The general practice codes consist of practices where there is no designated primary actor, such as connecting course content to scientific research, drawing attention to connections among course concepts, and real-time polling.
Teachers can take advantage of this phenomenon, known to psychologists as "elaborative encoding," by connecting course content to students' lives in any of a variety of ways.
Diverse student populations have been shown to connect course material to daily life in different ways (Packard, 2013), a factor that instructors might recognize when crafting statements.
Table 1 Codebook used for content analysis Definition Example item Instructional format codes Connect course content to scientific research Instructor relates concepts directly to scientific work.
One way to connect course material with things students naturally care about, says Shirley Malcom, head of education and human resources programs for AAAS, which publishes Science Careers, is to highlight the historic context in which discoveries were made.
Although they do not pretend to be able to replicate the full "campus experience", Futurelearn's CEO Simon Nelson says they intend to use the power of social media to connect course participants.
For instance, 'please consider how important each reason is for you in attending counselling', or 'the good connecting course'.
Research that connects course design features with outcomes will also be useful for future studies of the efficacy and effectiveness of CUREs.
Thus, not only are students' perceptions about how they enjoy the discipline statistically related to their degree of expert-like effort, but helping students to connect course material to real-world applications may in turn help students both enjoy the discipline more and become more expert-like in their problem-solving efforts.
Through Berkeley's course thread program, undergraduates explore themes that connect courses across departments and disciplines.
It could be supported by organisations that already exist to help connect courses and businesses and could create measurable benefits for everyone involved.
