Articles

Four Ways to Motivate Your Students

Motivating students is one of the most difficult challenges for any faculty member, but lighting the fire is critical to ensuring active, dynamic classes. Alice Cassidy, PhD, principal of In View Educational and Professional Development and a faculty member at the University of British Columbia, has devised a four-step process to motivate students for a more stimulating class for students and faculty alike.

Jennifer Patterson Lorenzetti July 27, 2012

10 Ways to Promote Student Engagement

Student engagement is another of those buzz phrases popular in higher education. As with many regularly used terms, everyone assumes we are talking about the same thing; but when asked for definitions, either we are hard pressed to come up one or what’s offered is a decidedly different collection of definitions. Here’s an article that includes clear definitions and, based on a creative synthesis of research, offers 10 ways to promote student engagement.

Maryellen Weimer, PhD July 26, 2012

Makeup Exams: Seeking Answers in a Sea of Student Excuses

They’re a hassle. Depending on whether it means constructing a different exam, arranging a time and location to administer the exam, or grading after the fact, a makeup exam can consume a lot of extra time and effort. Unfortunately, such exams are pretty much a necessity. Most of our institutions require faculty to excuse students for certain events and activities such as serious illnesses, court appearances, military duty, and university-sponsored athletics.

Maryellen Weimer, PhD July 24, 2012

Cultivating Stronger Relationships with Online Faculty through an On-Campus Visitation Program

Strategic relationships build strong commitment and a measurably higher expectation of compliance in all areas, including institutions of higher learning. Columbia Southern University (CSU), a fully online institution, developed an on-campus visitation program in the spring of 2011, inviting groups of faculty to attend a one-day or two-day event for the purpose of connecting faculty to their campus support structure.

Elwin Jones and Katherine Quinley July 23, 2012

App Review: PickMeBuzzer

I enjoy working with students and believe that learning can be a fun activity. Today there are some interesting ways to introduce elements of fun in classroom activities using stand-along buzzer systems—wired and WiFi—but these can be very expensive and a bit bulky.

Dave Yearwood, PhD July 20, 2012

Sustaining Assessment Efforts

Requirements from accreditors and the Higher Education Opportunities Act (HEOA) have made assessment more important than ever. The key to doing it well is adopting sustainable assessment practices, says Linda Suskie, author of Assessing Student Learning: A Common Sense Guide.

Rob Kelly July 19, 2012

Using a Capstone Course to Assess Learning

“In this article, we describe an easily adoptable and adaptable model for a one-credit capstone course that we designed to assess goals at the programmatic and institutional levels.” (p. 523) That’s what the authors claim in the article referenced below, and that’s what they deliver. The capstone course they write about is the culmination of a degree in political science at a public university.

Maryellen Weimer, PhD July 17, 2012

I Don’t Have Time to Teach That: The Benefits of Faculty-Librarian Collaborations

Community College instructors have a great deal to teach: study skills, a college orientation to education, and the actual course information for their discipline. They also know that their students must be information literate, must know how to find supplementary information for each course, how to use information effectively, and how to credit their sources appropriately. In this regard, Washington State Community and Technical Colleges have been working under an LSTA grant on Information Literacy from 2008-2012 (Washington). Lower Columbia College libraries have been using the grant to integrate librarians or library tutorials into face-to-face and online classes, thereby offering information literacy instruction to students without increasing the teaching load of the discipline instructors. When incorporated with research assignments, this instruction, along with embedded librarians, facilitates both student learning and faculty grading of assignments.

Andrea Gillaspy-Steinhilper July 16, 2012

The How, Why, and When of Posting Resources in the Online Classroom

Resources—that amalgam of nearly anything and everything related to the subjects we teach and offered to our students as “extras”—give students a broader, deeper, and enhanced understanding of what they are being taught. Resources come in a variety of forms and often reflect our deep interest in our specialties. Sharing them in the online classroom gives students a better learning experience.

Errol Craig Sull July 12, 2012

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