Helping students develop critical-thinking skills and discipline-specific knowledge remain at the forefront of faculty goals for undergraduate education, with 99.6 percent of faculty indicating that critical-thinking skills are "very important" or "essential" and 95.1 percent saying the same of discipline-specific knowledge. Other top goals include helping students to evaluate the quality and reliability of information (97.2 percent) and promoting the ability to write more effectively (96.4 percent).

Jonathan P. Mathews, assistant professor of energy and geo-environmental engineering at Penn State University, teaches a high-enrollment (more than 400 students) general education online course, Energy and the Environment. Although he has two teaching assistants, the logistics of managing such a large class would be overwhelming without implementing the following online course design and management ideas.

A new online course designed to help higher education faculty and staff recognize and mitigate disruptive and potentially dangerous student behavior is now available from Magna Publications. The six-part course, Campus Safety 101, focuses on "the four D's" of concerning behavior — distressed, disturbed, dysregulated and medical disability-based behavior — and how early and effective intervention can protect the campus community and enhance student success.

If you were asked to describe community colleges, the word “entrepreneurial” probably wouldn’t be one of the first things to come to mind. That may be changing. As the traditional avenues for funding decrease and expenses increase, community colleges are turning to innovative fundraising strategies to support everything from student scholarships to program development.

EDUCAUSE, the association for information technology in higher education, released its list of Top Teaching and Learning Challenges for 2009. Voted on by the EDUCAUSE teaching and learning community, the top five challenges are:

If there’s a silver lining to the bad economy … and couldn’t we all use some good economic news about now … consider the results of an annual survey on online education. Staying the Course: Online Education in the United States, 2008 reports that higher education institutions believe that the economic changes will have a positive impact on overall college enrollments, with online courses and programs for working adults seeing the greatest interest.

Campus safety issues remain a critical concern for the higher education community. During the past 10-15 years, incidents of disruptive behavior have increased on colleges campuses nationwide. For college administrators, choosing the appropriate response can make a big difference in the outcome of the situation and the student's future at your institution.

Much attention continues to be directed at those freshman experience programs in college. As important as that time is, it’s not the only portion of a student’s career to which attention should be directed. True, seniors are no longer likely to drop out of college, but they face a transition just as compelling as the one that brings them from high school to college. They are about to depart from college to professional lives. It is a time for reflection, integration, and closure.

It wasn’t all that long ago that the only people using Web 2.0 applications were Millennials and other early adopters. Today Web 2.0 tools are making serious in-roads into the higher education community as valuable weapons in today’s teaching arsenal. And while it’s no surprise that students are drawn to these applications, what may be one of the most unexpected technology trends in higher education is the number of faculty members using them as well.