he dominant teaching experience for academics is teaching an existing course, generally one the academic has taught previously. In such a setting, academics spend most of their time fine tuning a course or making minor modifications to material or content (Stark, 2000)

many academic staff continue to employ inappropriate, teacher-centered, content focused strategies”. If the systems and processes of university teaching and learning practice do not encourage and enable everyday consideration of alignment, is it surprising that many academics don’t consider alignment?

student learning outcomes are significantly higher when there are strong links between those learning outcomes, assessment tasks, and instructional activities and materials.

"So, what I want to know is, why are you wasting money on glossy fundraising brochures full of meaningless synonyms for the word 'Excellence'? And, why are you sending them to ME? Yes, I know that I got a master's degree at your fine institution, but that master's degree hasn't done jack ---- for me since I got it! I have been unemployed for the past TWO YEARS and I am now a professional resume-submitter, sending out dozens of resumes a month to employers, and the degree I received in your hallowed halls is at the TOP OF IT and it doesn't do a ----ing thing."

Who knows how smart and conscientious and skilled the graduate really is. He might falter in face-to-face interviews, or have an overly-thin resume. But that doesn't change the fact that the school in question admitted the student, put him through a public policy curriculum, and accredited him. If the writer is a klutz, then that, too, reflects upon the university that trained him.

Obviously, this student doesn't recall any non-vocational learning that happened, or doesn't respect it. He even terms the education he received "imaginary."

Christian Terwiesch and Karl Ulrich argue that group dynamics are the enemy of businesses trying to develop one-of-a-kind new products, unique ways to save money or distinctive marketing strategies.

Terwiesch, Ulrich and co-author Karan Girotra, a professor of technology and operations management at INSEAD, found that a hybrid process -- in which people are given time to brainstorm on their own before discussing ideas with their peers -- resulted in more and better quality ideas than a purely team-oriented process.

Although several existing experimental studies criticize the team brainstorming process due to the interference of group dynamics, the Wharton researchers believe their work stands out due to a focus on the quality, in addition to the number, of ideas generated by the different processes -- in particular, the quality of the best idea.

Eric Mazur, who teaches physics at Harvard, describes the main innovations he has made in how he runs his courses - and the painstaking empirical research that he has used to guide these changes.

Faculty members and administrators in Texas are speaking out about a recent state law that requires them to post specific, detailed information about their classroom assignments, curricula vitae, department budgets, and the results of student evaluations.

Beginning this fall, universities will have to post online a syllabus for every undergraduate course, including major assignments and examinations, reading lists, and course descriptions.

All of the information must be no more than three clicks away from the college's home page.

Students give the same responses on paper as on online course evaluations but are less likely to respond to online surveys, according to a recent study.

The only meaningful difference between student ratings completed online and on paper was that students who took online surveys gave their professors higher ratings for using educational technology to promote learning.

Seventy-eight percent of students enrolled in classes with paper surveys responded to them, but  only 53 percent of students enrolled in classes with online surveys responded.

cash, appears to be the single best approach for colleges trying to recruit students to volunteer for institutional assessments and other low-stakes tests with no bearing on their grades.

American Educational Research Association

A college's choice of which incentive to offer does not appear to have a significant effect on how students end up performing, but it can have a big impact on colleges' ability to round up enough students for the assessments, the study found.

Here's what they found: In 1961, the average full-time college student spent 40 hours per week on academic work (that's time in class and studying). In 2003, it was 27 hours. The authors figure that 21st-century students spend an average of 10 hours fewer every week studying than their 1961 counterparts. Over the course of a four-year college career, that would add up to something like 1,500 fewer hours spent hitting the books.

the difference isn't caused by more people stretching out their college experience. Also, according to the authors, the difference can't be explained by the fact that more students have jobs or by the fact that the makeup of the student body has changed since the sixties. From the paper: "The large decline in academic time investment is an important pattern its own right, and one that motivates future research into underlying causes."In other words, we don't know why. 

Here's the abstract for the working paper, which was written by Philip S. Babcock and Mindy Marks

"There's a lot of talk out there about alternative routes into teaching being very different from traditional routes, and we found that that distinction just is not meaningful," Ms. Lagemann said. Colleges of education vary widely in their methods, and many alternative-certification programs require participants to take classes at colleges and universities, she pointed out. In some cases, students pursuing a traditional education degree and students in an alternative-certification program are in the same class.

I started to wish that I had the opportunity (or was aware of the opportunity) to participate in more general, broad-based teaching workshops. I've done the disciplinary thing for years; something new could definitely push me in productive ways.

But, in my career at least, disciplinary teaching practices have dominated my training, and I've started to look at changing that.

Professors who are heavily focused on learning how to improve their teaching stand apart as a very distinct subset of college faculties, according to a new study examining how members of the professoriate spend their time.

those who are focused on tackling societal problems stand apart as their own breed. Other faculty members, it suggests, are pretty much mutts, according to its classification scheme.

1,000 full-time faculty members at four-year colleges and universities gathered as part of the Faculty Professional Performance Survey administered by Mr. Braxton and two Vanderbilt doctoral students in 1999. That survey had asked the faculty members how often they engaged in each of nearly 70 distinct scholarly activities, such as experimenting with a new teaching method, publishing a critical book review in a journal, or being interviewed on a local television station. All of the faculty members examined in the new analysis were either tenured or tenure-track and fell into one of four academic disciplines: biology, chemistry, history, or sociology.

For students, the act of filling out those forms is sometimes a fleeting, half-conscious moment. But for instructors whose careers can live and die by student evaluations, getting back the forms is an hour of high anxiety

"They have destroyed higher education." Mr. Crumbley believes the forms lead inexorably to grade inflation and the dumbing down of the curriculum.

Texas enacted a law that will require every public college to post each faculty member's student-evaluation scores on a public Web site.

The recognition that a college that offered credit for experiential learning could stand with traditional institutions, while commonplace today, was a leap of faith then. Empire State had to demonstrate its validity through results—educational outcomes—and on that score, it stood tall. In fact, focusing on outcomes, as we did, led many of us to question how well traditional institutions would measure up!

Assessment Quickies #1: What Are Student Learning Outcomes?

A project led by the American Association of Community Colleges to develop common, voluntary standards of accountability for two-year institutions is moving forward, and specific performance measures are being developed, an official at the association said.

financed by the Lumina Foundation for Education and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, is now its second phase

The project's advocates have begun pushing a public-relations campaign to build support for the accountability effort among colleges.

Educators and industry partners can help students learn these skills through the following three practices:   1. Involve the community

Combine academic and technical knowledge That means educators must play on the same team.

. Make learning relevant Students need to see the tie between concepts they're learning and their application in life, said Allyson Knox, an academic program manager for Microsoft Corp.'s U.S. Partners in Learning program.

Employers increasingly want to hire students who are highly adaptive, who can work in a fast-paced environment, be creative and problem-solve—and these are not necessarily core skills universities focus on. Most universities focus on knowledge acquisition, but what the world requires is much more about learning how to work within a fast-changing environment and be a leader in that context.

social entrepreneurship is relevant in different disciplines

We're not just bringing them into the classroom, but we're involving them in more research collaborations and conversations, so the learning students do is guided by that.

Choosing the academic program at a single university, they say, is a relic of a time before online education made it possible for a student in Oregon to take courses at a university in Florida

Much of the talk about this imminent unbundling has come from colleges that predict that students might want to transfer credits from other colleges that might have different missions. But the competition may also come from entities that do not even offer degrees.

The company outsources grading and other work to master’s degree-holders in India for much less than it would cost to employ similarly qualified teaching assistants in the United States.

Employers are looking for candidates who can navigate, critically evaluate, and make sense of the wealth of information available through digital media—and now educators have a new way to determine a student’s baseline digital literacy with a certification exam that measures the test-taker’s ability to assess information, think critically, and perform a range of real-world tasks.

iCritical Thinking Certification, created by the Educational Testing Service and Certiport, reveals whether or not a person is able to combine technical skills with experiences and knowledge.

Monica Brooks, Marshall University’s assistant vice president for Information Technology: Online Learning and Libraries, said her school plans to use iCritical Thinking beginning in the fall.