practices accordingly.

Read the full article online:

Chew & Cerbin (2020). The cognitive challenges of effective teaching. The Journal of Economic Education, 52(1). 

The findings suggest that understanding the experiences of distance learners as they study in the home are important for effective course design. More specifically, working mothers face significant distractions in their study environments, but the cognitive load can be reduced by making use of their prior knowledge, scaffolding instruction, and encouraging social presence. Additional strategies from the literature that address these constructs are provided for instructors and instructional designers.

Read the full study here:

Fensie, A., St. Pierre, T., Jain, J., & Sezen-Barrie, A. (2023). Engaged learning during distraction: A case study of successful working moms in distance education. Journal of Computing in Higher Education, 36, 1–46.