A free ebook from the Teagle Foundation addressing the humanities' approach to learning assessment. "What happens when the disciplines make themselves heard in the discussions of learning outcomes assessment that are ubiquitous in higher education today? What do disciplinary perspectives and methodologies have to bring to the table? This volume engages these questions from the perspective of literary study, with essays by education leaders, faculty from English and foreign language departments, and assessment experts that offer a wide range of perspectives."

This article discusses an interesting approach to discussion participation in the syllabus: what's expected, what's "good" participation, and how do you get students motivated to participate?

An interesting take on "preparation for the real world." I suspect it asks as many questions as it answers, but it's good to challenge the idea that we can give pat answers about "what the real world will be like."

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."

An interesting set of prompts to help you consider publishing scholarship about your teaching. I'd like to highlight the first sentence of Step 5 - "a primary rule of (the scholarship of teaching and learning) is to use your discipline-based methods first." Don't use your preconceived notions of what education literature looks like, but consider how your study might use your disciplinary ways of knowing.

Rubrics covering a variety of learning outcomes, including a number of skills we have discussed in relation to the Essentials project. These were created as part of the Association of American Colleges and Universities' project "Valid Assessment of Learning in Undergraduate Education."

An amusing letter about maintaining focus in the "always-on" mobile network environment. I fear, though, that if first-years actually saw this, it would read as something between "eat your broccoli" and "get off my lawn." (In fact, I fear it reads that way to staff and faculty too.)

Do you talk to your students about their study habits? Do you structure assignments to lead them into good habits? This Washington Post article summarizes a 2013 study on the effectiveness of 10 commonly used learning techniques. (The original study is linked from the Post article, and available to us free through OhioLINK.)

A nice overview of metacognition by Jose Bowen, and a specific metacognitive exercise which could be added to any course activity. Any article which has citations from Socrates to 2013 ought to be popular at Kenyon...

"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.

An interesting idea for providing a daily "roadmap" of the major topics in class, starting with the first day.

"So while the similarities between the flipped classroom and studio/lab/seminar courses probably outnumber their differences, there is something different, and it's in the intentionality of the design behind both the in- and out-of-class experience."

Students tend to hate group work, and I've come to believe it's because we have an unrealistically high expectation of students' skills at working in a group. Walking the students through the skills which the group task requires, and accurate assessment of their abilities and team composition, seems like a good step in teaching students what group work will be like in the working world (as well as positioning the students for success at the course work).

An interesting approach to the way an institution's design affects the kind of education it delivers. Considering Kenyon's ongoing consideration of general education requirements, I'll exerpt here the last paragraph as a prompt for discussion: "General education is often thought of as a means to expose students to a broad range of "essential" knowledge and to provide a historical context for the culture in which they live. These are valid, but insufficient, goals. The purpose of general education should be to produce graduates who are skilled in communication, imbued with quantitative reasoning skills, instinctively collaborative, inherently transdisciplinary in their approach to problems, and engaged in their local and global communities-broadly educated individuals with an informed perspective on the problems of the 21st century and the integrative abilities to solve them."

"The authors of the article suggest one fairly simple but meaningful strategy. Stop talking about "finding sources." Frame the work as learning about something."

A news story on a web site which uses Google Maps to plot scenes from books. 

A collection of Google Earth map files, designed to help students think about the geographic locations in various literary works (and the travels of their characters). The site also includes links to some good Google Earth tutorials.

Some interesting thoughts here on the differences between debates in course discussion boards and the "toxic" level of discussion in other social media.

A study of images used by articles in selected history journals from 2000 to 2009 shows no increase in the use of images, despite the boom in online images generally and digitized historical images in particular. How should this impact digitization strategies and visual literacy efforts?

I've heard from multiple people who are not satisfied with the quality of online discussion in their classes. Their concerns sound like the ones in this article - they get more student-to-professor writing than real "class discussion", and what they get is often dominated by the better students. This article poses 2 responses: ask for private journaling instead of public discussion, and then use the writing intentionally during class time.