CrossCurrents Library
CrossCurrents is an electronic publication that offers articles on a wide range of topics related to teaching and learning in higher education. Through engaging content that encourages exploration and reflection on best practices, innovative pedagogies, and emerging trends in higher education, we try to help college teachers successfully navigate the challenges they face in today’s complex classroom.
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At the K. Patricia Cross Academy, our mission is to support faculty with easily accessible online teaching resources. As instruction is increasingly accomplished in an online environment, this edition of CrossCurrents is focused on highlighting some of the previous resources we’ve made available to instructors to aid in their development of successful, high-impact approaches to online teaching.

It’s been said that the best tool is the one you actually have with you, but how useful that tool is really comes down to whether or not you know best how to use it. Bearing that in mind, this post is aimed at helping you best utilize the online teaching resources provided by the K. Patricia Cross Academy. Video

Active learning has come of age in higher education, with many educators adopting this method of teaching in their courses and with many studies documenting its effectiveness as an instructional approach. But what is active learning anyway? And given the fact that so many of us are teaching online, what does it look like in an online course? Descriptions of

When we teach online, we have to be more intentional about sharing information about ourselves and about which information we will share. We decide, for example, whether to display a picture of ourselves or an avatar and if so, which. We have to make decisions about what personal information to put out there for students. We have to choose whether or not we want them to see and hear us. How can we make deliberate choices when creating our personas?

Faculty who have recently begun teaching online often ask: “How will I know that my online students are learning when I can’t see them?” The short answer to this question is assessment. At its most fundamental level, assessment is the action of appraising the quality of something. In teaching, assessment is used to appraise the knowledge, skills, attitudes, and beliefs

After years – even decades – of teaching onsite, many instructors are able to teach a traditional, classroom-based course without having laid out the entire course in advance. This approach doesn’t work well in the online classroom, however, as online course delivery requires more fully developing the course ahead of time. Thus, when teaching online, the process of course design is essential.