Online student retention is one of the most critical components for the success of any college or university. The key to a successful online retention program is the realization that student retention is everybody's job.

Anyone who teaches online has run into problems within their courses. Some of these problems can be complicated and if not correctly resolved can do major damage to the online instructor’s reputation and opportunity for teaching future courses. This column tackles the worst of these.

I have taught the senior-level marketing capstone course for more than 15 years. That translates to something like 28 semesters of graduates about to embark on life in “the real world.” We joke in academia about calling it that, but in fact when one considers the sheltered life of a college undergrad of traditional age, the world outside is more real than what they have experienced in our classrooms. I do not profess to be an expert at getting them prepared to face that scary world, but I do have an assignment that I think helps them at least think about who they will be in that new place. It involves blue slips. What’s a blue slip? Pink slips you know, but not blue ones.

Getty Images, one of the world's leading creators and distributors of imagery, video and other multimedia products has partnered with AcademicPub^TM, a technology platform which enables faculty to create customized course packs with real-time selection of copyright-cleared content from multiple publishers and sources.

Dead ideas that limit teaching and learning—that was the topic of Professor Diane Pike’s plenary session at the recent Teaching Professor Conference. There’s a tyranny associated with dead ideas. They limit and constrain our thinking, and can lead us in the wrong direction. An idea may pass on without us noticing, and discovering it is dead can be provocative. Consider, for example, these three ideas that Pike proposed.

“Inquiry-based learning is an umbrella term, encompassing a range of teaching approaches which involve stimulating learning with a question or issue and thereby engaging learners in constructing new knowledge and understandings.” (p. 57) Teachers who use these approaches act as facilitators of learning. Students start becoming more self-directed learners. A hodgepodge of approaches gets put under this umbrella, including case-based learning; problem-based learning; and discovery-oriented learning, which involves undertaking original research.

If you find yourself working longer hours or maybe feeling a bit more stressed at the end of the day, you’re not alone. Fifty percent of college faculty who completed the annual Faculty Focus reader survey said that their job is more difficult than it was five years ago. Only nine percent said their job is less difficult, while 33 percent said it’s about the same.

Blackboard today unveiled Mosaic™, a unique platform that gives schools and universities a radically different approach to deploying mobile apps. While institutions can spend months developing apps and lack flexibility to make changes once they've launched, Mosaic greatly simplifies the process so that people with very limited technology experience can create, deploy and update high-quality, device-specific apps in minutes or days.

Often faculty who teach large classes (and some who don’t) fantasize about sitting down and working individually with students. For many of us that’s the ideal teaching scenario, but for most of us teaching realities are far removed from this ideal. You can’t tutor individual students when faced with 100 of them. Or can you?