Center for Innovative Pedagogy

This is about as honest an assessment of MOOCs as I've seen. Read between the lines and you'll see the promise and potential failings of this grand educational experiment.

There's a fair amount of interest at Kenyon in moving lecture out of class time. This article addresses the fine points of what you do, then, with the freed-up class time. Includes a bibliography for further reading.

With a 95% response rate in Spring 2012, this may not seem to be a big issue at Kenyon. Still, as we think about course evaluations going forward, we do need to pay attention to the common qualities of people who don't respond.

Other possible tags: Roy_Orbison and Nude_Models During a recent demonstration of software for creating video clips from DVDs the subject of copyright naturally arose. I shared some notes on copyright that I took while watching a webinar that highlighted the court decision in the Georgi State U. case in May. This article fits in nicelywith this thread of a conversation in that it illustrates the touchy/controversial nature of what exactly is meant by the term "transformative."

A listing of conferences with significant focus teaching and learning, from Elon University.

A new iOS app designed by faculty at Bryn Mawr and Notre Dame integrates the text of The Tempest with critical commentary, different actors' interpretations of critical scenes, and class discussions. The "book app" seems to be diverging in important ways from the "e-book."

This is a video posted by the Harvard Business Review. The speaker provides examples of how disrupting one's routine -- and of those around you -- can lead to new ways of doing things. I think the analogy of Miles Davis with a professor is pretty clear.

"So the solution may be in having a well defined rubric but being able to apply it with discretion and sensitivity to individual learner differences." Rubrics seem to have garnered quite a bit of attention as a teaching and grading tool, and reflecting on their design and appropriate use seems important.

A fascinating walk through interesting syllabi (and isn't that still the preferred plural?) From conventional documents with interesting tweaks, to Prezi presentations, to a "fold-your-own quarto", lots of experimenting going on.

A Faculty Learning Community is a cros-disciplinary group of faculty who meet to investigate a common topic of interest in teaching and learning (or the conduct of scholarship more broadly). This article discusses the involvement of a librarian as facilitator to an FLC on scholarly writing.

Recent research suggests that an irregular and inadequate sleep schedule makes learning new concepts the next day significantly harder.

Analysis of discussions on a site called Piazza suggest that requiring students to post an introduction can improve the amount of discussion on the boards, while heavily-graded discussions can lead students to "grind for grades" instead of authentically participate.

By building an open, multi-disciplinary collection of SMART recipes (Simple, Modular, Assessable, Reproducible,and Tested) that could be integrated into any curriculum, we intend to bring information literacy to the forefront of liberal arts education.

This seems very much like the kinds of questions we're facing at Kenyon.

Gadget use is an etiquette issue to be addressed formally in the syllabus. This article (and the links in it) have some interesting suggestions. Perhaps the most intriguing idea to me is the "laptop-free zone" of seating - I've noticed that I can be as distracted by the person a row or two ahead of me checking email (or worse) as by the urge to check my own.

This chart provides an interesting way of thinking about the tools included in Moodle - for each tool it briefly describes what it is, how hard it is to set up, and whether you can transfer information, assess performance, communicate, or co-create in it. We will be upgrading to Moodle 2 this summer.

The American Anthropological Association has a "Teaching Materials Exchange" which faculty can use to submit syllabi, lesson plans, activities, and assignments. Some materials are relevant to other disciplines (or interdisciplinary/cross-disciplinary approaches). If your professional association has such a resource, please let the CIP know.

A proposal that college curricula should more fully and more intentionally take advantage of the college's physical locations and the moment in time. What surprises me is how relatively easy to incorporate some of the ideas seem.

Not every word of this article applies to Kenyon, and but there is a lot of good advice. We could generate a related set of suggestions by pondering what to do in case Moodle is up but there's an extended power outage in your classroom, office, and/or home.

Billed as the first peer-reviewed journal dedicated to the writing (and sharing) of excellent syllabi, this is an interesting approach to the teaching commons. Is this a viable approach to the twin problems that many syllabi have moved off professors' web pages and into the Learning Management System (a.k.a. Moodle), and that those syllabi which are on the web haven't been peer reviewed?