FERPA is one of the most misunderstood regulations in education. It is commonly assumed that FERPA requires all student coursework to be kept private at all times, and thus prevents the use of social media in the classroom, but this is wrong. FERPA does not prevent instructors from assigning students to create public content as part of their course requirements. If it did, then video documentaries produced in a communications class and shown on TV or the Web, or public art shows of student work from an art class, would be illegal. As one higher education lawyer put it:

Many students come to college without the knowledge and skills needed to successfully complete college coursework. But does taking remedial courses in math and English (where the bulk of the courses are offered) make a difference? Do those courses develop the knowledge and skills students need to successfully complete regular college courses?

In order to effectively establish and maintain an active learning community, the instructor must establish his or her teaching persona and maintain it throughout the course, says Bill Phillips, an instructional designer at the University of Central Florida. Unlike in a face-to-face classroom, one’s persona in the online classroom needs to be deliberately incorporated into course design.

While it is easy to see how service-learning meshes with courses in the social sciences, public health and education, can it work equally well in other areas, such as the hard sciences and the humanities?

I’ve been reading pedagogical literature for a long time and so I don’t often come upon a topic I haven’t seen before. But this week I came across one — it was an article on conversation in an international faculty development journal.

About eight years ago, students taking Alice Cassidy’s Biology 345 course were asked to create a learning portfolio as their final project for the course. The portfolio was intended to help students demonstrate their learning in creative ways that include examples, connections and reflections, based on three key criteria: content, links and visual diversity. Two pages of the eight-page portfolio had to be a concept map.

Developing sophisticated but essential learning skills is especially challenging in large classes. That’s why we regularly report on strategies that faculty members have developed and are using in large classes. The cases in point here are three different biochemistry courses in which faculty members have been using online, asynchronous discussion groups to develop problem-solving skills.

“Rarely does an examination ask students to list questions that the course posed for them.” C. Roland Christensen made that observation. “Rarely?” I can’t remember ever hearing of an exam that asked students to list questions. One time early in my teaching career, I came to an exam review session with a list of answers and asked students to pose the questions. It was April Fool’s Day, but my students didn’t find the strategy the least bit funny. It was a much more difficult task than I anticipated and the possibility that they might have to do this on the exam created near panic. I think that was the first time I realized how answer oriented students are. Later I came to understand that the same applies to many teachers.

George Stanton, a professor emeritus of biology, recently expressed his disappointment with student response to social media elements in classes. He pointed out that students were less than active in using the tools, meanwhile a recent survey of first-year students at his institution found that the number one expectation for class was “to be entertained.”