Yes. While service-learning is not appropriate for every course, it can and does work well in every discipline. No matter the discipline, research has shown that service-learning helps students identify and examine the “big questions” and the social context in which the disciplines are situated.

Service-learning also asks students to consider a discipline’s knowledge base and how it is used in real practice, and consider the larger questions that lie outside the boundaries of many traditional courses. With service-learning, students see the interdisciplinary nature of problems and solutions. They see the complexity of the social fabric.

Students love seeing the relevance of course content to real-world issues. Can you work service-learning into your curriculum so there’s time for both? Don’t think of it as “working in” service-learning, but as designing or redesigning the course. If you add a service-learning element to an existing course, remove another element. If you’re adding an assignment (service), reduce the volume of assignments accordingly.

Service-learning course design
When looking at course design, the first question to ask is, “What pedagogies will align with desired learning outcomes?”

You know that learning outcomes are hot topics for discussion today. They’re required by all the regional accrediting associations at the course major and college levels. Learning outcomes need to be stated in concrete, measurable terms. And, they also need to make it clear to students what they can expect to gain from the course.

And there are other concerns you should address, too. For example:

• What do you want students to know as a result of taking the service-learning course?
• What desired learning outcomes are best achieved through service-learning? Why?
• What new awarenesses do you want them to gain?

As faculty members, we understand what it means to select and use a text in a course to enhance student learning. With service-learning, a good guideline is to look at it as the equivalent to text. While it is not literally a text, it serves an equivalent function. Service can be equal to written work in terms of learning potential.

When it comes to using a text, we can make it required or optional. The same applies to “service-as-text.” We determine how much of the texts students will be required to read and we can determine how much, or how many hours of service students will do. We know how to provide structures for reading, analyzing, discussing, and evaluating a text.

This means the service experience and the course materials are equivalent to course content. Second, like text, you must decide which service experiences are appropriate for the course, and whether they’ll be optional or required. Third, it means structures need to be provided so students can thoroughly read, analyze, and discuss the “text.”

Finally, it is necessary to evaluate how well students have learned. The service-learning-text analogy suggests that evaluation should be based on what students learned from their experience.

Let’s look more closely at creating a course design. Here’s an example of a course description, the service-learning outcome and how it was achieved.

Introduction to Chemistry course: The students in this course take and analyze water samples from the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries. At the same time, they’re studying the periodic table. That interaction brings the table alive as they study the chemicals that cause the pollution. The results are reported to an organization that uses the information to improve the ecological health of the Bay.

Desired learning outcome: Identify the causes of pollution in Chesapeake Bay.

How it was achieved: Students worked with a conservation organization and took water samples from the Bay, analyzed them, and added them to the organization’s database. That organization then used that information to help them lobby for additional funding to preserve the Bay.

Excerpted from Service-Learning Course Design: What Faculty Need to Know. Learn more about this white paper »

Consider the following scenario:
An economics professor on your campus records a program from MSNBC on her DVD recorder at home and then shows the film to her online economics class over your college broadcast network. Is this acceptable? To further help the students, she copies several articles off the Internet from The Economist and BusinessWeek magazines and places them on her college Web page.

Is this copyright infringement or does it fall under the heading of “fair use”?

This is an extremely common problem at many colleges across the United States, because faculty have grown to believe that everything they do in a classroom is considered to be fair use as long as it is for educational purposes. This view seems to have extended to the online arena as well, which is more exposed to the public. This merely increases the likelihood that violators will be caught.

To avoid copyright problems in both online and face-to-face classes, the first key is to stick within what are called “fair use” guidelines. A common test that courts often apply to determine if infringement has occurred is to consider whether you are reproducing material (photocopying articles, scanning images, or recording a show and posting it on your website) merely to avoid purchasing the work. This is the most important component of the “Fair Use Four-Part Test.” This is the most significant factor that courts will consider in determining infringement.

Many faculty members lament the fact that books are so expensive and wonder if they can just copy parts of them and post them online for students. Of course, if you are doing that to avoid having your students purchase the work, then you are taking away market and income from that author. If that is the case, you are violating fair use.

In addition, many colleges and universities throughout the United States no longer indemnify a professor or administrator who is sued for a copyright violation. What that means is the college is not going to be standing behind you, with its legal team supporting you, if you are named in a legal action. If you violate copyright laws, you are going to be trudging into court on your own to defend yourself against a lawsuit. You will be hiring your own attorney to do so. This is not just career breaking, but it can destroy your personal finances as well.

Excerpted from What Distance Ed Administrators Must Know About the Law, a Magna white paper. Learn more about this valuable resource »

The sobering fact is that less than sixty percent of the students entering four-year colleges in America today are graduating within six years. (Bowen, Chingos, & McPherson, 2009.) Minority students and those from poor families have an especially difficult time reaching the graduation milestone.

Historically, faculty members have not been expected to play a major role in retaining students. Their role, instead, was to “sort” students by assigning them grades based on their performance. The common view, for quite a long time, was that “students have a right to fail.” Many institutions did not even bother keeping track of the number of dropouts from their institutions or programs. In times of plentiful students and budget surpluses, this laissez-faire approach was tenable. This view is changing, rapidly, under the current conditions.

The new thinking is that institutions have a responsibility to promote and support student learning and that they should measure their success as institutions based upon how well their students learned. Certainly, students have a great deal of responsibility for their own success, but so does the institution and, by implication, the faculty members.

The shift from “teaching” to “learning,” then, is really a shift away from measuring the success of a college or university based upon resources and processes to measuring success based upon outcomes. These imperatives are behind the current drive to collect student success data and to help faculty and staff develop strategies to raise success rates. In short, institutions are turning to their faculties for help in improving upon dismal retention numbers.

Retention is not only a growing expectation and imperative, but it is also an opportunity for faculty members to take the lead in innovating, researching, and implementing new strategies while demonstrating their effectiveness. This is both a challenge and a huge opportunity for college professors to take the lead in re-creating the college learning experience in ways that are more supportive and effective.

Faculty members are on the front-line of meeting the increasingly important retention imperative. Instructors interact with students frequently and are likely to be among the first to notice signs that a student is disengaging from college and at-risk of dropping out. By learning to recognize the warning signs and taking informed intervention action, a faculty member can play a key role in changing the course of a student’s life for the better. This is an exciting opportunity and a big responsibility, but future generations depend on our willingness to rise to the challenge.

Excerpted from What Faculty Members Need to Know About Retention, a Magna white paper. Learn more about this valuable resource »

Reference
Bowen,William, Chingos, Matthew, & McPherson, Michael. (2009.) Crossing the Finish Line:
Completing College at America’s Public Universities. New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

When you undertake a blended learning course, you can’t just think about what assignments and activities you are going to move online. You have to reconceptualize the entire course. This means starting with your learning goals. The place to begin is by asking yourself: What do I want students to learn?

If you don’t start with a clear idea of your learning objectives, you’re not going to end up where you want to go. A theme throughout this white paper is the reminder to keep thinking about the overall goals that you’ve created for the course. While this is not meant to be a white paper on writing learning objectives, one helpful tip is to remember to use action verbs as much as possible when outlining your course goals.

Here are examples of some possible learning objectives in history, ranging from ineffective to very effective:

• Poor: Know the causes of the American Revolution
• Better: List three causes of the American Revolution
• Best: Given a possible cause of the American Revolution, provide reasons to support that cause

When you write learning objectives, it is very helpful to keep in mind how you might write a test question based on those objectives. Verbs like “know” are too amorphous to be very helpful. How would you test and how will you assess whether students “know” the causes of the American Revolution? The verb “list” is more specific. Students can write a list of possible causes to study.

Even better, though, is to think at higher levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy. At the higher levels, you get the students to analyze a particular cause critically or provide reasons why something occurred. You have them do some evaluation or some synthesis using higher-order thinking. The more you can move your learning objectives beyond the lowest levels of thinking, the more you will improve your courses through blended learning.

Here’s another example of learning objectives, this time taken from a science class:

• Poor: Understand hybrid orbital theory
• Better: Describe the underlying construct for hybrid orbitals
• Best: Given a molecule, identify the hybrid orbitals and explain why they exist

Understanding a particular theory isn’t that impressive. Far better is trying to encourage students to describe some of the constructs, or better yet, apply them to an example. It would be fairly easy to write a test question based on the best learning objective here.

It is important to have learning objectives for the overall course and for each unit within a course. Naturally, they will be different for every discipline. You need to think through what you want students to accomplish and how you are going to know when they have accomplished it. This will help you map out your blended course.

With strong, clear learning objectives, you will be prepared and organized when it is time to begin moving some of those topics online. You’re going to be able to make informed decisions about which content to put where and whether to have them complete certain activities before or after class time. But it all begins with the learning objectives.

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Students with a narcissistic personality style are apt to challenge instructors on relatively minor matters, as well as cast scathing aspersions on their professors’ characters and their very qualifications to teach.

For example, one rather young, unmarried, and childless psychology instructor at a Midwestern college once complained about how some of her older students who were parents would blister her with complaints that she did not know enough about the psychology of children because she didn’t have any.

A pertinent question here is how they even knew that she had no children. In this particular case, she had shared this personal information with them when they pressured her to disclose it. Clearly, there was no reason for her to share this information with her students, and they were crossing personal boundaries by pressuring her to disclose it. Had she remained tight-lipped about her personal life, she might have averted this particular form of attempted denigration and devaluation.

This struggling instructor merely needed to be reminded that there are many people with children who have poorly understood and atrociously raised them. Conversely, there are many people who do not have their own children but who, like she does, understand the psychology of children exceptionally well. In other words, having children does not necessarily qualify a person to teach child psychology, and not having children is not a disqualifying factor for this assignment.

How to Respond
This type of student can be very hard on an instructor’s confidence and sense of self-worth. When confronted with a student who challenges your worth, remind yourself that you were hired to do your job based upon the strength of your qualifications.

Keep in mind, for your own protection, that self-entitled students do not respect personal boundaries or privacy especially well. They may attempt to intrude on your privacy by asking inappropriate questions. Try to refrain from answering personal questions asked by students with personal self-disclosures unless you are absolutely certain that your disclosures provide an absolutely relevant and positive contribution to the topic under discussion.

A short, straightforward comment to inappropriate inquiries is all that is required, such as, “I’m sorry, but information about my personal life is neither relevant nor essential to the topic under discussion, and therefore I prefer to maintain my personal privacy here and will do all I can to respect and protect yours.” That should suffice.

There is some indication that this current generation of college students includes more people who exhibit self-entitled behavior. Assuming this is correct, we can expect to have to deal with more narcissistic traits than we might have seen a mere generation ago. In the past, students seemed to be somewhat more deferential, more conforming, and more self-sacrificing than are some of the students we are seeing on campuses today. If this is the case, then instructors will have to adjust their behavior accordingly to accommodate the growing presence of certain narcissistic characteristics among their students.

Narcissism is just the beginning. If you’re struggling with difficult students at your institution, Coping with Seven Disruptive Personality Types in the Classroom will provide the practical and effective solutions that will prepare college officials to handle the full range of student misbehavior. Learn more about this valuable new resource »