At a workshop on learner-centered teaching, a participant told us that philosophically she couldn’t agree more with the need to make students more responsible for their own learning, but she couldn’t go there because her ratings would take a hit.

Has email overtaken your life? Teresa Marie Kelly offers hope. As a distance education faculty member at Kaplan University, Kelly knows first hand how easy it is to fall into the email trap and offers the following four tips for to help online faculty create a better work-life balance.

Here’s an interesting book: Academic Cultures: Professional Preparation and the Teaching Life. It isn’t one every faculty member should read even though the point is relevant to all academics.

The sheer volume of content faculty members are responsible for teaching is enormous, but being an effective educator takes much more than the mastery and delivery of material. It requires unique skills and knowledge that most new higher education instructors were never trained in. For newcomers, the challenges can seem overwhelming.

From developing strategies that enrich student learning to fostering a campus culture that values innovative teaching and learning, quality faculty development is the cornerstone to educational excellence.

I attended the recent ISETL Conference (International Society for Exploring Teaching and Learning). The conference is definitely worth attending. Of course, we do have a vested interest in your attendance at The Teaching Professor Conference, but even more important than that, is getting you to recognize the value of attending a teaching-learning conference. They offer such opportunities for growth and renewal. Check out: www.isetl.org and www.teachingprofessor.com)

Unlike their college-level counterparts, those who teach at the K-12 level spend a significant portion of their education studying the “how” of teaching. What they learn can be invaluable to college professors who enter classrooms with vast content knowledge but little (or no) background in teaching and learning. As those who teach these teachers, we’d like to showcase five teaching strategies college professors can learn from those who teach younger students.

I’m picking up where I left off with the previous blog entry. I’m still thinking about the evidence for active learning—those pedagogical practices that engage and involve students in learning processes directly. I’ve also been thinking about the faculty predilection (not at all universal but still reasonably widespread) to bad mouth educational research, or less flagrantly, to benignly neglect it.

In the early years, web-based distance education was looked at as a magic bullet. A relatively quick and easy way to increase revenue without a lot of additional work or expense. Like so many things in life, however, turning a profit in online distance education is easier said than done.