Teaching Best Practices

The Faculty Assessment and Development team distributes brief teaching tips every two weeks during the Fall and Spring semesters. The purpose of this series is to promote professional development by sharing evidence-based practices that can be implemented in your classroom. 

Many faculty at SPS are teaching online for the first time, while others are considering the possibility. If you're one of these instructors, it's important to take a few key factors into consideration in order to ensure teaching online is as enjoyable and rewarding for you as it can be.

There are a number of critical items you need to make sure are in place before classes begin: paperwork and class information; your syllabus; library reserves, textbooks, and other course resources; your Canvas course site; getting familiar with your classroom; and more.

Columbia University promotes diversity and inclusion, both inside and outside of the classroom. One of the most important ways that faculty and staff can support these principles is by ensuring that course content (documents, PDFs, presentations, images, video, audio) meets digital accessibility standards. 

The hybrid flexible, or HyFlex, course format is an instructional approach that combines face-to-face (F2F) and online learning. Each class session and learning activity is offered in-person, synchronously online via Zoom, and asynchronously online. This page contains regularly updated tips for best practices for HyFlex teaching.

Remote teaching is undertaken for the sake of instructional continuity and faculty usually have had less time to consider all of the technical, logistical or pedagogical elements of the class. These resources will support you as you prepare to teach remotely, and are intended to make the process go as smoothly as possible.

Participate in online, interactive workshops on topics such as Hyflex Teaching, Effective Design for Online Environments, Inclusive Teaching and many more.