SHINY AND NEW
The promise of a new semester is always exciting. Our old ideas are new again. We will have a new roster of motivated students. All of our teaching will be met with enthusiasm. All of our carefully thought out learning outcomes will be achieved. Of course reality can be anything but the scenario just described but the possibilities keep us motivated. It is, after all, the reason you became a teacher. Your great desire to share the excitement of discovery and inquiry along with a sense that the world's problems are just one student away from being solved. The person that finds a cure for cancer could be in your class. The person that determines how to pull our economy back from the fiscal cliff might be sitting in the back row this semester. The person that writes the next great novel could be enrolled in your elearning course for the spring. Even more likely, the nurse that helps during your hospital stay or the vet tech that saves your cat or the police officer that provides the first line of defense between you and a criminal is very likely to be here at BRCC ready to start the path to their new career. It is an exciting time for all of us and I hope that I can be a resource for you this semester. As you continue to plan for your upcoming semester, feel free to contact me with any requests for help that you may have. I am ready to assist you so that each and every course you teach will have maximum impact. You are the key to improved student learning at BRCC and I am ready to help.

WHAT IS THIS TEST FOR AGAIN?
A new study by Liu, Bridgeman and Adler reveals that motivation plays a big part in the performance of students on standardized tests used to measure general student learning. Many colleges are using tests of learning outcomes, such as the Collegiate Learning Assessment to prove to their stake holders and accreditors that higher education matters. They note that the CLA, and popular alternatives from ACT and the Educational Testing Service, tests the critical thinking of small groups of entering and graduating students. In theory, comparing the scores of new and graduating students yields evidence either that students are or are not learning. Many call the difference between the entering and graduating students' performance the "value added" by a college degree. The researchers note that when students were told that the test (which typically are not graded and therefore hold little value to the students) were being used by potential employers, the scores improved.

GETTING STUDENT FEEDBACK YOU CAN USE
Gary Cooper has written an excellent blog post about the merits of student ratings. He suggests that you survey your students throughout the semester so that you can circumvent any big problems that may crop up during the term. I have suggested, in faculty development seminars, the use of the Stop-Start-Keep Doing student survey to improve student learning. He gives a number of other suggestions that could be put to use in your course.

THE ALT-AC TRACK
One of the highly attended sessions at the recent Modern Language Association's annual meeting had to do with life as an adjunct professor. Brian Croxall, a steadily employed digital-humanities strategist and lecturer in English at Emory University, extolled the virtues of life as an adjunct. Others on the panel added emphasized the need to be flexible and to acquire potentially useful talents along the way. Learning administrative skills, for instance, comes in handy whether you work in faculty development or as a digital-humanities project manager or any number of other jobs in and around academe.