Center for Innovative Pedagogy

The author discusses recent research indicating that students spend most of their study time using the least effective study techniques and speculates on what teachers can do to promote the most effective techniques.

Some early lessons from MOOCs including benefits in the flipped classroom.

I had a conversation recently with a faculty member who claimed that she could not possibly write about research in college teaching, despite her many years as an effective teacher! There are multiple scholarly approaches to what happens in the classroom, and they can all be applied effectively.

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."

The author of this opinion urges caution in the rush to MOOC-ify higher education. He touts the benefits of (another version? of a MOOC called) a hybrid online-field course. I think this type of course is tailored for field-based disciplines such as his own (marine biology), but I am sure this could be modified for non-field science disciplines. I am almost positive, though, that such a hybrid course would fail to live up to the largest, most-inclusive (in terms of numbers of students enrolled) meaning of a MOOC.

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."

A professor of learning technology discusses some of the questions faculty should ask themselves about effectively grading digital assignments.

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."