Innovations
As an instructor, I feel that it is my responsibility to make sure that I am the most knowledgeable person possible about the topic we are covering. And with that I try to share that with my students. As opposed to simply giving the class the details on how to do the experiment, I also develop the fundamentals and important concepts in class before they are used to solve the experimental problems. These items are usually discussed in lecture and in the textbook; however, many students find this stuff to be confusing and difficult. When I cover these topics I stress that with just a few basic concepts (eg Newton's Second Law of motion) and some mathematics, we can solve many problems and discover many new concepts (eg momentum conservation, work-kinetic energy theorem). I have discovered that my method of clearly outlying the steps of derivation help the students to learn that many of these concepts can be easily rediscovered with just a little be of math.
Like many instructors, I believe that practice will make better students. However, many of them have not been given the opportunity to practice very basic concepts, such as units, that are critical for successful engineers, scientists, and medical professionals. As such, I figured out how to make online quiz assignments in the new Canvas system. Every week I construct a Canvas quiz with approximately 20 questions. Then I give the students the next week to work on them. These quizzes cover very basic concepts, primarily units, and they force each student to learn theses important concepts through practice.