Based on feedback from my students, and guidance from my university, I have decided to make the rest of my survey course entirely asynchronous. I will hold optional collaborative discussions, but everything that is graded or otherwise required can be completed independently and with limited technological requirements. I am erring on the side of accessibility…

I, like most of you, will be teaching online for the rest of the semester. As part of my preparation, I read through the TUSH archive to steal ideas from some of our bloggers. Here’s a list of some of my favorite posts about teaching online. Teaching US History Online: Some Reflections by Kevin Gannon…

Carol Goodman is the author of fourteen novels and the winner of many literary prizes. She teaches creative writing at The New School and SUNY New Paltz. Her work frequently engages the past, including her latest novel The Metropolitans. This winter, I sent her a handful of questions about how she understands and employs history…

My university’s Center for Teaching and Learning has created reading groups in each of the university’s eight schools. The reading group for the School of Arts and Humanities has decided to read Linda B. Nilson’s Specifications Grading: Restoring Rigor, Motivating Students, and Saving Faculty Time (2015). Nilson proposes a grading system called specs grading that…

A recent Los Angeles Book Review piece argues that the digital humanities’ “most significant contribution to academic politics may lie in its (perhaps unintentional) facilitation of the neoliberal takeover of the university.” The article has series flaws, and insightful reactions have come from Matthew Kirshbaum, Alan Liu, and (I have to acknowledge UTD graduate) Michele Rosen. I am participating this…

I am teaching introductory digital humanities courses this spring at both the undergraduate and graduate level. Both courses have three goals. Students will engage in scholarly conversation on the key issues in the field. Students will learn to critically evaluate works of digital scholarship. Students produce a piece of original digital scholarship. We recently pivoted…

A few months ago, someone invited me to a hidden Facebook group for college-level instructors to ask questions, share successes, and vent frustrations. I recently left this group after having enough of the unceasing student-bashing. The most common complaint among these instructors is similar to the one I hear most from friends and colleagues, “these…

History came alive for me when, as an undergraduate, I learned that historians argue. I was already a history nerd who enjoyed learning (really, memorizing) the names and dates of the past. But the sense of satisfaction I derived from “knowing” the past paled before the enthusiasm I experienced when I began “engaging” history by…

Two and a half weeks ago, Molly Worthen published a much-discussed op-ed in the New York Times. I am a big fan of Worthen’s scholarship. Her 2013 study Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism is the best of many intellectual histories of modern evangelicalism. This semester, I am reading through academic…

Last month I complained about the anti-intellectualism exhibited when historians dismiss and even disparage research in teaching and learning. This semester I am trying to read through research in several pedagogy journals including, The Review of Higher Education, Review of Educational Research, Contemporary Educational Psychology, Learning and Instruction, and Educational Research Review. My first observation is that faculty can control…