Despite all the high-tech communication technologies available to online instructors today — discussion boards, email, IM, wikis, podcasts, blogs, vlogs, etc. — every once in awhile Dr. B. Jean Mandernach likes to use a tool that was invented way back in 1876. The telephone.
Move over 18-year-olds. There’s a new student on campus, and she might be your mom. A new survey by the Plus 50 Initiative at the American Association of Community Colleges (AACC) finds that community colleges are reaching out to students over the age of 50 and planning to expand programs for them.
If you think everybody’s pretty much on board with the idea of active learning, think again. I was surprised to find an article that in its opening paragraph describes active learning as “a philosophy and movement that portends trouble for the future of higher education and the American professoriate.”
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).
Research on learning styles now spans four decades and occurs across a wide spectrum of disciplines, including many quite removed from psychology, the disciplinary home of many of the central concepts and theories that ground notions of learning style.
In the corporate world, there’s long been talk of breaking down the workplace silos that often prevent true company-wide communication, collaboration, and growth. Now colleges are looking to get faculty out of their silos, as well. The catalyst? That old nemesis: learning outcomes assessment.
Although distance learning is no longer in its infancy, there are still a lot of unknowns. It’s easy to get overwhelmed by the questions and the possibilities of what you want your online program to look like today … not to mention five years from now. Here’s your chance to take advantage some of the best practices learned by those who blazed the trail before you.
After years of stating my expectations for tutorial participation orally, I have developed a rubric that I think both improves my accountability as an assessor and provides my students with a clear sense of my expectations for class discussions. It also makes clear my focus in the small group setting: creating a “learners-centered,” as opposed to a “learner-centered,” environment.
In Tuesday’s post, we talked about a survey conducted by Brenda Coppard, chair of occupational therapy at Creighton University, on the transition from faculty to chair, and what experiences they…
Despite all that has been written about leadership, the question still remains: What does it take to be an effective academic leader? At the risk of being redundant, and with apologies to David Letterman, here are the 10 characteristics that I have found to positively contribute to effective leadership.