How to increase value: strategies & tools

Some Ideas for ways to increase "value" in your learning environments.

First, ask yourself

Identify and reward what you value (be transparent as you set this out in the learning aims/outcomes and aligned assignments/assessments).
Show relevance to students' current academic lives.
Demonstrate relevance of working to attain higher-level skills to students’ future professional and personal lives.
Create a graphic concept map of your course to serve as an orientation for your own course planning/syllabus development, and for possible use by students in navigating connections among course concepts, or by students in setting out what they are connecting to the course concepts.

Show your own passion and enthusiasm for the discipline.
Provide authentic, real-world tasks.
Provide flexibility and control.
Have students create a concept map each week; each week ask them to add on new learning from that week.
Transform an analytical idea into a story, an image, an analogy, or a guiding question that capture’s their attention at the start of a class session or longer-term assignment.
Associate your subject with things that students already care and/or know about, their personal, community, affinity group interests.
Allow students some choice in their assignment topics and format.

Provide authentic, real-world tasks (projects, collaborative writing, review by experts in the field).
Set out authentic audience for students work by providing information about purpose, tasks, and target audiences for major assignments/assessments. Where possible, ask students to set and describe their own target audiences and places where they could share their work (public blogs, websites).