Changing workplace demands and student learning style preferences require that instructors rethink their courses. No longer can students passively absorb knowledge. They must become active learners -- interacting with peers and designing and implementing the learning, says Jane Legacy, MBA/MBE chair at Southern New Hampshire University's School of Business.

As college teachers, most of us know that the profession is changing, but we aren't always as up on the details as we should be. The changes occurring today have implications for everyone who teaches. Just a couple of facts make that abundantly clear. According to the National Center for Educational Statistics, between 2001 and 2003 only 54 percent of the faculty hired were appointed to full-time positions, and 35 percent of all full-time appointees were not in tenured or tenure-track positions.

I’m busy doing reading for the October issue of The Teaching Professor newsletter, sitting lakeside at our summer place in upstate New York. I got three mosquito bites while reading an article by Jerry Farber on presence. Yes, I was so enamored with the article I never felt the bites! I’ll summarize in the newsletter what he means by presence and how it so very often escapes teachers. But here’s another insight—one I felt like underlining twice!

A recent informal poll conducted by Magna Publications' electronic newsletters Faculty Focus and Eye on Students asked, "Would you like to see student affairs work more closely with academic affairs on your campus? What is preventing-or encouraging-collaboration on your campus?"

I am just finishing up a book on pedagogical scholarship, more specifically a review of previously published work on teaching and learning authored by faculty in disciplines other than education and its related fields. If you read this newsletter regularly, you know that I have no quarrels with folks in education. In fact they are the pros-the folks trained to study teaching and learning and advance of our knowledge of both. But this book is devoted to the the scholarship of practitioners-the work that is written by college teachers for college teachers. Up to this point, I don't think anybody has looked at it as a body of applied scholarship and asked what we might learn from it.

By Steve J. Thien, Kansas State University

I had an interesting accident of technology yesterday. I was trying to read the most recent issue of Innovative Higher Education. I entered the year correctly but then listed the volume number as 1 when that was the issue I wanted. I didn’t note the error and began reviewing the table of contents as it downloaded. An article on independent studies. Great, I thought. I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen an article on that topic. I downloaded the pdf and the article did not disappoint me.

Studies on faculty careers show that faculty research publication productivity plateaus or drops at midcareer. However, this one measure of faculty productivity should not be mistaken as stagnation, says Shari Ellertson, an assessment consultant at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, who conducted research on faculty "vitality," or the intensity of engagement with their work.

In order to have a productive learning environment, the instructor needs to develop and maintain a sense of trust between and among the students and the instructor through good course design and facilitation, says Nancy Coppola, associate professor of humanities at New Jersey Institute of Technology.