McGraw-Hill and Magna Publications are pleased to announce the winners of the second annual Scholarly Work on Teaching and Learning Award. The award recognizes outstanding scholarly contributions that advance college-level teaching and learning practices.

As you plan a new course or revise an existing one, when do you decide on a text? I worry that many of us make that decision early on and then use the text to anchor our course design decisions. What gets included in the course as well as how it’s presented are often strongly influenced by what’s in the text and how it’s presented there. As the authors below point out, that’s not the role the text should be assuming in course planning.

My recent foray into using MP3s to teach college level English classes came out of my need to reach more of my non-traditional students. I saw a trend developing where more adults than ever were seeking a college education or even returning to college to change careers, and it only followed that I had a responsibility as an instructor to try and reach these students. It also became apparent in my classroom that I wanted to not only reach, but to retain these non-traditional students who seemed to become easily frustrated with the more traditional lecture and textbook methods.

I recently set out to make introductory managerial accounting a more effective learning experience for students. The course is typically taken in a student’s first or second year. The range of experiences students bring to the course can be quite diverse. Some may have never been employed, still live at home, and have parents who work in white-collar jobs. Others may have worked and lived on their own, and have family who may own or run a store or work in factories. This diversity means that some students have no mental picture of how goods are manufactured, while others understand the process required to get a product to the customer.

Students dropout of college for a variety of reasons – some are not ready for the academic rigors, while others leave to raise a family, get a job, or join the military. Many of these students are now in their 30s, 40s and 50s. They’re more mature, and they’re ready to come back and finish what they started. Is your school truly committed to do what it takes to attract and support these students through degree completion?

We handed out the 2010 McGraw-Hill and Magna Publications Scholarly Work on Teaching and Learning Award at the recent Teaching Professor Conference. The review committee designated two finalist articles along with the winning piece, and all three of these articles are open with free access (for a limited period for two of the articles). I do hope you’ll take time to peruse them. Even though all three appeared in discipline-based periodicals, they are relevant to wider audiences—first, as exemplars of scholarly work on teaching and learning and second with content relevant beyond just the discipline. The winning article describes an impressive project that used a creative assessment method to look at the critical-thinking skills of a program’s majors. What discipline would not find that of interest? The article on library instruction looks at how well online instruction, face-to-face instruction, or a combination of both fostered learning. And the history article shares an assignment in which students prepared a well-researched entry for Wikipedia, a writing assignment that could work in many courses.

One of the most important responsibilities online instructors face is teaching students how to think critically. Successful achievement of this task requires that instructors provide the right setting and the appropriate activities that will prompt a student on to higher-level thinking. Though this mission is not exclusive to online instruction, the online environment presents some unique challenges and opportunities that distinguish this type of learning environment from traditional face-to-face classroom instruction.

Most universities press their faculty to add technology to their classroom by adopting the Learning Management System—Blackboard, Moodle, etc. This is a mistake. Faculty often end up spending hours learning the system and loading the same content that they use in the classroom, and finish wondering if the benefit was worth the effort.

Because we know that active engagement in collaborative projects can create a synergy among students that often surpasses what can be learned individually, we find ourselves designing assignments that create opportunities for students to collaborate and learn from one another. Also, the ability to work together in teams is a skill needed in today’s workforce. So for many reasons, assignments that foster collaboration have become essential parts of a well-designed course.