“Let’s begin today where we stopped last class.”

Congratulations to the winners of the inaugural McGraw-Hill – Magna Publications Scholarly Work on Teaching and Learning Award.

“After 40 years of intensive research on school learning in the United States as well as abroad, my major conclusion is: What any person in the world can learn, almost all persons can learn, if provided with the appropriate prior and current conditions of learning.” (Benjamin Bloom)

One of the biggest problems with doing group projects online (and face-to-face) is student resistance, says Jan Engle, coordinator of instruction development at Governors State University. “One of the best ways to overcome resistance is obviously for students to have a positive experience. Unfortunately, many of them come into an online class having had a very negative experience with group work. Almost always, those negative experiences stem from problems where they’ve been on teams where they ended up doing most of the work and other people did nothing and everybody got the same grade,” Engle says.

A survey released last month suggests that many colleges and universities are reforming their general education programs and developing new curricular approaches and educational assessment strategies for measuring key student learning outcomes. As institutions review their general education programs, many are choosing to incorporate more engaged and integrative curricular practices.

Hundreds of distance education administrators breathed a collective sigh of relief upon learning in a recent online seminar that the vast majority of schools are already in compliance with the Higher Education Opportunity Act’s new rules on student authentication.

We’ve moved up to our summer home and I’ve decided to start composting. We live on an island that is mostly rock. When we had the place excavated, the engineers called what’s on the ground organic matter and decreed it wasn’t deep enough for anything like a conventional septic system. There is no topsoil anywhere that I’ve been able to find … so composting makes good sense, to say nothing of having less garbage to haul to the local dump.

Most higher education institutions include language in their mission statements about the importance of diversity, but they often fall short when it comes to retaining faculty of color, says Christine A. Stanley, executive associate dean of faculty affairs at Texas A&M University, and editor of Faculty of Color: Teaching in Predominantly White Colleges and Universities (Anker Publishing, April 2006).

Editor’s note: Maryellen Weimer, editor of The Teaching Professor penned the following column upon her retirement in 2007. As you read it, we encourage you to think about the things you will and won’t miss when you retire. Share your thoughts in the comment box.