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"Once you present OER to faculty, there's a real affinity and alignment of OER with faculty values. Jeff was surprised more about the potential of OER than he had thought going in. Unlike other technology-based subjects of BSRG studies, there is almost no suspicion of OER. Everything else BSRG has measured has had strong minority views from faculty against the topic (online learning in particular), with incredible resentment detected. This resistance or resentment is just not there with OER. It is interesting for OER, with no organized marketing plan per se, to have no natural barriers from faculty perceptions"

"The findings also show faculty members are creating new opportunities with technology. Through experimentation with online education, for example, faculty members say they are able to serve a more diverse set of students and think more critically about how to engage students with course content, and with free and open course materials, they say they are increasing access to education."

This is a place to aggregate/add faculty blogs. So if you know a faculty member blogging, add their feed in here or invite them to add themselves via the "Join In" form.

Assessment: What are students really learning?

"Traditional courses have long focused on tools and techniques for the presentation of content. Traditional concerns from faculty focused on covering the material, getting through the book and meeting expectations so that faculty in other courses won't muse and wonder,  "Didn't you learn these concepts from faculty X?"   And "Didn't you study the work and contributions of  ____ (Fill in your favorite who)"  A major drawback with designing for content as a priority is that it focuses attention on what the faculty member is doing, thinking and talking about and not on the interaction and engagement of students with the core concepts and skills of a course. The new focus on learners encourages a focus on learners as a priority. The new focus on the learner is to develop a habit of asking, what is going on inside the learner's head? How much of the content is being integrated into their knowledge base? How much of the content and the tools can he/she actually use? What are students thinking and how did they arrive at their respective positions? Additionally, we are seeing a shift to looking at the student no only as an individual, but as an individual within the learning community. Other questions that we are now considering include: How is the learner supporting the community of learners and contributing to the overall growth of the group? "

Creating a sense of community in the classroom and making meaningful student-faculty interactions can help curb retention issues in higher ed.

Faculty Development for Student Success: An Example

"All of these companions have arrived in my life courtesy of the Teaching in Higher Ed Podcast, a free and fantastic resource for college and university faculty. Curated by Bonni Stachowiak, of Vanguard University, the podcast offers weekly episodes in which Bonni and her guests explore, in her words, "the art and science of being more effective at facilitating learning." Some episodes also focus on personal productivity for academics."

"Over the past six months, @AcademicsSay has allowed me to recruit over 6,800 faculty and graduate students from over 60 countries to participate in three online studies on topics ranging from procrastination and impostor syndrome to work-life balance and burnout, resulting in one of the most comprehensive and international investigations of psychological well-being in academia to date. So beyond the account making my academic life maybe a bit less boring, perhaps the most important part of this experience for me has been the sobering realization of how deeply and widely these psychological challenges resonate with other academics and that I am in a unique position do something about it."

""We recommend that the assistant secretary require the Higher Learning Commission to reevaluate competency-based education programs previously proposed by schools to determine whether interaction between faculty and students will be regular and substantive," the report said, "and, if not, determine whether the programs should have been classified as correspondence programs.""

"I started composting at our summer place in 2009, and now I'm a convert. In the summer, we live on an island that's mostly rock covered with something the locals call "organic matter." Growing anything this far north on this soil base is challenging, but compost has made a big difference. My bleeding hearts, campanulas, delphinium, phlox, and coral bells are far more impressive than they used to be."

"These days, Irvine's massive courses typically run on their own. It's easier for everyone that way, says Mr. Matkin. "What we learned is you try to present a MOOC for what it is," says the dean. "It's a free course, with relatively little interaction with faculty members.""

Excellent! Sharing with faculty colleagues.

This could be a checklist for ALL professional development across education and, I suspect, other fields as well. Personalized, customized, sustained.

"Our organizational cultures need to embrace online learning as unique. We need to be supporting faculty by immersing them in engaging, meaningful online classes as part of their preparation to becoming great online instructors. When our organizational practices convey a hierarchy between face-to-face and online classes, that hierarchy will translate into the attitudes of the instructors who teach those classes."