Top 20 Evidence-based Humor Techniques for Online Teaching: Building on a Half-century of Research and Practice

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic upended higher education in March 2020 and has continued into 2022. Within days of the international lockdowns, an emergency conversion from face-to-face (F2F) to remote learning occurred. Educators scrambled to convert their in-class teaching into some version of online teaching. The transformations ignited a surge in e-learning platforms. Combining PowerPoint (PPT) or Keynote with those platforms enabled several forms of humor to be presented by any professor in online teaching. The research evidence on the educational benefits of humor is reviewed. The top 20 humor techniques initially tested in F2F classrooms are adapted to hybrid, hyflex, synchronous, and asynchronous delivery. Faculty have the opportunity to change their teaching back to F2F or adopt some form of online. That will involve a new teaching playbook. The intentional use of humor in F2F and online teaching will add value to their students’ academic experiences with restorative and therapeutic effects in addition to all of the instructional benefits. The humor can be a game-changer in their pandemic teaching and after COVID-19.

The online marketplace for business education: An exploratory study

“…These studies have found that for face-to-face courses, student responses drop significantly when they are asked to rate the course using an online tool (Gerbase, Germond, Cerutti, Vu, & ). This problem is believed to be magnified when the course itself is delivered online (Berk, 2012). The results obtained in this study provide support for this belief based on the finding that while the average student enrollment in a course is 3,169, the average number of reviews is only around 276.…”

Animated Process-Transparency in Student Evaluation of Teaching: Effects on the Quality and Quantity of Student Feedback

“…The current study examined the effect of increasing transparency on students' faith and participation in end-of-course SET, as transparency is recognised as an important measure to increase SET participation (Berk 2012;Hoel and Dahl 2019). Building on a study in which a text-based intervention showing course specific changes to students to increase SET transparency yielded little results (Nederhand et al 2023), we took an alternative approach by developing an animation showing the general SET process to students, untied to a specific course.…”

“…While they focused in their study on showing students how their detailed comments were applied, negative impact on response rate and quality appears to also stem from students being unaware of certain aspects of the general SET process. For example, it is recommended to make students aware of multiple aspects of the general SET process, such as why SET are collected, how and by whom their feedback is being used to improve aspects of education, and anonymity (Chen and Hoshower 2003;Berk 2012;Keeley et al 2013).…”

“…2. Creating transparency by animating the general SET process positively relates to motivation to participate in SET (Berk 2012;Macfadyen et al 2016;Linse 2017;Hoel and Dahl 2019), as reflected by increased student response rates and increased response quality.…”

“…Yet, research shows no less than 84% of European universities use SETs as, often the sole, diagnostic feedback about courses and teachers, also forming the base of decisions about teacher appraisals, tenure and paygrades (Scheepers 2019). Taking high-stakes decisions based on SET results with low response rates and low quality of comments is problematic as they provide an inadequate source of information (Berk 2012;Zumrawi, Bates, and Schroeder 2014). Hence, there is a need for institutional strategies focusing on how to improve the usage of SETs by increasing response quantity and quality to strengthen reliability and validity (Hoel and Dahl 2019;Stein et al 2021).…”