Center for Innovative Pedagogy

When you borrow an assignment or part of the course structure from a colleague, do you note that on your syllabus? Do you make your syllabi (or other writeups of your course activities) available to your colleagues? What would happen if you did?

How can we encourage students to take their time with serious study instead of rushing through reading and assignments?

This article includes an interesting discussion guide which can help faculty members articulate their philosophies of teaching and consider the impact of philosophy on practice.

The college conducts student evaluations of teaching for all courses, and many faculty members supplement those evaluations by asking questions of their own (within, or along side, the college's official system). But do you take time to conduct a self-evaluation? This article includes a link to a self-evaluation form.

A personal essay about the ways in which classroom formality (and the lack of it) is affected by the race and class of the professor and students.

The article reports on a meta-analysis of 225 studies on the effectiveness of active learning techniques in undergraduate STEM classrooms. If anybody needs more evidence that techniques to actively engage students are more effective than the traditional passive lecture and listen classrooms, this report offers compelling numbers. Students in those traditional classes are found to be 1.5 times more likely to fail than those in classes with active learning components. Students in active learning classes earn grades that are, on average, 6% better than their counterparts in traditional classes.

Another article on Active Learning.

This article presents one view on classroom rules. The comments open up the floodgates of counter opinions. Comments in this case break down into snarkiness and vitriol; I'm sure that a face-to-face conversation with colleagues about such policies would be much more productive.

This comes from a publication from my alma mater, but I don't think that makes me any less impartial than I should be. I have been thinking about my courses for next year quite a bit lately, and I had already decided to incorporate some form of regular, low-stakes testing for a variety of reasons. This article is a nice confirmation of that decision.

A report on studies which show the positive impact of exercise and being in nature on subjects' creativity and mood. Next time your class begs "can we have class outside", why not suggest a discussion during a walk to the other end of campus?

This episode of NPR's Planet Money presents a good case study in applying the 4-factor fair use test. The topic is web sites which present song lyrics. In specific, they look at a site called RapGenius, which makes a "transformative use" case by providing a site where users can annotate and explicate lyrics. (Despite the name, the site includes any genre of music as well as poetry, prose, and news.) RapGenius also has an education program for faculty who want to use it as a classroom tool for close reading exercises.

There are more topics covered here, and these best practices codes are mainly for students learning how to make documentaries and to post online videos. However, there are documents and links in here that would be of use to "regular" professors who simply want to make use of video clips in their courses.

An overview of fair use presented by the Stanford (University) Copyright and Fair Use Center. This link is to the first page of a four page "spread" on fair use that covers: definitions; how to apply the four factors; summaries of significant cases; and a discussion of disagreements over what constitutes fair use and whether one is likely to get sued or not.

This tool by the Copyright Advisory Network of the American Library Association should help you understand and evaluate the "fairness" of a use under the U.S. Copyright Code. The tool will document your efforts to determine fairness of the use and create a time-stamped pdf document for your records. (NOTE: I have not actually officially used this tool, but I plan to do so.)

A discussion of the meaning and practical interpretation by recent courts of the term "transformative." Folks in the fields of literature, music, and visual arts will find synopses of recent cases covering the specific application of the law with respect to their media. While not necessarily of direct importance to academicians in the classroom, these synopses should be of interest to anyone (faculty and students) who produce outside of the classroom.

This is the ARL's document on how to best apply fair use.

This is the VRA's statement on how fair use of still images can be applied in many instances in an educational setting. Such instances include use by teachers in lessons and by students in transforming a work for an assignment (among others).

This blog post is the most recent by Kenneth Crews (as of May 8, 2014) covering the Georgia State University case, which is currently on appeal to the 11th Circuit Court. The decision in this case was a significant "victory" for proponents of academic fair use as the judge sought to clarify the limitations and exceptions that constitute fair use, and she essentially rejected the formerly strictly imposed classroom guidelines as well as the "one-time use" limitation.

After the Georgia State University ruling came down in 2012 Educause offered a live, interactive webinar featuring Kenneth Crews, one of the leading experts in the area of copyright law and educational fair use. Crews is (was) the director of the Copyright Advisory Office of the Columbia University Libraries. This page provides resources from the webinar, including a recording. However, this recording is of poor quality, especially the final 1/3 of the recording.

This is a useful starting point for exploring current news and activity in educational copyright issues and how fair use is being applied. Recent court cases are covered in the blog postings.