Students with disabilities are drawn to online courses for many of the same reasons as everyone else, but it’s often the anonymity that makes learning online particularly attractive to someone who’s spent his or her life trying to mask a disability. For online instructors, this can present new issues.

In the process of preparing an article for the newsletter, I came across this observation: “Students who have the impression that nothing they do will alter the results of the learning process, or who attribute success to good luck and failure to bad luck, or who see the pedagogy and didactic practice of the professor as the sole determinant of success or failure, will make little effort to contribute to their own learning.” (p. 244)

To say that my first year as division chair was a “learning experience” filled with “teaching moments” is an understatement. I had no idea what I was getting myself into! In addition to the normal duties of chair, my division was moving to a new building, the college was working on its accreditation self-study, we began collective bargaining, we added two new members to the division, we conducted a search for an additional new member, and I taught a fully online course for the first time.

Getting students to participate in class is one of those perplexing instructional problems we all face, particularly when teaching undergraduate classes. Are there significant differences in the graduate classroom?

The use of PowerPoint is widespread now in college classrooms. Compared with the old transparencies of overhead projector days, it gets all sorts of points for legibility and glitz. But a lot of the problems with the way faculty used overheads still prevail. So please take these gentle do and don’t reminders in the spirit they are given. PowerPoint slides can enhance learning, but that benefit doesn’t accrue automatically. And if the PowerPoints aren’t enhancing learning, they may be doing the opposite.

The contribution that humor makes to student learning is well established in research. It is not that humor causes learning; rather, it helps to create conditions conducive to learning. It helps learners relax, alleviates stress, and often makes it easier for students and teachers to connect personally. The presence of humor in a classroom can be very beneficial.

In the online classroom, faculty work hard to engage their distance learners and build a strong sense of academic community in the electronic setting. Screencasting can be an effective and easy way to do this. Screencasting allows you to take a digital video of what you are doing on your computer desktop, and most screencasting tools allow you to narrate your video while recording. The possible uses for screencasting are endless; these include providing course orientations, delivering instructional lectures, providing feedback, and encouraging student collaboration.

I’d like to share a couple of the points made by Robert Zemsky in the second part of a two-part essay that appeared in Inside Higher Education. (There’s a link to this second part at the end of this post.) I don’t know if you’re familiar with Bob Zemsky’s work—he’s a professor at the University of Pennsylvania who has been on the forefront of efforts to reform higher edcuation for decades, and he’s a superb writer. In this article he put three items on the higher education reform to-do list. The first one is learning—I love that it was listed first.

We hear a great deal these days about “accountability” in the academy. Many states (including South Carolina, where I try my best to be a “responsible” college administrator) have some kind of state law mandating that public schools—and, in some cases, colleges—demonstrate that they are indeed “accountable.”