Most instructors supplement their face-to-face courses with some online learning materials such as online syllabi, handouts, PowerPoint slides, and course-related Web links. All of these can add to the learning experience, but they are merely a start to making full use of the learning potential of the online learning environment in either a hybrid or totally online course. Although there is no standard definition of a hybrid course, one characteristic that makes a course a hybrid is the use of the Web for interaction rather than merely as a means of posting materials, says LaTonya Motley, instructional technology specialist at El Camino Community College in California.

A recent issue of an excellent pedagogical periodical, called Pedagogy, devotes itself to an exploration of professional development within English. One article describes experiences in a teaching circles program. Here’s a great quote that raises some important issues related to the challenges of talking teaching with colleagues.

Incivility in higher education has flourished in recent years, fueled by a convergence of factors ranging from the infiltration of a more corporate culture and a system that rewards individual accomplishments above collaboration to decreased state funding coupled with increased workloads and expectations. For department chairs, leading teams of educators during such a difficult time can be wrought with unexpected challenges and frustrations.

About three years ago, having served four years as department chair and having gone through the typical headaches that people in my position go through, I began studying and practicing time management techniques.

“I have come to realize that it is not so much what students know as what they can do. Likewise, teaching is not about what I know but what I enable others to do.”

There’s a short article in a recent issue of College Teaching on a topic that I don’t see written about very often. I suspect we don’t think about it as often as we should either. It’s the matter of bias in grading.

Questions are one of those mainstay teaching strategies used to accomplish all kinds of learning goals: questions help an instructor gauge levels of understanding; questions can pique flagging interest; questions lead the way deeper into content and questions challenge thinking. Adult educator Patricia Cranton identifies three kinds of questions especially effective at promoting critical self-reflection and self-knowledge.

A recently published study in the Journal of Higher Education offers some encouraging evidence about the role of teaching ability in the hiring process. More than 90 percent of the survey respondents rated candidates’ teaching ability as important or very important. Despite that stated importance, a bit less than 17 percent ask for a teaching philosophy statement as part of the credentials packet, less then 8 percent request student rating data, 4 percent ask for syllabi from courses taught previously and less than 1 percent require a teaching portfolio.

I was with a group of faculty yesterday. We were bemoaning how strongly grade-oriented most students are. Some of us thought faculty were too grade-oriented as well. One participant shared a small but unique way he tried to emphasize learning over grades.