With 10 inches of snow on top of two inches of ice, there wasn’t much to do besides read this past week, and I got around to several books that have been waiting on my shelf. One of those books is a collection of essays, all written by faculty at SUNY (State University of New York) Postdam.

In a previous post, we talked about the challenges of teaching our first online course, and the miraculous transformation of switching to a hybrid offering. If you’re new to the online teaching experience, especially if you’re considering a hybrid course, here are some tips you might find helpful.

If you think multiple choice tests are only good to assess how well students memorized facts, it may be time to rethink your testing strategy. Although they are not appropriate for every situation, when properly developed, multiple choice tests can used to assess higher levels of thinking, including application and analysis.

In the February issue of The Teaching Professor I highlight some very practical research that looked at student responses to written feedback provided on their papers. Most of us tend to be a bit cynical about this. We see students quickly turning to the page with the grade and then shoving the paper into the backpack. But the findings of these two studies indicate that this isn’t how most students respond. The studies give students more credit than we tend to. But there was something else from one of the studies I wanted to share here.

A few years ago, our university started accelerating its distance learning program. Some professors designed courses that worked well, while others found that 100 percent Web delivery wasn’t effective for them.

MAPP, CAAP, C-BASE, CLA, NSSE, to name just a few. With so many published assessment instruments available, how do you know the best one for assessing student learning at your school?

EDUCAUSE, the association for information technology in higher education, released its list of Top Teaching and Learning Challenges for 2009. Voted on by the EDUCAUSE teaching and learning community, the top five challenges are:

Despite the tremendous growth of distance education, retention remains its Achilles’ heel. Estimates of the failed retention rate for distance education undergraduates range from 20 to 50 percent. Distance education administrators believe the failed retention rate for online courses may be 10 to 20 percent higher than for face-to-face courses. Failure to address online course retention will have a significant impact on a program’s bottom line and ability to grow.

Recently I read this advice to new faculty: “Just be yourself.” Like a lot of advice, this isn’t bad; it’s just not very good. Every person has many selves, so which one of the many should you be in the classroom? Moreover, the classroom teacher is under some obligation to meet professional standards. You can’t act in the classroom like you do at home in your PJs.