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The Online Faculty Competency Certification program is intended for future and existing online teachers. The program is designed to help faculty members become proficient in the use of Blackboard and to become effective facilitators in the online environment. What happened to the Excellence Program? Beginning Spring 2012, the Course Redesign program will replace the Excellence Program. Designed with face-to-face and online instructors in mind, the new Course Redesign program will afford all Texas Wesleyan instructors an opportunity to design a new course, or redesign an existing course, to include student-centered teaching and learning methods. The flexible nature of this program also allows faculty the opportunity to focus on specific skills and methods relevant to their particular subject and course. Instructors previously certified through the Excellence Program do not need to complete the new program and will remain certified as quality online instructors. To successfully complete the requirements for the Faculty Online Competency Certificate, participants must complete one of the following tracks:

The Social Web is transforming the way students interact with others, and is challenging traditional pedagogies, values and practices. An analysis of students’ uses of social networking tools (e.g. Facebook, Myspace) and video/photo sharing sites (e.g. YouTube, Flickr) reveals the emergence of collective digital literacies. These include filtering content, new textual and visual literacies, managing multiple digital identities, representing self in cyberspace and engaging in new modes of interaction.

Now, there's a pretty good chance that some of the students probably knew that Quinn was a lazy professor, who just used testbank questions, rather than writing his own. That's the kind of information that tends to get around. But it's still not clear that using testbank questions to study is really an ethical lapse. Taking sample tests is a good way to practice for an exam and to learn the subject matter. And while those 200 students "confessed," it seems like they did so mainly to avoid getting kicked out of school -- not because they really feel they did anything wrong -- and I might have to agree with them. We've seen plenty of stories over the years about professors trying to keep up with modern technology -- and I recognize that it's difficult to keep creating new exams for classes. But in this case, it looks like Prof. Quinn barely created anything at all. He just pulled questions from a source that the students had access to as well and copied them verbatim. It would seem that, even if you think the students did wrong here, the Professor was equally negligent. Will he have to sit through an ethics class too?

The answer to that first one surprised me. The "cheating" was that students got their hands on the textbook publisher's "testbank" of questions. Many publishers have a testbank that professors can use as sample test questions. But watching Quinn's video, it became clear that in accusing his students of "cheating" he was really admitting that he wasn't actually writing his own tests, but merely pulling questions from a testbank. That struck me as odd -- and I wasn't really sure that what the students did should count as cheating. Taking "sample tests" is a very good way to learn material, and going through a testbank is a good way to practice "sample" questions. It seemed like the bigger issue wasn't what the students did... but what the professor did.