Marie Norman

Marie Norman, PhD, is co-author of the book How Learning Works: 7 Research-Based Principles for Smart Teaching. She has taught in higher education for over 20 years and worked in faculty development for 13. She has served as Associate Director of the Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence at Carnegie Mellon University, Director for Intercultural Education at iCarnegie Global Learning, and Senior Director for Educational Excellence at Acatar, an online education technology start-up acquired by The Learning House in 2015. Norman is currently on the faculty of the Institute for Clinical Research Education at the University of Pittsburgh's School of Medicine, where she is the founding director of the Innovative Design for Education and Assessment (IDEA) Lab. She speaks regularly at teaching and learning conferences, has published widely, and writes a blog for Synapse, an education publication on the blogging platform, Medium.
Course Structure

The Course Design Triangle

Course design is especially critical for online courses because you have to produce your course materials in advance. Once the course is live and students are enrolled, it’s much harder…

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Multimedia Use

Principles of Multimedia Learning

Richard Mayer’s seminal book Multimedia Learning details his extensive research on how to structure multimedia materials effectively to maximize learning. Relying on numerous experiments, he distills his findings into 12…

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Course Structure

Transitioning to an Online Class

Transitioning from teaching a face-to-face class to teaching an online course requires rethinking and reconfiguring materials. Lectures, activities, and assessments that worked for your face-to-face class will need to be…

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Course Structure

Course Context

When you design a face-to-face course, you probably start by asking questions. Who are my students likely to be? How large is the class? How many credits does the course…

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Online Experience

Group Projects in Online Courses

“Every professor teaching online should consider team projects for his or her classes.” — Edward Volchoc (2006) Group projects allow students to tackle more complex and interesting problems than they…

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