CURRENT ARTICLE • October 19

Working With Part-Time Faculty to Enhance Teaching and the Curriculum: A Top 10 List

Part-time faculty make essential contributions to our programs. Their part-time status often limits their contact with other faculty and their knowledge about the program in which they are teaching. Program coordinators and directors often provide the only contact between the two, and so play a critical but challenging leadership role. However, coordinators may also tend to work in isolation from one another and may lack opportunities to share experiences and learn from one another.

Read more ›

OTHER RECENT ARTICLES

Intellectual Property, Copyright, and Harassment: Navigating the Murky Legal Waters of Online Teaching

By: Mary Bart

If you teach online, here’s a simple quiz for you:

Read More ›

When Mentoring New Faculty, Don’t Ignore These Issues

Beginning college teachers benefit when they have an instructional mentor. That fact is well established; as is the fact that mentoring benefits those who mentor. The influx of new faculty over the past few years has caused mentoring programs to flourish. All kinds of activities have been proposed so that mentors and mentees can spend their time together profitably. Addressed less often are those instructional topics particularly beneficial for the experienced and less-experienced teachers to address. Here's a list of possibilities.

Read More ›

What Lectures Can Accomplish

“I have never believed that there was intrinsic damage being done to students in what has been called the ‘sage on the stage’ model of teaching. I don’t think it’s always bad to listen to an expert talk about what she knows best, and I don’t think that the discussion format is inherently better than the lecture format merely because the latter allows the students to express their opinions. On the contrary, I think that a truly great lecturer has the capacity to change a student’s life, and I think that there is something valuable in students listening to a person who has an effortless command of a subject, in seeing the kind of dedication and erudition a fine lecturer embodies.” (p.460)

Read More ›

Do More Tests Lead to More Learning?

Most college teachers assume that more tests are better than a few. Why? What caused us to decide on three or four unit tests followed by a final? Is there evidence that students don’t do as well in courses where there are only a midterm and a final? Why do we think that more tests might be better? And what do we mean by better? Higher grades? More learning?

Read More ›

RateMyProfessors: Is There a Lesson to be Learned?

RateMyProfessors.com needs no introduction to most instructors. The problems with the site are equally well known. There's no guarantee that the students who select to evaluate and post the comments are a representative sample—and no guarantee that the assessments themselves are representative.

Read More ›

Students and Reading: Another Good Idea

The quest to get students doing assigned reading and engaging with that material is one of those ongoing challenges faced by university and college teachers today. Simply assigning the reading, telling students to do it and making threats about what will happen if they don’t is rarely enough to get most of today’s students interacting with their texts. It almost always takes something more, and if you regularly read this blog you know that we’re always looking for good ideas—especially those that not only get students doing the reading but those that help to develop their reading skills in the process. And, I’ve found another promising approach. I’ll be highlighting this strategy in much greater detail in an upcoming issue of the newsletter, but here’s a preview.

Read More ›

Three Tips for Handling Disruptive Online Students

Disruptive students, in any teaching and learning environment, are a challenge to manage, but they can be particularly so online. And it may take longer for an instructor to realize that a student is actually being disruptive online, since online communications can be ambiguous and one always wants to give students the benefit of the doubt.

Read More ›

Online vs. Face-to-Face Throwdown: Good Teaching Transcends Course Format

By: Mary Bart

In the 2009 report, Evaluation of Evidence-Based Practices in Online Learning: A Meta-Analysis and Review of Online Learning Studies, the Department of Education reported that “on average, students in online learning conditions performed better than those receiving face-to-face instruction.”

Read More ›

The Benefits of a Course Blog

Does it matter if students leave courses with a positive attitude toward the content area? Maybe successful acquisition of content is all that really matters. Maybe teachers don't need to be concerned if students "liked" the content. As physics professors Duda and Garrett (reference below) point out, this is about more than whether or not students "liked" physics.

Read More ›