FACULTY LEARNING COMMUNITY BEGINS WORK
The Common Reader Faculty Learning Community kicked off with an abundance of enthusiasm and participation on Wednesday. So much so, that there is currently a waiting list of folks who would like to join the FLC. The Teaching+Learning Center is currently exploring the idea of opening another section of the FLC to accommodate the need. Participants discussed the profession of teaching, explored the syllabus, and examined the learning outcomes at the first faculty professional development session. The FLC is developing a set of group objectives as well. FLC members include: Nisha Aroskar, Robbie Burleigh, Emily Graves, Wes Harris, Susan Nealy, Jennifer Perkins, Todd Pourciau, Angela Pursley, Kathleen Schexnayder, Jeanne Stacy, and Lin Warmsley.

GROUP WORK TEACHES VALUABLE LESSONS AND SKILLS
Group projects are a great active learning experience that has proven benefits for student learning. Randall Hansen's article Benefits and Problems with Student Teams: Suggestions for Improving Team Projects published in the Journal of Education for Business lists a number of great suggestions that you may want to employ. Hansen says that we should emphasize the importance and benefits of teamwork by pointing out the special skills acquired that are useful in any job the student may be seeking. Team-building exercises help to build cohesive groups and promote engagement. If you are looking to have your students learn how to work with others whom they may not know (similar to most work environments), you should form the groups. The workload expectations should be reasonable and you should provide some class time for meetings. The goals of the project should have clearly defined learning objectives and you should require interim reports and group process feedback. Always remind the students that they should keep a log or journal of their experience that indicates their contributions and peer assessment should be part of the evaluation process.


THE RANKING BUSINESS EXPANDS
Did you know that the U.S. Department of Education is set to launch a rating system for all colleges and universities by 2015? It will apparently reward colleges with a high rating if they graduate large numbers of students from disadvantaged backgrounds and do not saddle such students with heavy debt without graduating them. Once in place, the program would give larger Pell Grants and more-affordable loans to students attending higher-rated institutions. The focus on college completion sharpened this past year, as campus leaders pursued national goals for higher-education attainment, and more states tied a portion of colleges' appropriations to performance measures such as graduation rates. Louisiana of course has the GRAD ACT. The US News and World Report ranking focuses on the national level. Washington Monthly started publishing a national rankings system as well in 2005. The rankings, whose most recent edition was published last month, "give high marks to institutions that enroll low-income students, help them graduate, and don't charge them an arm and a leg to attend," the magazine said.

CAN A ROBOT DO YOUR JOB
As the debate about the role of technology in education builds, two California community-college professors have published their own commentary on the automation of teaching—in the form of an illustrated comic according to the Chronicle of Higher Education. Adam Bessie and Arthur King, who teach English and studio and computer arts, respectively, at Diablo Valley College, have weighed in with a piece of graphic journalism titled “Automated Teaching Machine: A Graphic Introduction to the End of Human Teachers.” The comic, published by the left-leaning Truth Out, has been circulating among faculty members on California community-college e-mail lists. It was inspired by the introduction of an automated reading machine to score English-placement assessments at Diablo Valley College, Mr. Bessie said in an e-mail. Previously, English-department faculty members had created and reviewed the assessments manually, a collective exercise that gave them the opportunity to discuss standards, he said. “We were told that the robo-reader could do the same job as us for cheaper, which seemed an absurd notion,” Mr. Bessie said. “I had, before this, never heard of a robo-reader and thought that I had the one job that couldn’t be automated: that written human communication was one area that technology could augment, but not replace.”