EDUCAUSE | Contributed by Organizations or Campuses; Articles, Papers, and Reports; and Faculty Development

What the Army Taught Me About Teaching

ckeller — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 10:25:27 -0500

The author has found that her military experience has proven to be good training for teaching ill prepared students.

Online Training for Online Faculty

ckeller — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 14:53:46 -0500

A checklist of the best strategies for designing and delivering online courses to train online faculty.

Bringing Online Learning to a Research-Intensive University

ckeller — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 17:11:29 -0500

"A spirited debate recently arose on the International Forum of Educational Technology & Society (IFETS) listserv. A (real world) conference had been announced with the aim of "raising awareness of the benefits of using online technologies in supporting teaching, learning and assessment, with a particular emphasis on the impact of e learning." A university was organizing this conference and aiming it at the university sector. Contributors to the IFETS listserv questioned whether there was still a need for conferences on this topic. In my experience at the University College Dublin (UCD), understanding of the online medium's potential among faculty has always appeared limited. But recent software developments have helped more academics—and their students—at UCD benefit from online learning."

Navigating the Mammoth University

ckeller — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 11:59:52 -0500

The University of Minnesota has expanded its orientation for new faculty members from several hours to 3 days. The faculty are given information on the library systems and invited to attend faculty development workshops in teaching and learning along with information on other various aspects and programs the university has to offer.

Minimum Indicators to Assure Quality of LMS-supported Blended Learning

ckeller — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 11:15:31 -0500

This study describes a set of institutional indicators that suggest minimum standards for the quality
assurance of learning supported by learning management systems in blended contexts. The indicators are evaluated by comparing seven universities that use a common learning management system to support student learning experiences. The responses to a qualitative questionnaire provide evidence of how the participating universities approach leadership, policy making, development, and evaluation as they relate to the quality assurance of learning management systems. A comparison among the universities reveals that they tend to have a better understanding of technical rather than educational issues related to quality assurance. A case is made for the need for universities to address key areas in order to reliably assure the quality of learning supported by learning management systems.

Growing Popularity of E-Learning

drupal — Fri, 10 Nov 2006 16:33:07 -0600

The latest survey of online learning by the Sloan Consortium reported that about 3.2 million students took at least one online course from a degree-granting institution in fall 2005, double the number who did in 2002. The report, issued jointly by the Sloan Consortium and the College Board, defines an online course as one in which at least 80 percent of the content is delivered over the Internet. The rate of growth of online students slowed from 2003 to 2004 despite a continuing upward trend. In contrast, only one in four academic leaders said their faculty have embraced online education, a number that has persisted through four surveys.

Online Training for Adjuncts

drupal — Thu, 24 Aug 2006 11:37:31 -0500

New services are emerging that offer online tutorials for adjunct faculty, a group many say is marginalized and treated poorly by many colleges and universities. Higher education increasingly depends on adjuncts, often to teach night or weekend classes, and many adjunct faculty have little experience teaching. Services such as AdjunctSuccess offer online seminars and other tools to help train these part-time faculty and give them a place to correspond with others in similar situations at other universities. Critics of such programs say they do little to help adjunct faculty while encouraging the trend toward fewer tenure-track instructors in favor of part-time faculty to whom institutions have little obligation. Richard Lyons, cofounder of AdjunctSuccess, defended the company, saying colleges and universities will not be swayed to hire more adjuncts because of this training and that it provides a needed resource for an entire class of faculty who are often left behind.

The Tablet PC For Faculty: A Pilot Project

drupal — Wed, 05 Jul 2006 12:06:29 -0500

This paper describes a pilot project with the purpose of evaluating the usefulness of tablet PCs for university professors. The focus is on the value of tablets primarily with respect to teaching and learning (and not for research or administrative work). Sixty-four professors, distributed across the various schools of a university, were provided with tablet PCs and were trained in their use. A survey was distributed to the participants at the end of the semester. There were 59 respondents, and of these 45 used the tablet in at least one of their classes. This paper describes the pilot project and the survey results. We observed that a) only a fraction of faculty are motivated to use tablet technology: roughly a third of faculty expressed an interest in replacing their notebook computer with a tablet computer and b) generally, participating faculty did indeed use tablet functionality in their classes and were convinced that this use resulted in a meaningful impact on teaching and learning.

Campuses Make Way for the Worldwide Wiki

drupal — Tue, 21 Feb 2006 13:08:34 -0600

Do you wiki? Almost sounds suggestive, doesn't it? But while it is a trend on college campuses, where it may be bordering on a craze among the millennial generation, you can still get blank stares when you ask a grayer general audience about wikis.

Balancing the Learning Equation: Exploring Effective Mixtures of Technology, Teaching, and Learning

drupal — Tue, 14 Feb 2006 14:51:46 -0600

At present, faculty experience with technology varies widely: Some instructors have been developing Web-enhanced learning environments for quite a while, and others have just joined these ranks. In general, though, technology has come to seem less novel in higher education, and its prevalence has allowed faculty discussions to move beyond discussions of mere availability to more critical issues associated with instructional design. In what follows, we offer a descriptive matrix of online instruction in order to facilitate discussion among faculty members and to promote experimentation with different formats.