I am discovering that overparticipators have been studied quite extensively in the speech communication field. Researchers there refer to these students who contribute more often than they should as “compulsive communicators” and those researchers have developed a “talkaholic” (now there’s some fanciful jargon) scale to determine if a student is. The scale relies on self reports, and, depending on the study, between 4.7 percent and 7.3 percent of students are considered compulsive communicators.

Institutions of higher education nearly always feel a budgetary crunch, and this holds true for online programs. However, the costs of running a successful online program run far beyond the expected line items of salaries, technology, and marketing. Faculty turnover and attrition can bring a number of serious but unanticipated costs to a program, costs that are may be poorly understood due to a lack of research identifying these costs.

In CHEATING IN SCHOOL: What We Know and What We Can Do, (Wiley-Blackwell) authors Stephen F. Davis, Patrick F. Drinan, and Tricia Bertram Gallant provide a comprehensive look at the cheating phenomenon from primary through graduate school. In an email interview with Faculty Focus, the authors discuss academic integrity issues in higher education specifically, including steps that can be taken at the institutional level as well as in individual classrooms.

A neighbor of mine has an 18-year-old friend who started his first year of college at the end of August. Last weekend he came home for the first time. My neighbor asked him what he’d learned so far in college. I complimented my neighbor for asking that question instead of the more common, “How are you doing in college?” But my neighbor was troubled by his friend’s response. “What have I learned in college? Gee, I don’t know … I haven’t really thought about it. Lots of stuff, I guess.”

Given student motivation to get grades and the prevalence of cheating, most faculty would never seriously consider letting students grade their own work. However, self-grading, especially of homework, does accrue some significant benefits. It can move students away from doing homework for points to making them more aware of why and how doing problems helps them learn. If students grade their own work, they see exactly where they are making mistakes. And they obtain that feedback far sooner than if the instructor collects the homework, grades it, and then returns it some days later.

It was August 26, 2009. That evening I receive a phone call from someone in Japan looking to create free online math and science courses on mobile devices for youth in India using existing shared online video. The following day, I get an email from a colleague at a university in Canada who had just read my new book, The World Is Open: How Web Technology Is Revolutionizing Education. Many points made in the book seemed to resonate with him except for my advocacy of YouTube videos in teaching. Like most faculty members, he was very reluctant to show the YouTube homepage to his class because an offensive video might be featured.

A love of course content and a willingness to convey that enthusiasm to students is a vital component to effective teaching, but you also need to make sure the methods used to convey that knowledge are up to the task.

While conducting a class, even though teachers may be doing all or most of the talking, students communicate important nonverbal messages. They communicate these messages through facial expressions, body postures, and how they say what they say, as well as what actions they do or the skills they attempt to perform. Both novice and expert teachers see the same student responses, but expert teachers see in those responses something very different than novices see.

This fall marks Robert Nash’s 41^st year in the classroom. When asked about retirement plans, he reports telling colleagues that he’ll go when they carry him out in a box and bury him on the main university green.