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Inquiry-Based Approaches: What Do Students Think?

“Inquiry-based learning is an umbrella term, encompassing a range of teaching approaches which involve stimulating learning with a question or issue and thereby engaging learners in constructing new knowledge and understandings.” (p. 57) Teachers who use these approaches act as facilitators of learning. Students start becoming more self-directed learners. A hodgepodge of approaches gets put under this umbrella, including case-based learning; problem-based learning; and discovery-oriented learning, which involves undertaking original research.

Maryellen Weimer, PhD June 25, 2013

Half of Faculty Say Their Job is More Difficult Today than Five Years Ago

If you find yourself working longer hours or maybe feeling a bit more stressed at the end of the day, you’re not alone. Fifty percent of college faculty who completed the annual Faculty Focus reader survey said that their job is more difficult than it was five years ago. Only nine percent said their job is less difficult, while 33 percent said it’s about the same.

Mary Bart June 24, 2013

When Teaching Large Classes, Think Like a Tutor

Often faculty who teach large classes (and some who don’t) fantasize about sitting down and working individually with students. For many of us that’s the ideal teaching scenario, but for most of us teaching realities are far removed from this ideal. You can’t tutor individual students when faced with 100 of them. Or can you?

Maryellen Weimer, PhD June 21, 2013

Recent Copyright Cases: What You Need to Know

In the spring of 2008, Georgia State University officials were sued by three academic publishers claiming extensive copyright infringement in the posting of book excerpts to GSU’s e-reserves and learning management systems. Although the case went to trial in the summer of 2011, the judge took nearly a year to craft an almost 350-page opinion that painstakingly analyzed 75 alleged violations of fair use.

Jennifer Patterson Lorenzetti June 20, 2013

Seven Guidelines for Designing Effective Course Pages for the Online Classroom

The design of your course pages can have a significant effect on the learning experience in your online course. Good design can draw students in, help them comprehend the information the first time they read it, and enable them to easily retrieve information, says Sheree Webb, an instructional designer at Tyler Junior College.

Rob Kelly June 18, 2013

Teaching Inequality: Denial, Defensiveness, and the Diminishing of Oppression

As a sociology teacher, not only do I discuss topics related to oppression and inequality, but these topics comprise a pervasive and substantial portion of our pedagogy. The chapters on class stratification, race and ethnicity, and gender and sexuality are a required chunk of the curriculum by the social science department, and an obvious pedagogical necessity to the social scientist who knows that our location on the social hierarchy is tremendously dependent upon the “isms”—on an individual and institutional level. When covering a lesson on privilege and oppression—almost inexorably, and amongst others—at least one of the following responses from students ensues: denial, defensiveness, and/or diminishment. Aptly enough, their reactions exemplify a part of the lesson, and therefore can be used as a learning device in the liberal arts and social sciences classroom.

Kimberly D. Brostrom June 17, 2013

The Importance of Relevancy in Improving Student Engagement and Learning

For more than nine years, I have been deeply interested in metacognition as it applies to the art and science of teaching. I have also been involved in taking non-professional teachers and training them to be both content area experts and more than adequate teachers in the classroom. This can be a tough endeavor as people like to teach in non-traditional schools for a variety of reasons and some are not always interested in becoming teachers qua teachers. Worse are those who feel being a subject matter expert is enough because as long as they’re talking, the students must be learning, right?

Steve Wyre EdD June 14, 2013

Lessons Learned from My Students

My students have taught me some invaluable lessons during my first two years as a college professor. I’d like to share three of the most important ones here. They aren’t new lessons and I didn’t use any unique methods to learn them. I collected data midsemester from students, I talked with them, and I looked closely at what was happening in my classroom. The lessons were there for me to learn, and taken together they have helped me think more clearly about what I want my students to know and do, and who I want them to become. They are lessons that have made me a better teacher.

Candice Dowd Barnes, EdD June 13, 2013

Private Journal Replaces Discussion Forum in Blended Course

The discussion board in Kathleen Lowney’s large blended (or hybrid) section of introduction to sociology at Valdosta State University wasn’t serving its intended purpose of engaging learners with the content and preparing them for face-to-face class sessions. She tried dividing the students into smaller discussion groups of 50 and then 20, and the results were the same: the weaker students waited until the last minute and essentially repeated what the better students had posted previously. When she replaced the public discussions with private journals, the quality of students’ posts improved, as did their grades.

Rob Kelly June 11, 2013

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