Controversies surrounding promotion and tenure can lead to legal trouble for departments and institutions. It’s up to academic leaders to guard against possible pitfalls by adopting, disseminating, and implementing equitable policies.

Most people, when they conceive of hell, conjure up an image of a subterranean inferno to which sinners are forever consigned to an afterlife of endless suffering and punishment. But according to Dr. Gerald Amada, author of Coping with the Disruptive College Student: A Practical Model, hell also can take many temporal forms, especially in the world of academia.

An instructor's "digital" personality can influence student achievement, retention or completion, and satisfaction with courses, says Todd Conaway, an instructional designer at Yavapai College in Arizona. This is why he encourages instructors to infuse their personalities into their online courses. A growing number of tools and technologies can help.

What can I offer this week, which for many is one of the busiest weeks of the semester? It is such stressful time for teachers and students—everybody gets tired, even the best of us get cranky. I know what many teachers would love to have: a grading machine, delivered overnight with no assembly required.

If you are looking for ways to facilitate collaboration among students, consider using a wiki—a website that contains pages that can be easily created and edited by multiple users. Several characteristics of Wikis make them excellent choices for projects that involve brainstorming and research and that require a final report, says Rhonda Ficek, director of instructional technology services at Minnesota State University Moorhead.

It wouldn’t be the end of the year without a few top 10 lists, so this year we’ve put together one of our own: the top 10 most popular articles on Faculty Focus.

Here’s Margaret Morganroth Gullette’s great description of feelings associated with discussion. “Discussion … can feel light-weight, loose jointed, like holding hands in zero gravity. The sense of weightlessness can overcome you—even if you’re good enough at leading discussion so that your students are uninhibited and exploratory; even if you guide it subtly by the weight of a question or an inquiring gesture; even if you’re sure that at each session they’ve learned three new ideas in the most unforgettable way, by discovering them and stating them themselves.” (p.32)

Throughout 2010, Faculty Focus published more than 250 articles. The articles covered a wide range of topics — from online teaching to philosophy of teaching. In a two-part series, which will run today and tomorrow, we’re revealing the top 10 most popular articles for 2010.

It’s been a while since I was an undergrad, but I still remember my two favorite professors. They had completely different personalities and teaching styles, they even taught in different departments, but they did some things in very similar ways. I think that’s what made them so effective. It really wasn’t the content — although that was part of it — it was more the classroom experience they created.