Articles

What’s the Future of Online Education?

To many students and would-be students who have yet to experience them, online colleges are sometimes viewed with a combination of suspicion and distrust—and occasional newspaper headlines talking about some CEO who, it was learned, received his or her advanced degree at an online “paper mill” do not help these impressions. And many in traditional academic institutions—including those who offer online courses—continue to quickly turn their noses up at online colleges, believing that any for-profit online college could not possibly offer the same quality education that they can.

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Tell Students When They’re Wrong

Instructors need to be thoughtful and reflective about those strategies they use when they respond to students’ answers, and this is especially true when the answer given is wrong. Most of us understand that the stakes are high in this case. Students are easily intimidated. Even those not participating can be negatively affected by how an instructor handles incorrect answers. Some current philosophies of education argue against telling students that they are wrong. The thinking here is that students need to figure out for themselves if their answers are right or wrong. Instead of telling them, instructors should guide them to the right answers, possibly through some sort of Socratic dialogue…

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What’s Bad about Good Practices?

The Socratic questioning strategy described in the article appealed to me. I could see how it would cut down on quizzes, grading, and the whole sad enterprise of writing multiple- guess questions that dulled students’ thinking. I made some adaptations and expectantly implemented it in my introduction to political theory course.

Those expectations quickly dissolved. At her desk, one of my best students…

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The Scholarship of Teaching

The Scholarship of Teaching in the Community College

In his influential Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate, Ernest L. Boyer proposed that the definition of “scholarship” be broadened beyond the predominant emphasis on the scholarship of discovery to encompass the scholarship of application, the scholarship of integration, and the scholarship of teaching. What are the objectives of these four different domains of scholarship?

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