Most students (and many faculty) do not like group work. I have maintained for a while that one of the reasons is that faculty assume that by putting students into groups, they learn how to do group work.  To think that students learn how to be a contributing group member when we never teach them how to may be a bit naive.

Here is a link to a good discussion on structuring group work and helping students actually learn how to work in groups.  http://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/teaching-professor-blog/five-things-students-can-learn-through-group-work/

Several activities for the first days of classes.  Great ideas!

Ask students what faculty do to help/hinder their learning.  Ask students to discuss syllabus in small groups, etc.

http://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/teaching-professor-blog/first-day-of-class-activities-that-create-a-climate-for-learning/

I love the concept expressed here… http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2012/08/21/essay-importance-teaching-failure…  That we can help students learn from failure.  Trying to figure out how to incorporate this concept into my classes.

I love the insight here….

“While there is still plenty of information I will ask my students to learn, I know that my instruction will primarily focus not on what writers know, but what they do.” [emphasis mine] (Warner, J. What we do, not what we know.  Inside HigherEd, July 18, 2012.  Retrieved from http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/education-oronte-churm/what-we-do-not-what-we-know#ixzz214qkPQ6A

…”MOOCs and online courses may share a delivery platform (web based learning), but they differ in fundamental ways. How is a traditional online course different from a MOOC?

The critical difference is that a well-designed online course is built around the co-construction of knowledge amongst the students and the instructor. This knowledge construction requires active and personal engagement between students and faculty.  Conversation.  Dialogue. Collaboration.  Give and take.  Back and forth.

A well constructed traditional online course is not a vessel to deliver content from the brains of the professor to brains of the students, but rather an opportunity for faculty to guide, shape, reinforce, and support student learning.   Good teaching, both online and face-to-face, requires both a subject matter mastery and the ability to create and nurture environments that facilitate active learning.  This work requires that the faculty have the opportunity to interact with the students.

Online (and blended) learning may help us scale up these interactions, and we have gone a long way in understanding how re-engineer traditional lecture courses to act and feel more like small seminars.   Better utilizing the expensive and scarce talent of our faculty with online and blended learning will be a key element of increasing higher ed productivity, an important element of bending the higher ed tuition cost curve.

There is a limit, however,  to how much online and blended learning can scale while remaining true to an authentic course experience.   No matter how well the multimedia, assessments, and peer learning opportunities are designed into a MOOC, the experience with 160,000 fellow learners (as in Stanford’s AI course) will never be comparable to a well designed traditional online, blended or face-to-face course.”

Kim, J. (2012).  Parsing the NYTimes Coverage of the Growth of MOOCs. Inside Higher Ed, July 18, 2012.  Retrieved from http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/technology-and-learning/parsing-nytimes-coverage-growth-moocs#ixzz214og5nvm.

See a reprint of an article (Dysfunctional Illusions of Rigor) at:  http://cgi.stanford.edu/~dept-ctl/tomprof/posting.php?ID=1058 and http://cgi.stanford.edu/~dept-ctl/tomprof/posting.php?ID=1059

As I have been working on the ThinkAchieve Quality Assessment Plan, I have pondered long on if I even think that I know how to think critically.  If so, how is that exhibited?  Can my students “see” it?  Can I explain how I “do” it?  How do faculty express their critical thinking skills?  See http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2011/12/22/essay-whether-writing-instructors-need-assess-themselves for a perspective on this…  What would happen if we took our own tests?

Interesting article on what students see as the most important characteristics of faculty….  See http://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/philosophy-of-teaching/what-students-want-characteristics-of-effective-teachers-from-the-students-perspective/?c=FF2  The full paper is online at http://www.uwex.edu/disted/conference/Resource_library/handouts/28251_10H.pdf (Student Perceptions of Effective Teaching in Higher Education).  Number one on the list?  Respect! And read the full report to see what students mean by that term…..

Professors of the year are announced and I am intrigued by the videos made by one professor to help students understand how to be successful learners. (How to get the most out of studying….)

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/11/17/case-announces-us-professors-year

What should you do as faculty on the first day of classes?  Does it matter?  Research says that it does.  Here are some hints on what to do…

Introduce yourself to the students.  Be sure to let the students know what you want them to call you – Dr.?  Professor?  First name?  Tell the students a little about yourself, in particular how your passion for your discipline was started.  Let students know the best way to reach you – email, phone, etc. – and your office hours preferences. Can they drop by?  Do they need to make an appointment?

Do more than go over the syllabus.  Whatever you plan for the semester, do it on the first day.  Let students see that you value class time and expect to use it over the course of the semester.  Engage the students in the discipline to get them excited about the course content.  Connect your course with other content.

Design a way to get an idea about what students already know about the course content.  Introduce the course, explain how you designed the class and why you designed it that way.  Review how the tests and assessments will measure the learning outcomes.  You might be able to gauge how motivated the students are about the course content.

If you require the students to buy a book for your course, be sure to review how they should use it and how you will use the text.  Give students an idea of how to approach and read the textbook.  What’s the best way to determine what’s important in the text, chapters, etc.?

Be sure to go over your expectations for the class, the course outcomes, and your perspective on what the students need to do to prepare for class and punctuality, attendance, etc.  Outline the students’ responsibility in learning. Review the best ways to study the course material and the course. Review UTC’s policies on cheating and plagiarism.

Let students know if you will be using UTC Online, for what purposes and what they need to look for in that system.  You might also refer them to the self-paced training in the system in which they can self-enroll.  http://utconline.utc.edu/

Some additional resources on the first day of class are listed below.

• http://www.cmu.edu/teaching/designteach/teach/firstday.html
• http://honolulu.hawaii.edu/intranet/committees/FacDevCom/guidebk/teachtip/firstday.htm
• http://depts.washington.edu/cidrweb/Bulletin/FirstDayofClass.html
• http://cft.vanderbilt.edu/teaching-guides/preparing-to-teach/first-day-of-class/