Jesse Stommel, executive director of the Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies

Jesse Stommel, executive director of the Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies, was quoted in an article entitled “When Grading Less is More” on Inside Higher Ed. “There are a surprising number of faculty questioning grades in productive ways, and experimenting with alternative modes of assessment,” said Stommel, an early proponent of ungrading. “If, as teachers, we just ask students why, when and how they learn, what we can get back is way more valuable than any standardized assessment mechanism can reveal.” Ungrading “creates space for that kind of honest reflection and dialogue,” he said. Read more.

Jesse Stommel, executive director of Teaching and Learning Technologies

Jesse Stommel, executive director of the Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies, was quoted in an Inside Higher Ed article that focused on whether discussions boards are valuable or overused in university courses. Stommel offers the following tips for using discussion boards: Build a community of care; Ask genuine, open-ended questions; Wait for answers; Let conversation wander; Model what it looks like to be wrong and to acknowledge when you’re wrong; Recognize that the right to speak isn’t distributed equally; Make listening visible.

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Jesse Stommel, executive director of Teaching and Learning Technology, was quoted in Elon News about student performance: “My anecdotal experience over 17 years of teaching is that my students are getting better and better and smarter and smarter,” Stommel said. “They are working harder and harder and I honestly believe that my students are performing better.” To read the article, visit http://www.elonnewsnetwork.com/article/2018/01/6tq9eytfgtzuuk1

Jesse Stommel, executive director of the Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies at UMW,  and founding director of the Hybrid Pedagogy journal, was quoted recently in Inside Higher Ed. In the article, “Do Professors Need Automated Help Grading Online Comments?,” Stommel said that he found Blackboard’s proposal to evaluate student writing in this way to be alarming. “There is certainly space for technology to help us create dialogue in an online class, but using a technology to assess the success of a discussion, ultimately it reduces student engagement to a rote series of behaviors. ‘Write a comment of 60 words, citing two sources, responding to at least one of your classmates’ — those kinds of behaviors do not make a discussion successful. They’re arbitrary markers.”