Group items tagged

Student evaluations and a heavy reliance on them can be problematic for several reasons, the authors of the paper argued. Departments can misinterpret these evaluations by comparing averages for all instructors in similar courses, which can be a very imprecise measure. Moreover, instructors may alter their teaching methods solely to boost their student evaluation scores. The potential problems, according to the paper. Teachers might try to entertain and not educate. "To instructors, generating positive student answers to questions about overall effectiveness and communication skills may smack of entertainment and dumbing down," the paper says. Professors might try to drive out malcontents or otherwise unhappy students before the end-of-semester evaluations. Instructors might avoid attempts at innovation and play it safe in the classroom just to get better evaluations.

student evaluations are most correlated with: expected grade, teacher personality, attractiveness. "Administrators rely heavily on student evaluations of teaching, but the reality is, they don't correlate with good teaching. Students don't necessarily "like" teaching that makes them think."

The ECP submission form and the extensive ECP rubric provide an outstanding frame of reference for reflecting on and reviewing online course elements.  Through the years I've served as a director in the program, I have spoken with many individual faculty members as well as many members of design and development teams. Many have used the ECP rubric in a number of creative ways - helping to raise awareness on what is needed for quality online learning strategies and guiding course evaluations.  In fact, the ECP rubric identifies seventeen important elements needed for effective online learning and provides details on the criteria that would deem each category exemplary.  The ECP submission form requires careful thought and reflection about course design, interaction and collaboration, assessment, and learner support as well as a narrative describing the best practices demonstrated in the course for each category. 

As part of our effort to understand which LMS features our faculty depend upon from Blackboard 8, we polled them (84 responded) and we created this breakdown of how they are using our current LMS

Lifelong learners need to be skilled in finding, filtering, collating, evaluating, collaborating, editing, analyzing and utilizing information from a multitude of sources. Instead we could prioritize "content construction". Textbooks are an important gateway - a starting point from which students can learn and then begin their exploration of information on any topic (although even on that point I feel we should encourage the "critical reading" of textbooks). However the days when students could responsibly rely on any textbook as a singular information source are gone. Also, the process of accessing, synthesizing and utilizing information is often as important as the product. The skills developed are an essential component of education and life today. We have access to an exponentially growing amount of information to process and apply. There are many excellent tools we can all use to help in constructing and organizing that content. Here's a short selection of some of the more popular ones. They can be used by individuals and also by students or teachers collaborating in groups.