The upcoming October issue of The Teaching Professor contains a thoughtful essay on the value of “modeling stupidity.” I know, it doesn’t sound like something any self-respecting professor should do, certainly not regularly. What the author advocates is being able to honestly admit to students when you don’t know something and regularly acknowledging how much there is to know and how little of it even highly educated professors know.

In an online learning environment, it’s easy for students to feel isolated or unsure of themselves, particularly if they’re adult students who’ve been away from school for a long time.

When John Pyle was vice president at St. Mary’s University of Minnesota, one of his goals was to focus the campus’s energy on implementing the operational plan. “There was a lot of energy once the strategic plan was developed, but we kind of lost steam in implementing the operational plan,” he says.

Although the online classroom environment provides tremendous flexibility of time and place of study, establishing and communicating a course pace and pattern of work can aid both instructor and student, and alleviate confusion of course operation.

I got my book finished last week ... packed up and mailed off. Letting go of something you’ve worked on that hard for so long is difficult, at least it is for me. But I wanted to share two experiences relevant to the finishing up and sending off.

The initial design of your course will have a big impact on how much time and effort will be required to update it in the future. Here are some tips from the University of Michigan School of Nursing to consider as you create your course to accommodate future changes:

For quite some time now I’ve been interested in a widely held set of assumptions faculty make about the need to assert control at the beginning of a course. The argument goes something like this: When a course starts, the teacher needs to set the rules and clearly establish who’s in charge. If the course goes well, meaning students abide by the rules and do not challenge the teacher’s authority, then the teacher can gradually ease up and be a bit looser about the rules.

I’m reading a great book. This probably won’t be the only blog entry about it. The title is long: Why Don’t Students Like School? A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions about How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom. The cognitive scientist, Daniel T. Willingham, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, writes about how the mind works to an audience of basic educators. Even so, the book clearly and compellingly explains mental functions equally relevant in the college classroom. Here’s an example.

When given a reading assignment, some students feel they have met their obligation if they have forced their eyes to ‘touch’ (in appropriate sequence) each word on the pages assigned. How can we entice students to read the material we assign, and how do we help them develop strategies for deep comprehension and retention of the material? Are there subtle ways we can prod them to read and help them develop literary skills—without spending our own precious time explicitly teaching ‘reading?’ (p. 125-126)