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Thoughts on Professional Learning: Organizing Interactions in the Online Environment

Organizing Interactions in the Online Environment By Nadia Kader Are you worried about engagement in your online class? Are you getting ready to start online instruction but are unsure how? Online instruction can be challenging even for the most seasoned practitioners. At the forefront, there is so much to consider: audience, engagement, resources, tech tools, and support. At Propel, one of our priorities is to support you in designing, developing, and delivering the best online learning possible. This article intends to discuss what transactional distance is and what the four interaction points to consider are in order to bridge the transactional distance between students and their instructors. Instructors may use this information to better design their online courses. Administrators may use this information to support online course design and instructors in improving their practice with pointed feedback and potential solutions.  Transactional distance is a theory that hypothesiz...
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Literacy Corner: Getting Started Tutoring Online

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                     Getting Started Tutoring Online                                                                      by Carrie M. Cannella                                                                       Tutoring adults online requires all of the same skills a nd approaches as tutoring in person PLUS the extra digital literacy skills for both the tutor and the learner. While it is often more challenging than tutoring in person because of this extra layer, the benefits include safety, critical at this time, and flexibility for the student. It...
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Literacy Corner: Microlearning in the Library

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  Microlearning in the Library  By Linda Martin and Carrie M. Cannella   Linda is tutoring a student who recently got a new job and now simultaneously has less time for studying and is more anxious to progress quickly in his studies. They have been talking about how to shift gears and how to learn more in less time: the constant struggle with adult learners balancing all of life’s responsibilities.  Around the same time, Propel colleagues started a discussion group about a book called Microlearning: Short and Sweet , by Karl Kapp and Robyn Defelice (learn more about the book from this podcast ). Linda jumped on board, thinking this might be the magic bullet—a way to compress her student’s lessons. She realized that there is no magic bullet; microlearning can’t replace the deeper study her student was working on. Yet she has found microlearning to be an effective addition for the learning, teaching, and tutoring repertoire.  This post will focus on how Prope...
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Thoughts on Professional Learning: What's the Buzz About Microlearning?

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What’s the Buzz About Microlearning?  By Rebecca Sherry  Microlearning. Maybe you heard this word at a recent conference. Perhaps you’ve tried out some of Propel’s microlearning offerings like Mental Health Mondays or TSTM-E’s Nine Skills Microlearning Minute . But what is microlearning, and how and why do we use it as an instructional tool? In this blog post, we’re going to investigate those questions and introduce you to some resources for implementing microlearning in your teaching. You will also see some microlearning examples embedded throughout this article as a way to demonstrate how this tool works in practice.   Microlearning Explained   Let’s start by defining microlearning. In their book Microlearning: Short and Sweet, authors Karl Kapp and Robyn Defelice (2019) synthesize several definitions found in the research in this way: Microlearning is an instructional unit that provides a short engagement in an activity intentionally designed to elicit ...
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Literacy Corner: On Emotional Literacy

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On Emotional Literacy Literacy Corner By Carrie M. Cannella We cannot tell what may happen to us in the strange medley of life. But we can decide what happens in us—how we take it, what we do with it—and that is what really counts in the end. ~Joseph Fort Newton   We are living in difficult and divisive times, yet we in adult education and literacy continue to show up and do this work in spite of what disquiets us and unnerves us. As we show up, we can practice grace and ask ourselves how we can support each other in this moment. These skills are essential for emotional literacy. Emotions impact every area of our lives: how we focus, how we learn and make decisions, how we create, how we manage relationships, how we get our work done. It shouldn’t come as any surprise that people with emotional literacy have more positive and realistic self-concepts, have more optimistic thinking, are better equipped to solve problems, and are overall more successful in life and work.  What I...
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