Like many faculty members, I know that the research suggests a blended or flipped approach to learning (where students do some work outside of class time e.g. by watching videos or doing readings, and spend the in-class time working on problems and actively engaging with material) is better by far than only using classes for lectures where students absorb information passively. The thing that always held me back from applying this approach was the enormous amount of time and effort it would take to create that out-of-class content.

But over the last year, like many faculty...

In Winter 2020, my large introductory undergrad course went online abruptly for the last three weeks. Luckily as a core course there was already online course material available, and we were able to pivot fairly painlessly. In Spring 2020 I taught two small grad courses, and we did them completely synchronously so not much needed to change. But for the Fall 2020 term, when I was scheduled to teach a mid-size upper-year undergrad course, I needed to think very intentionally about how I was going to design it.

The Math faculty expressed a strong preference for asynchronous...

I've given several presentations this term (and watched several dozen more!) about academic integrity in online teaching. This post is some of the thoughts which became my recent presentation on the subject at the Actuarial Research Conference. You can find the video of the talk here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3IL2a7L1WEw and slides attached to this post.

First of all, cheating is not necessarily higher in online courses just because they are online. Cheating has many causes, including students being...

It has been several months since the READI course on Interactive Teaching in Actuarial Science, and it feels a little bit like a dream, it was such a whirlwind experience. In this post I’ll try to collect some of my thoughts about how it went and what I learned.

On the first morning, I met my students for the first time at breakfast, and then we headed to the seminar room. The room had a projector, a small whiteboard, and a pair of flip charts, which worked well for what I had planned. I organized the students into groups of 5-8 people each to facilitate the discussion phases...