Most instructors attempt to encourage class participation by making it part of the overall grade. But evaluating individual contributions and promoting a substantive, intriguing discussion
In my classroom-based courses I have always valued discussion as a powerful learning tool that provides students with opportunities to explain their reasoning and understanding, learn different perspectives and points of view, and re-think and possibly revise their own conceptions based on careful reflection of potentially disparate viewpoints. As I prepared to teach my first online course five years ago, it was only natural that discussion would be a part of it.
Administrators can help inspire much-needed reform of the tenure and promotion processes at their institutions if they begin discussions of reducing the workload of both candidates and committees in the following three ways.
In last Wednesday’s post, Stephen F. Davis, Patrick F. Drinan, and Tricia Bertram Gallant, the authors of the newly released CHEATING IN SCHOOL: What We Know and What We Can Do, recommended steps faculty can take to reduce cheating in their classroom. In this, the second of a two-part email interview, the authors offer advice to academic leaders on how to create healthy environments that support ethical choices at all levels of the organization.
For six years, Cecilia McInnis-Bowers and E. Byron Chew served as dean-partners for the division of business and graduate programs at Birmingham-Southern College, taking shared leadership beyond a simple division of labor by working together on every decision, jointly advising students, and conducting each meeting and telephone call together.
Larry Ragan, director of faculty development for Penn State World Campus, may have given a new spin to the old expression “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.” Except, unlike the philosophical musing that’s become immortalized as one of those motivational posters, Ragan’s focus is on improving online learning.
The intermediate statistics class I took quite a number of years ago had two types of learners at the outset—those who were worried about passing the course and those who were sure they couldn’t pass it. The professor clearly understood the “fear-of-stats” phenomenon and used a number of instructional techniques to help learners gain confidence and skills.
Institutions of higher education nearly always feel a budgetary crunch, and this holds true for online programs. However, the costs of running a successful online program run far beyond the expected line items of salaries, technology, and marketing. Faculty turnover and attrition can bring a number of serious but unanticipated costs to a program, costs that are may be poorly understood due to a lack of research identifying these costs.
In CHEATING IN SCHOOL: What We Know and What We Can Do, (Wiley-Blackwell) authors Stephen F. Davis, Patrick F. Drinan, and Tricia Bertram Gallant provide a comprehensive look at the cheating phenomenon from primary through graduate school. In an email interview with Faculty Focus, the authors discuss academic integrity issues in higher education specifically, including steps that can be taken at the institutional level as well as in individual classrooms.
Given student motivation to get grades and the prevalence of cheating, most faculty would never seriously consider letting students grade their own work. However, self-grading, especially of homework, does accrue some significant benefits. It can move students away from doing homework for points to making them more aware of why and how doing problems helps them learn. If students grade their own work, they see exactly where they are making mistakes. And they obtain that feedback far sooner than if the instructor collects the homework, grades it, and then returns it some days later.
