Providing students with mentors can be an effective way for students to learn directly from experts in real-world situations. It’s a technique used widely in face-to-face courses, and it can work in online courses as well. Al Widman, professor of management and business administration at Berkeley College, has matched students with practitioner mentors in his online undergraduate non-profit management course.

A colleague shared an excellent but not yet published paper on the syllabus. It got me thinking as this is the time of year when most of us are revisiting these venerable documents. Oh, I know, some of you finished yours back in May when the semester ended. And then there are the rest of us who are working on them feverishly as the beginning of new academic year quickly approaches.

At the start of a new position, it’s natural to wonder how many new initiatives you should get under way quickly and which are better left for the future. There are, after all, two conflicting principles at work:

Donald McCabe’ s 2005 article “Cheating Among College And University Students: A North American Perspective” is often cited for its sobering statistics regarding the prevalence of cheating in higher education.

Frustrated with the traditional lecture format in an upper-level chemistry class that enrolled more than 100 students, and envious of my teaching assistants who spent time in small recitations working on problem solving with my students, I designed an approach I call the “The Front Row.” It brings a small group feel into a large classroom.

In a recent conversation, a faculty member expressed great dismay at the amount of cheating taking place in higher education and the cavalier attitude of many students toward it. His dismay is well founded. Depending on the study (and there have been many) anywhere between 40 to 60% of students report that they have cheated and they indicate a much higher percentage of their peers have as well. The faculty member I was talking to then went into a detailed description of all the measures he took to prevent cheating.

Online programs are under a microscope. Some school faculty and administrators are concerned with maintaining academic quality, while others have already identified problems with quality and integrity. Negative media exposure has caused accreditors and other stakeholders to scrutinize online learning, and college and university administrators know that they need to respond.

It’s not “serial teaching” or “a lot of little mini courses stuck together” or “sequenced solo teaching” as team teaching too often is, but rather teaching where “we are both planning, we are both making sure we understand the material as it needs to be presented, and we are both standing up there.” That’s how Jessica Lester and Katherine Evans describe their goal for team teaching a senior-level educational psychology course for preservice teachers. (p. 375)

Despite the continuing mainstreaming of online education, there are a number of myths that continue to persist, particularly in terms of the hiring practices for online instructors, and whether institutions make a sufficient effort to integrate remote instructors into the campus culture.