With the growth of distance education and changes in student demographics, the traditional class schedule, when a class meets two or three times a week, may no longer be what students want or need to meet their educational goals. In its place, institutions are offering online, hybrid, and accelerated courses, which provide greater flexibility and can improve student learning and retention.

Colleges and universities need leadership at every level, but often faculty are reluctant to lend their leadership abilities because the notion of them as leaders is often at odds with their perception of themselves as academics. "It's not who we are. We're people who challenge and question all the time. When we associate leaders with authority, most faculty shy away from that," says Marlene Moore, dean of the college of arts and sciences at the University of Portland.

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.

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

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.