Richard Felder and Rebecca Brent

12/10/2025

We attended the Alumni Luncheon sponsored by the Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering Department at NC State last week. Five alumni were recognized for outstanding careers. The best part for Rich was connecting with four former students who received awards: Helene Lollis, Billy Willis, Tonya Peeples, and Chris Peoples. Chris brought along several of his classmates who were a part of Rich's longitudinal study where the cohort had Rich for five consecutive semesters. It was a wonderful event!

10/21/2025

Curious about how the brain learns? Check out our new post!
https://educationdesignsinc.com/how-the-brain-learns-and-implications-for-teachers/

09/24/2025

We've just started a new webinar series for several hundred faculty members in India highlighting content from our book. We've posted the first of what we expect to be many blogs sharing our answers to some of their questions. We hope you'll take a look!

Enhancing Student Motivation to Learn Leave a reply We have the distinct pleasure of working with hundreds of university faculty members from India in a webinar series sponsored by the Indo-Universal Collaboration for Engineering Education (IUCEE) led by Dr. Krishna Vedula, retired Dean of Engineeri...

12/13/2024

Teaching online has become increasingly common in recent decades, and while the quality of the available technology has steadily improved and no systematic student performance differences have been found between face-to-face and online courses, students’ and instructors’ complaints about their online learning experiences are still common. We heard a number of them recently in a webinar on teaching online we gave to an audience of engineering professors. This post summarizes their questions and our responses.

Strengthening Online Courses Leave a reply Principal Reference: R.M. Felder and R. Brent, Teaching and Learning STEM: A Practical Guide, 2nd edn. (2024), Chapter 7. . Teaching online has become increasingly common in recent decades, and while the quality of the...

11/02/2024

As we've announced before (in as many forums as humanly possible), the second edition of our book--Teaching and Learning STEM: A Practical Guide--appeared in print this year. We'd like to share with you a really nice review of it that just came out in PRISM, the journal of the American Society for Engineering Education.

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Teaching and Learning STEM: A Practical Guide walks faculty through effective teaching step-by-step, including new material in the second edition about teaching online and integrating AI. The authors make the research on teaching accessible and help busy faculty apply it to their lived experience in the classroom.

For example, the authors break active learning into steps. They do this by encouraging small forays into active learning, taking only 2-3 minutes of class time. These small forays are followed by reflection, adjustments, and then bigger forays. This is a recipe for success.

Rich Felder and Rebecca Brent are two of the best teachers and writers in academe, and it shows: their advice is inspired and their prose flows like melted butter. One of my colleagues attended their workshop based on the book and declared that her teaching was transformed. Many teachers will find the book transformative. That is why it is my favorite book on teaching.

Tara Gray, Ph.D.
Associate Provost for Faculty Development
Director, Teaching Academy
New Mexico State University

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For more information about the book, see

Teaching and Learning STEM: A Practical Guide, Second Edition Teaching and Learning STEM: A Practical Guide, presents a trove of practical research-based strategies for designing and teaching university and high school courses. Its engaging and well-illustrated descriptions will equip you to impleme...