Blended learning, which combines face-to-face learning with a mixture of online activities, has been hailed as both a cost-effective way to relieve overcrowded classrooms and a convenient alternative to the traditional classroom experience. But it has quickly become much more than that.

Did you see the nice collection of comments posted in response to the blog entry on rubrics? I love it when you add your comments! Something more on rubrics will be coming shortly but there was also a blog on critical thinking with the advice that a course should contain no more than 50 new concepts. My good friend and colleague Larry replied that he thought that was too many. In an email note to me he was a bit more blunt wondering where in the world that number came from. I expect it’s an arbitrary figure—somebody’s good guess. It may well be wrong. Quibbling over it is probably not worth the time, but it does raise several other points well worth consideration.

Some years back The Teaching Professor featured an article highlighting Mano Singham’s wonderful piece describing how he moved away from a very authoritarian, rule-centered syllabus (reference below). It’s one of my very favorite articles—I reference it regularly in presentations, and it appears on almost every bibliography I distribute.

Many academic leaders are involved in regional accreditations, and I am no exception. The six regional accrediting agencies are becoming increasingly stringent in the application and interpretation of their standards, and this can make the accrediting process a difficult one to survive. Our institution was a founding member of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS) and has been accredited continuously from the beginning. I have been involved in four of the 10-year “reaffirmation” activities, serving as chair of the college steering committee twice and serving as our institutional liaison with SACS for many years.

As a marketing professor, I often found myself scouring publications, stores, and my cabinets prior to a lecture, to find real-world examples of concepts I was teaching. Although students seemed to appreciate and learn from these examples, it didn’t get them as actively involved in their learning as I’d like.

At a teaching center I visited recently this quote was posted on a bulletin board: “A teacher’s constant task is to take a roomful of live wires and see to it that they’re grounded.” The quote was attributed to E.C. McKenzie.

As every academic leader can attest, the current generation of college students has been blessed with parents who remain highly invested in every aspect of their children’s education. It is not uncommon for parents of students to call the dean, provost, or even president to discuss a problem with a course. Occasionally even the parent of a graduate student will attempt to intervene in an academic issue affecting his or her child.

Required introductory courses, especially those in math and science, offer special teaching challenges. Frequently, these are courses that must be completed before students can proceed to their chosen majors.

I started using an online grade book as a convenience for myself. Here, finally, was a grade book that couldn’t get lost or stolen, and it would be automatically backed up by the IT department every night. The accumulated scores could also be downloaded directly into a spreadsheet for calculation of grades, a shortcut that reduced the possibility of errors.