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This article promotes two teaching strategies that cognitive psychology research has shown to be effective: spaced practice, which brings students back to the same topics periodically throughout a course, and retrieval practice, which uses quizzes and class discussions to reinforce study.

Interview with James Lang, the author of "Cheating Lessons." The soundbyte from the interview might be this: "The fascinating discovery I made in my own research was that the features of a course that do tend to induce cheating were also ones that tend to reduce learning."

We want independent, self-motivated learners, but we also know clear expectations are key to teaching disciplinary modes of thinking (and avoiding basic errors). How do you balance that tension?

An essay on six core titles on teaching and learning by Jose Bowen. (All 6 are in CONSORT and widely available in OhioLINK.) I particularly enjoyed Bowen's personal reflections on techniques he's taken from these books and applied in his own teaching of music.

This site provides a simple template for re-building or re-designing a course that already exists, but it could be used to craft an entirely new course too. Technically this site is all about blended learning, but the steps are not meaningless if one is not blending. Go ahead and apply them to a more traditional pedagogical approach!

Lots to think about in this deceptively short article. The finding highlights the importance of course design - I think Koh undersells the point that her online course may require more writing than many.

"Do nothing in isolation; always connect the events." The author says this in the context of a digital humanities program, but I think it applies to all professional development efforts, and probably to many course designs.

"Backward design" is a popular approach in planning a syllabus - start with your goals for what the students will learn and practice, and work back from there. This article suggests an interesting twist on that process. Concentrate on how your work will flow during the semester, and use your imagined ideal month to make sure you have the time and energy to meet your teaching goals.

This course redesign "formula" may not work for all courses, but perhaps it can work for you. The article describes what amounts to a course redesign that results in a blended classroom, using the technology available through the text publisher as the source of outside data. The six guidelines they propose can be boiled down to: (1) guide students in active learning; (2) enforce deadlines to keep students on task; (3) reward students for real effort, which translates into real learning; (4) provide regular assessment (immediate feedback via technology, if possible); (5) accommodate varied learning styles; and (6) keep on students to do their work (again, technology can help with this).

A good introduction to Weiman's approach to improving science education. In spite of the title, the lack of scientific rigor in his presentation might bother some of you (especially initially). However, stick it out until the fourth page, and your patience will be rewarded.

A six-page synopsis by Dee Fink of his seminal book on course design, "Creating Significant Learning Experiences." From the text: "The heart of this approach is to decide first what students can and should learn in relation to this subject and then figure out how such learning can be facilitated. Although this approach requires more time and effort, it also offers the best chance of ensuring that students have a significant learning experience."

Michael Wesch describes his steps in redesigning a course syllabus to make the Big Ideas of the course more obvious (and engaging) to students. I was particularly taken by the typographical element of putting the Big Ideas in his handwriting and the day-by-day details in type.

The authors describe a method for teaching writing skills with a mixture of assignment scaffolding and peer review of the stages of the writing project.

We spend a lot of time focusing on backward design, but that model presumes a great deal of knowledge of what the course is about and what students will get out of it. This professor lays out the questions you need to ask when designing a course for the first time, and the result is a kind of flexible forward design.

I'm intrigued by the structural approach of "pattern teaching" as a method for designing individual class sessions. Certainly seems like a useful approach for those classes where you have trouble fitting everything in (or even deciding what everything is). At the same time I'm really uncomfortable with the article's tone, which verges on "teaching is that thing which gets in the way of research."

"The historian Kevin Gannon has written about the notion that teaching is an act of "radical hope," and nothing brings out that notion more than envisioning how you might have affected the lives of your students 20 years after they have left your classroom."

As we wrap up this semester's projects and start thinking about next year's, Dr. Ruben Puentedura's model of the functions of technology in a course provides a useful framework.

Tremendous example of reflective teaching and course design, as the hosts of the Tea for Teaching podcast reflect on their fall experiences teaching online courses with significant synchronous elements. This would be great listening as we think about the design of spring courses.

A terrific set of models from Plymouth State's CoLab present a set of ways of thinking about how we can make the best use of our precious face-to-face class time in the fall.

As we think about a J-term at Kenyon, it might be interesting to look at The Great VCU Bike Race Book as a model for demonstrating the connections between a set of shorter, more experimental courses.