Dillard University CTLAT Blog

Friday, October 15, 2010

CUR Council on Undergraduate Research: CUR Dialogues

February 24-26, 2011

Hamilton Crowne Plaza

Washington, DC

http://www.cur.org/cd.html

CUR Dialogues is designed to bring faculty and administrators to Washington, D.C. to interact with federal agency program officers and other grant funders.

Workshops and Plenary Sessions will:
• tell participants about grant opportunities in research and education, both new and ongoing;
• assist faculty learn how to find new funding opportunities;
• assist faculty develop grant proposal writing skills.

Participants will:
• meet in small groups and talk with program officers and grants management officers -- NSF, NIH, NEH, NEA, Dept. of Energy, Dept. of Ed, and more;
• take the opportunity to communicate directly with program officers and grants administrators concerning grant requirements and funders’ priorities;
• share ideas with colleagues.

In addition, CUR Dialogues provides a setting for funders to learn of the interests, needs, and concerns of researchers and educators relative to funding opportunities. CUR Dialogues has spawned many ideas for grant programs, and have helped agencies to refine their program guidelines.

Who should attend: Faculty at all career stages; undergraduate research directors; grants administrators; development officers.

For more information visit: http://www.cur.org/cd.html

Council on Undergraduate Research
734 15th St, NW, Suite 550
Washington, DC 20005
http://www.cur.org/
cur@cur.org
(202)783-4810
(202)783-4811 fax

"The Tomorrow's Professor Blog": Tomorrow's Teaching and Learning

http://cgi.stanford.edu/~dept-ctl/cgi-bin/tomprof/postings.php

Inside Higher Ed: Gaming as a Teaching Tool

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/10/15/games

October 15, 2010 ANAHEIM — All work and no play makes a dull syllabus.

That is what Sarah Smith-Robbins, director of emerging technologies at the Indiana University at Bloomington, told a somewhat wary audience here at the 2010 Educause conference on Thursday. “Games are absolutely the best way to learn,” she said. “They are superior to any other instructional model.”

Smith-Robbins prefaced her remarks by reminding the audience that she was taking an intentionally strong position in order to stoke debate. But she nevertheless argued that games — as simple as tag or as complex as World of Warcraft — can accomplish an array of teaching goals that more traditional pedagogy says it wants to achieve, but often does not.

“Fundamentally, school is already a game,” she said. “It’s just a really bad one. The rules are not clear. The system works better for some people than for others. Not everybody has the same resources at the beginning of the game. We don’t start on a level playing field or with a shared goal.”

Using games, whether within a single course or across a curriculum, helps iron out these inconsistencies and motivate students, argued Smith-Robbins. Compare a typical course — particularly one where assessment is subjective — to a game like Chutes and Ladders, she said. “When you land on one of those slides, you go down. Everybody sees you go down, you know exactly what happened, you know why it happened. There’s no, ‘This game hates me, it just doesn’t like my ideas.’ It’s simple.”

Further, students are more likely to learn from their mistakes in games, since the stakes are lower than they are with, say, exams. Gamers often get multiple opportunities to try similar challenges over again if they fail. This makes students more apt to reflect on feedback and work through mistakes, Smith-Robbins said. Like practice problems — only, you know, fun.

The point of Smith-Robbins’s presentation was not to prove that gaming is a superior method of learning, but rather that good course design and good game design are based on the same factors: fair rules, clear goals, fair rules, and strong incentives to learn from errors and develop the knowledge and skills necessary to be successful. Judging by how many students choose games over coursework, it would appear course designers might have something to learn from game designers.

But some were skeptical. “What about efficiency?” asked one audience member. How can professors, teach students everything they need to learn in 15 short weeks via low-stakes, presumably time-consuming games?

Smith-Robbins argued that a well-designed game should in fact allow students to move through lessons more quickly. Most courses, she said, are taught in chunks that only make sense to students in retrospect. In a game, the skills are learned in a context that makes them seem less discrete and more like intuitive steps toward an explicit goal. “So you don’t have to artificially put things in groups of common topics, or by chapters in a book,” she said. “You can break them up into an order than makes sense to the learner, so they can soak them up as quickly as they can.”

Another big concern was whether the rigid rules and objectives inherent to gaming might stifle creativity in the classroom. This was a challenge Smith-Robbins said she and her co-panelists faced when running a decidedly meta pre-conference session earlier in the week, in which they made a game of teaching others how to design classroom games. “One of the hardest things that we had to confront in designing that game was that we wanted to allow the players to be extremely creative, but because we couldn’t anticipate what they could do, we couldn’t figure out how to evaluate that within the games system,” she said. The experiment was a failure.

But what if creativity was the key to winning? There are plenty of games like that — such as Pictionary, or Charades — where there is a goal, but no prescribed path toward achieving it, Smith-Robbins said. A classroom-based game might be designed such that creativity is rewarded, not stifled, she said.

Not every student or course is ideal for gaming, Smith-Robbins said, but there are plenty of courses and curriculums out there that could benefit from games — or at least some of the principles that make games so appealing. “We could certainly do with a dose of play in school, period,” she said. “I hope games can do that. But if we can get the playfulness without the games, that would be an improvement in and of itself.”

For the latest technology news and opinion from Inside Higher Ed, follow @IHEtech on Twitter.
— Steve Kolowich

Learning Online Info: E-Learning and Educational Technologies News and Resources

How to Communicate With People Without Ever Meeting Them in Person

October 15, 2010 in Guest,Learning Technologies

http://learningonlineinfo.org/

This a guest post by Courtney Bishop. Courtney is a lover of all things creative, she likes to write and has an obsession with crossword puzzles. She recently started blogging and you can follow her on Twitter @cbishopBG.

You don’t have to have an official face-to-face meet-and-greet or get to know the people you’re talking to in order to have effective communication. As the world grows smaller and more businesses are going global, making changes in traditional ways of doing business has become necessary for many small and not so small businesses. These types of communications can also be applied to any situation where face-to-face interaction is the norm: such as the classroom.

Throughout it all, effective communication and the ability to coordinate on the go are critical for building business, encouraging teamwork, and collaborating on projects (school or otherwise) with people throughout the company, class, across the city, or even around the world. It’s not always possible to have those up close and personal meetings that are most effective but there are a few surprisingly effective options available.

What can you do to bridge the distance and still get your point across?

Email Communication
Today people exchange email the way phone numbers were exchanged in the not so distant past. In fact, a growing number of people today prefer communication via email rather than phone calls.

Emails are easily forwarded, can be shared among a large group, and provide written backup so that important information isn’t lost in the shuffle.

There is a bit of a downside to communication via email that should be considered. Sending emails to a large group of people can easily become cumbersome and unruly. It can even become difficult to keep up with exactly what’s being said and who is getting the message.

The major downside of email is that it isn’t instant communication. Different time zones, business hours, holidays, and down time for employees across the country and around the world make email a little difficult to rely on when quick communication is necessary.

Interactive Calendars
Whether using the calendar for the purpose of coordinating meeting times, in a global business this isn’t as simple of a proposition as one would like to believe, of for setting goals, establishing deadlines, and sharing vital, time sensitive information, interactive calendars that allow members to post public information as needed can prove incredibly useful. For online learning, interactive calendars are especially important.

There are quite a few great calendars available. Your greatest hardship may very well be deciding which one offers the features your business needs most. Most educational atmospheres offer standard versions of calendars on the institution’s website.

Conference Calls
Today’s businesses need something a little more impressive, and effective, than three-way calling to really compete on a global scale. There are quite a few reasons to consider conference calling. These are some of the best:

Free conference calling software makes it affordable to coordinate with business partners from around the world.

When everyone is on the line at once, it’s easier to make important points and ensure that everyone is on the same page for the project, business goals, and important upcoming deadlines.

Conference calls are a more affordable option than comparable video conferencing services without sacrificing much in the way of service or security.

It is not impossible to have effective communication with people around the world you have never met. The challenges of communicating over distances can be easily met with email, conference calls, interactive online calendars and other great tools that can be accessed easily online.

Magna Online Seminar: 23 Practical Strategies to Help New Faculty Thrive

Event Date: 11/22/2010 Time: 12:00 pm Central

http://www.magnapubs.com/catalog/help-new-faculty-thrive/

New faculty members need practical help to achieve lasting classroom success.

The average college professor knows his or her subject matter very well, but receives very little training in how to teach effectively. That’s because most graduate programs provide minimal instruction on classroom pedagogy.

It’s not surprising that many new faculty members struggle when they are first asked to lead their own classes. Bad habits picked up early in a teaching career can become self-defeating in the long term.

Often, new faculty members try to do too much and wind up overextending themselves, which diminishes their enthusiasm. This can lead to frustration and ineffectiveness.

The best way to confront these problems is to provide new faculty members with practical guidance and seasoned advice early on.

In 23 Practical Strategies to Help New Faculty Thrive, award-winning professor and faculty mentor Dr. Ike Shibley of Penn State will share effective strategies for success in college teaching.

Drawing upon his fifteen years of teaching and mentoring experience, Professor Shibley will offer compelling and realistic advice on day-to-day teaching and improving student learning to guide new faculty members around predictable pitfalls and set them on the path to a rewarding teaching career.

This video online seminar will cover:
•Deliberate course design
•Writing a strong syllabus—and sticking to it
•Improving student ratings
•High vs. low-stakes grades
•Finding the right pacing
•The reality behind teaching “myths”
•How to start and end each class
•How and why to find a faculty mentor
•Strategies for working with colleagues
•Ways to increase classroom efficiency
•Maintaining psychological health
•The rewards of teaching
•And more!

This seminar also includes the opportunity to respond to polling questions, ask questions, and share comments and ideas with other attendees.

Who should attend?
This video online seminar is recommended for college professors who are just starting out, and for professors needing to recharge. It is also designed for administrators seeking ways to support new faculty. Others who will benefit from this seminar include:
•Instructors
•Course Developers
•Instructional Designers

Registration Cost
The cost to participate in this 90-minute video online seminar is $259, regardless of the number of attendees from a single location on your campus. This means that you may include all of your new faculty hires in this training opportunity without increasing your costs! To take full advantage of this per-site registration offer, make arrangements to sign on to this seminar from a large meeting room or conference center.

Your presenter
Dr. Ike Shibley is an Associate Professor of Chemistry at Penn State Berks. He has won university-wide awards for his teaching and mentors new faculty members. His pedagogical research interests involve exploring strategies to facilitate cognitive development in college students and finding the most productive ways to enhance student learning. A frequent presenter, his pre-conference session for new teachers at The Teaching Professor Conference has been well attended for seven years.

Prepare your new faculty members for whatever college teaching can throw at them. Provide them with the tools for success by registering for this practical seminar today.

Faculty Focus Special Report: Strategies for Increasing Online Student Retention and Satisfaction

http://www.facultyfocus.com/free-report/strategies-for-increasing-online-student-retention-and-satisfaction/?c=FF&t=F101015a

Despite the tremendous growth of distance education, retention remains its Achilles’ heel. Estimates of the failed retention rate for distance education undergraduates range from 20 to 50 percent. Distance education administrators believe the failed retention rate for online courses may be 10 to 20 percent higher than for face-to-face courses. Failure to address online course retention will have a significant impact on a program’s bottom line and ability to grow.

Faculty Focus: RateMyProfessors: Is There a Lesson to be Learned?

October 13, 2010 By: Maryellen Weimer in Trends in Higher Education

http://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/trends-in-higher-education/ratemyprofessors-is-there-a-lesson-to-be-learned/?c=FF&t=F101013a

RateMyProfessors.com needs no introduction to most instructors. The problems with the site are equally well known. There’s no guarantee that the students who select to evaluate and post the comments are a representative sample—and no guarantee that the assessments themselves are representative.

In fact, in the Kindred and Mohammed (reference below) analysis of evaluation for 626 professors, 41.5 percent had only one rating listed. The site does not prevent students from evaluating a given instructor more than once. It does not ensure that they have even taken the course they are evaluating. And there’s nothing that prevents an instructor from entering high scores and making nice comments.

Despite these problems, use of the site continues to grow. Brown, Baillie, and Fraser (reference below) report that in January 2009 the site boasted more than 6.8 million ratings for more than a million instructors from over 6,000 colleges and universities in the United States, Canada, England, Scotland, and Wales. The numbers show just how interested students are in finding out as much as they can about a course before taking it—that was also one of the findings from the focus group interviews conducted by Kindred and Mohammed. Eighty-three percent of the students surveyed by Brown, Baillie, and Fraser reported that they had visited the site. They go there because most institutions do not give students access to end-of-course rating data.

Thirty-six percent of the students in Brown, Baillie, and Fraser’s sample said they had posted on the site. Students in Kindred and Mohammed’s focus groups said that students posted because they wanted to share information about the course with other students. They also indicated that students are especially motivated to offer assessments when a teacher is really good or really bad.

Kindred and Mohammed did a content analysis of 788 comments—just about 75 percent of students who rated professors made comments. “Approximately 42% of the ratings coded in the present sample (437 ratings) contained statements pertaining to the competence of the instructor.” About 30 percent of those comments were negative, with the remaining 70 percent positive. The researchers conclude, “While issues such as personality and appearance did enter into the postings, these were secondary motivators compared to more salient issues such as competence, knowledge, clarity and helpfulness.”

What do students think about the ratings and comments that appear on the site? In Brown, Baillie, and Fraser’s survey, 71 percent of the students said they avoided taking an instructor based on the ratings that appeared on the site. Interestingly, 58 percent of that sample said they thought students were more honest in the evaluations posted on the site than on the evaluations collected by the institution at the end of the course. However, in the focus group interviews conducted by Kindred and Mohammed, students said they trusted the opinions of their friends more than what they read on the RateMyProfessors site. They also reported that they took evaluations on the site less seriously if a lot of the comments contradicted each other. They said they could tell when a comment was just angry venting and took those comments with a grain of salt.

The RateMyProfessors site does not appear as though it is going away any time soon and its astounding popularity attests to how hungry students are for information about courses. Are there ways instructors could share this information about their courses? Doing so helps to ensure that students get accurate information about the course and its instructor.

References: Kindred, J. and Mohammed, S. N. (2005). “He will crush you like an academic ninja!”: Exploring teaching ratings on ratemyprofessors.com. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 10 (3), article 9. http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol10/issue3/kindred.html

Brown, M. J., Baillie, M., and Fraser, S. (2009). Rating ratemyprofessors.com: A comparison of online and official student evaluations of teaching. College Teaching, 57 (2), 89-92.

Excerpted from Despite Shortcomings Popularity of RateMyProfessors.com Grows, The Teaching Professor, vol. 23, no. 6, pg. 8.

Permalink: http://www.facultyfocus.com/?p=15727

Thursday, October 14, 2010

Arkansas News Bureau: Historically black colleges to receive $2.2 million for improvements

http://arkansasnews.com/2010/10/12/historically-black-colleges-to-receive-2-2-million-for-improvements/

October 12, 2010
LITTLE ROCK - Three historically black colleges in Arkansas will receive a total of $2.2 million from the federal government to improve facilities and buy equipment, Democratic members of Arkansas' congressional delegation announced today.

The funds, provided under the U.S. Department of Education's Title III Historically Black Colleges and University Program, will be distributed as follows:
-The University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff will use $1.17 million to add classrooms in an academic building and buy classroom and laboratory equipment for the School of Education and the School of Agriculture, Fisheries and Human Sciences.
-Arkansas Baptist College in Little Rock will use $500,000 to help build a new academic building and upgrade its information technology infrastructure.
-Philander Smith College in Little Rock will use $500,000 to help build a building that will house the college's Center for Social Justice, Integrated Campus Center, Academic Success Center and Computer Information Center.

Campus Technology: Distance Education Reaches Out

http://campustechnology.com/articles/2010/10/13/distance-education-reaches-out.aspx

An Iowa community college is taking a four-pronged approach to using technology as a retention-boosting tool for its expanding distance learning program.

By Bridget McCrea10/13/10

Magna Publications: Connect Learning Across Courses with Curriculum Mapping: Q&A with presenter Peter Wolf

http://www.magnapubs.com/catalog/curriculum-mapping/?track=email

Welcome to the Dillard University Center for Teaching, Learning and Academic Technology Blog!

The Dillard University Center for Teaching, Learning and Academic Technology (DUCTLAT) http://www.ductlat.blogspot.com/ is essential in helping faculty effectively manage technology on and off campus. An important aspect of this initiative is achieved by bringing groups of faculty members together to learn the technology necessary to develop electronic resources for their courses and themselves, while planning and beginning the development of shared curricular materials. Cultivating faculty success at all levels reinforces the University's commitment to build premier faculty learning communities. All faculty, deans and academic administrators play a critical role in creating competitive and productive academic units in which expectations for faculty performance are clearly articulated and professional achievements are recognized and rewarded.