I’m going to take a blog break for the next couple of weeks. I’ll be back with more entries the first week in January. This blog is just about a year old—I’ve been enjoying doing the entries. Thanks for reading and thanks especially to those of you who’ve posted comments and sent emails about various blog entries. I see this blog as having great potential for sharing good ideas and information succinctly. Sometimes that all it takes … a couple of paragraphs and there’s something new to think about or a reminder of something that hasn’t been thought about for a while. If you have content ideas or suggestions about how I could make the blog better, those would be most welcome.

In yesterday's post, it was argued that perhaps student evaluations were not, in Martha Stewart’s famous phrase, “a good thing,” given doubts about the qualifications of students to judge instructors, questionable validity of the evaluation instrument, threats to academic freedom, and misuse by administrators. Every college instructor subjected to student evaluation, myself included, has probably mused about these possibilities at one time or the other. But before we throw out the evaluation with the bathwater, let’s take a look at the other side of this double-edged question of the value of student evaluations.

My students have always given me positive evaluations of my undergraduate and graduate courses. I still teach four courses a year because I love the classroom and believe academic administrators are well served by ongoing connections with students in instructional settings. As a department chair, dean, provost, and vice president, I have found these student evaluations informative as I considered questions about tenure, promotion, and yearly raises for faculty.

We get a lot of submissions to the newsletter describing various and sundry games that faculty have devised to help students review, gain confidence in dealing with new vocabulary, apply material they have learned to different problems, and get involved and engaged with content. Some of the games follow popular TV shows like Jeopardy or Who Wants to be a Millionaire? Others mirror other forms of cultural entertainment like speed dating, and some are totally unique.

A love of the material and a willingness to convey that to students only enhances learning. The problem occurs when the content matters more than anything else, faculty are prevented from using methods that enhance student learning. Not only does this hurt the students, but it hurts faculty as well.

For some educators, student learning assessment is a little like exercise. Yes, we know it’s important, we feel better when we do it, and we can even see the results of our efforts, but it sure is a hassle to get started.

After years of teaching face to face, many instructors are able to begin teaching a traditional, classroom-based course without having the entire course laid out ahead of time. This approach doesn't work very well in the online classroom where careful planning and course design is crucial to the success of online students.

Do students have the right to remain silent in class? I continue to struggle with that question. It definitely depends on the course. If you want to learn French, you really can’t do that without speaking. But what about history or environmental biology?

Although faculty would like to think optimistically, most know that when it comes to student learning and how much content students take with them from a course, even one in their major, reality dashes optimism. This grim fact was confirmed in a study of students enrolled in a business consumer behavior course.