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.


  • Featured Collection: Online Teaching
Answers to Key Questions on Designing Effective Online Discussions THE K. PATRICIA CROSS ACADEMY.
Answers to Key Questions on Designing Effective Online Discussions

Designing effective online discussion boards can be a challenge. While some discussion boards can be fruitful grounds for conversation, others fall flat and feel forced and stale. The design of the board is critical to ensuring a successful online conversation. During the design process, we encourage you to consider the following questions. 1. What learning goal do you want students

Reflecting on Remote & Online Teaching Making Meaning and Moving Forward THE K. PATRICIA CROSS ACADEMY
Reflecting on Remote and Online Teaching: Making Meaning and Moving Forward

For years we have acknowledged that college teaching has gotten tougher, but the abrupt shift to remote teaching in response to the COVID-19 pandemic presented instructors with even more challenges. As colleges and universities struggled to deal with the crisis in the spring of 2020, some professors had only a week’s or even a weekends’ notice to restructure their classes

Meaningful Peer Interaction Combatting Isolation in Online Courses THE K. PATRICIA CROSS ACADEMY
Meaningful Peer Interaction: Combatting Isolation in Online Courses

It’s common knowledge for any educator who has taught online that it can be a significant challenge for students who are learning online to develop feelings of connection with their peers and teacher. Feelings of isolation when learning online have been around for as long as online learning has existed. In this article, we examine three key ways to combat that sense of isolation and encourage meaningful peer interaction.

Blended Learning: 7 Steps for Success The K. Patricia Cross Academy
Blended Learning: 7 Steps to Success

As colleges and universities look for new ways to improve both student learning and the student experience, blended courses are becoming increasingly common. A combination of onsite and online instruction, there is no single approach to blended learning. With any definition, the key to blended learning is the combination of onsite and online instruction. Educators in different geographic regions have

4 Ways to Improve Your Online Teaching THE K.PATRICIA CROSS ACADEMY
4 Ways to Improve Your Online Teaching

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.

7 Steps to Help Students Care About Learning During a Time of Crisis THE K. PATRICIA CROSS ACADEMY
7 Steps to Help Students Care About Learning During a Time of Crisis

The COVID-19 pandemic and its surrounding political climate find us all in a time of crisis. Teachers and students alike are often caring for family members, friends, and themselves. It seems simple common sense that students who really care about what they are learning will invest the time and effort required to learn it well and remember it longer. So how do we help students focus their care on learning, during a crisis, during an age of significant distraction?

From PCK to TPACK: Essential Knowledge for Teaching Online THE K. PATRICIA CROSS ACADEMY
From PCK to TPACK: Essential Knowledge for Teaching Online

Few of us have had formal opportunities to learn about teaching online. As a result, we often lack a full understanding, or even a good practical sense, of the look, pacing, and feel of an online course. But to teach online well, we need such knowledge. Lee Shulman, educational psychologist and former president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement

8 Time Management Tips for Online Teaching THE K.PATRICIA CROSS ACADEMY
8 Time Management Tips for Online Teaching

In higher education, we work within semesters, quarters, or terms that last a set number of weeks. Within a given term, we teach in chunks of time, with classes lasting 50 minutes, 3 hrs, 8 hrs, or other increments. But when we teach online, no longer does teaching have to occur synchronously at a fixed time and location. The online teaching environment requires reconsidering traditional notions of time

4 Techniques to Encourage Active Learning Online THE K. PATRICIA CROSS ACADEMY 5
4 Techniques to Encourage Active Learning Online

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

Creating an Engaging Teaching Persona Online THE K.PATRICIA CROSS ACADEMY
Creating an Engaging Teaching Persona Online

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?

Student Experiences of Online Learning THE K.PATRICIA CROSS ACADEMY
What do We Know about Student Experiences of Online Learning?

Higher education institutions have been scrambling to meet the demand for remote and online courses. This has been due in part to general growth trends in online enrollment, but it has also been accelerated out of response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Because of this, we have focused on helping faculty teach more effectively online. In this blog, we turn our

Learning Assessment in Online Courses THE K. PATRICIA CROSS ACADEMY
Learning Assessment in Online Courses

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