Articles

Strategies for Preventing and Correcting Poor Faculty Evaluations

Online instructors receive poor evaluations for any number of reasons, including lack of experience, inadequate training, and poor communication skills. Other times, the poor reviews are more reflective of the course design than the instructor who’s teaching the course. That distinction is unimportant to the students.

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Good Writing Skills Matter in Every Course, Not Just English Composition

At the end of English composition, I ask students how what they’ve just learned in my class might be useful in their other classes. They’re often bemused and surprised to learn that professors in other courses care about their writing. To encourage them to take responsibility for succeeding in their future writing assignments, I hand out a list of 20 questions that they might ask to better understand “what the professor wants,” and thus continue to apply what we’ve been practicing.

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Mentoring Undergraduates in Research and Scholarship

Interested in a good example of how teaching, student scholarship, and service can be integrated into a single activity? Cecilia Shore [reference below] suggests that mentorship of undergraduates doing scholarship (be it research in labs or bibliographic searches) may just be that example.

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Web 2.0 Grows Up, Goes to College

It’s not easy to get unanimous agreement on anything these days, but on this most educators can agree:

  1. An instructor’s personality impacts student learning;
  2. More is learned in a class than just course content; and
  3. It can be difficult to show your personality in an online course.
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Applying Learning Agreements in the Classroom

As a former editor in the business profession and now educator, I see connections between business and classroom best practices, especially applying professional development plans and performance reflection exercises as academic learning agreements in order to promote student leadership and engagement.

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Tips for Establishing a Rapport with Online Students

“There is no personal interaction between student and teacher…the spontaneity of teaching is lost…the only rapport exists in exchanging bits and bytes of info.”

Perhaps you’ve heard someone make this objection to online learning? Or even uttered it yourself?

My answer to this is very simple: hogwash.

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What Happened When I Stopped Policing and Started Teaching

I’m not sure how to say this without appearing either arrogant or ignorant, but I have discovered that there is a difference between being a police officer and being a professor. I have recognized the difference for some time now, but it has taken me the better part of my 40 years as a college professor to feel fairly comfortable in my new skin.

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