As we approach the end of another semester, we turn our attention to a final assessment. Something that will allow us to determine if our students learned and (maybe even more importantly) can they apply their learning and solve problems. Once again, Dr. Maryellen Weimer gives us a great article that illustrates insight into how and why students should study. She notes that " Students’ success as learners would advance if they had a larger repertoire of study strategies, if they could match study strategies with learning tasks, and if they constructively confronted how they studied with how they performed. Students need help on all three fronts, but courses are already packed with content. Most teachers have time to do little more than admonish students to study hard, avoid cramming and memorizing minutia, and abstain from any sort of cheating." She goes on to provide some recent research on the matter. Take a look at the entire article here.

We are regularly told that if we can just make our classes more exciting, our students would be motivated to learn. While I have found that to be true, I have also come to believe that using self-motivation and critical self-reflection is vital for any student to really become what I would call a super learner. This type of person wants to learn about new things because they understand that it enhances their quality of life. While they do want to get a great job (don't we all?) they know that hard work pays off and that learning for the sake of being a better informed person can be motivation enough. As I was going through my bookmark list, I found an article from 2013 that validates my observations. “Boring but Important: A Self-Transcendent Purpose for Learning Fosters Academic Self-Regulation”, is a paper that was published based on research by David S. Yeager, Marlone D. Henderson, Sidney D’Mello, David Paunesku, Gregory M. Walton, Brian J. Spitzer, and Angela Lee Duckworth. They write, “Many important learning tasks feel uninteresting and tedious to learners. This research proposed that promoting a pro-social, self-transcendent purpose could improve academic self-regulation on such tasks. Results showed that a self-transcendent purpose for learning increased the tendency to attempt to deeply learn from the tedious academic task.” Because their research was very extensive and actually included four studies, I strongly encourage you dive into the article here.

We are rapidly approaching the part of the semester/term when our students seem to really begin to zone out. They are waiting for the Thanksgiving break or the end of the semester, or something. Now is a really good time to look at using active learning in your classes. Dr. Maryellen Weimer offers some great ideas in this article. One of the suggestions she offers is, "How often do you ask a question and when do you ask it? How often does depend on the teacher but there’s evidence from more than one study that a lot of us over estimate how often we ask questions. How often should you seek student contributions? More than you do? Do you ask after you’ve covered a chunk of content and are thinking about how much you still have to get through? Do you ask at the end of the period when a lot of students are hoping nobody says anything so they can get out a couple of minutes early?"

Every now and then, someone posts a blog about their undergraduate experience. It is usually written by someone who is now an instructor in college. Sometimes the post is more about reminiscing rather than providing good ideas built on their experience. Susan Shapiro, who is an instructor at Columbia, has written one of the latter. She looks back on her undergraduate experience and regrets that she was the kind of student that currently gives her problems. She writes, "I enjoyed going to college at the University of Michigan, an hour from home, but my secret humiliation is: I was the type of mediocre student I now disdain. As a freshman, I cared about my friends, my boyfriend and my poetry. Or, I cared about what my boyfriend thought of my friends, what my friends thought of him, and what they thought of my poetry about him. Here’s what I wish I’d known and done differently." You can read the entire article here. More importantly, I encourage you to share this with your students.

Do you have students in your classes that never participate although you know from their work that they are bright and articulate? Maybe they are introverts? Karen Costa has written a terrific article about her college experience as an introvert. She provides some really good questions that we should be asking ourselves on this topic. She even suggests that maybe introverts are better built for elearning courses. She writes, "While critics will argue that extroversion is the ideal mode of existence and that as higher educators, we are therefore bound to press all students into a life of extroverted servitude, let us return to where we began, in the work of Susan Cain, whose 'quiet revolution' made the leap from a book to a movement. Cain has dedicated her life to remedying what she calls the 'grave mistake' of idealizing extroversion and argues that we must stop treating introversion as a 'second-class personality trait.' One of Cain’s model introverts, Rosa Parks, is a reminder that quiet can also be powerful. Isn’t it our job, after all, to help all of our students claim their power, even if that means letting go of our deeply held beliefs about primacy in learning modalities?" Read the entire article here.

Sarah Jones, a doctoral student at Michigan State, reminds us in her insightful post that giving more low-stakes assessments has a multitude of benefits for our students. She writes that providing your student with low-stakes testing will "produce large improvements in student final exam scores, help narrow the grade gap between poorly prepped and highly prepped first year college student, and might even result in more positive course reviews." She cites research by Scott Freeman, David Haak, and Mary Pat Wenderoth (Published in the Life Sciences Education edition of The American Society of Cell Biology) who wrote "We found no evidence that points from active-learning exercises inflate grades or reduce the impact of exams on final grades. When we controlled for variation in student ability, failure rates were lower in a moderately structured course design and were dramatically lower in a highly structured course design. This result supports the hypothesis that active-learning exercises can make students more skilled learners and help bridge the gap between poorly prepared students and their better-prepared peers." Some may be worried that their already heavy workload will be further burdened by more assessment. But the use of Canvas can actually reduce the amount of grading you have to do if you set up the quiz or analysis using the LMS. You can also use peer review, a great active learning tool that enhances learning for all students.

We have all heard of helicopter parents but have you heard about helicopter instructors? That is how Kristie McAllum describes instructors that she says "[have] replaced helicopter parents with helicopter professors. Through our constant availability to clarify criteria, explain instructions, provide micro-level feedback, and offer words of encouragement, we nourish millennials’ craving for continuous external affirmations of success and reduce their resilience in the face of challenges or failure.” I am not sure I totally agree with her argument but I do feel that we let our students off the hook when we assign reading and then lecture on everything they were supposed to read. It sends a clear message to our students that we will cover all of the material so why read the textbook. That is why I have encouraged all of us to ask questions at the beginning of class that allows the instructor to gauge the level of reading the students completed and the knowledge they retained from the reading. Dr. Maryellen Weimer offers the following suggestions as well. "Are there other benchmarks we could use to determine if we’re doing too much or too little? Could we look at individual policies and practices? Does extra credit coddle students? What about dropping the lowest score? What if teacher feedback is only provided on the final version of the term paper? Should we call on students who very obviously don’t want to participate? Or, must individual policies and practices be considered in light of course content and who’s enrolled in the course? Do students need more support when the content is especially challenging or requires sophisticated skills they have yet to develop? Does it matter whether the course is one taken by beginning students, majors, students fulfilling a general education requirement, first-generation students, or seniors in a capstone? Are there good reasons to do more for beginning students and less for seniors?" You can read the full article here.

Anyone reading this blog knows that I am big proponent of active learning. You should also know that I believe that students have a lot to learn from their peers and I try to infuse my class with opportunities for them to review their peer's work. A recent article by Tiffany Potter, Letitia Englund, James Charbonneau, Mark Thompson MacLean, Jonathan Newell, and Ido Roll (University of British Columbia) entitled "ComPAIR: A New Online Tool Using Adaptive Comparative Judgement to Support Learning with Peer Feedback" provided me with a new appreciation for student interaction. One of the concerns of using peer review is that students, especially early in their college career, may not be able to properly evaluate someone else's work. What the folks from UBC found through their research is that using a comparison option alleviates some of that effect. Better yet, the process help students learn more deeply, improves their ability to assess their own work, and improves their capacity to provide feedback on the work of others in a collaborative learning environment. You can read the entire article here.

As we begin our 12 week classes today, I thought it would be good to revisit some of the strategies we can use to integrate active learning into all of our classes. The goal is to create self-guided learning. Not stressing about coverage allows us to teach our students how to learn and thus create critical thinkers for the future. Students may approach coursework from a fairly mechanistic stance: If the instructor gives me information, I will memorize it, and get a good grade. This approach to learning doesn’t lend itself well to an active classroom, which requires students to wrestle with difficult ideas in order to lead to deeper conceptual learning. The good news is that most of your students are looking for cues from you on what you expect so they are malleable to your ideas. First, you might want to reflect on your own ideas about learning? Your own implicit ideas can have a big impact on how you teach (Good, Rattan and Dweck, 2012). Do you implicitly have performance goals for your students – and yourself -- and a "fixed" rather than a "growth" mindset about intelligence? Think about the messages that you send students. Do you show your students that you want to be questioned during class, that you own up to your own errors, and that you also can learn from them? Do you praise students for their effort or their grades? Consider intentionally framing your classroom for learning mastery. You can emphasize that learning takes effort and that anyone can improve if they work hard (Dweck 2010; Good, Rattan and Dweck 2012; Anderman and Dawson, 2010). You can create opportunities for students to reflect on the process of their own learning so they become more self-directed learners (Elby 2001; Redish and Hammer, 2009; Bransford, Brown and Cocking, 2000). Helping students reflect on their own learning, or “think about thinking” is termed “metacognition,” a learned skill that is unfortunately not directly addressed in many college courses. Spending a few minutes in each session about metacognition can pay off in big dividends when it comes to self-guided learning.

Being an effective teacher is really hard work. When we really dig deep to help students discover how to learn, the work is long but the results are sensational. There is new research that tells us that studying smarter rather than longer or harder is much more effective. Students who excel at both classroom and standardized tests such as the SAT and ACT aren’t necessarily those who study longest. Instead, they study smart—planning ahead, quizzing themselves on the material and actively seeking out help when they don’t understand it. Researchers call them activist learner (which sounds a lot like active learners right?). That activist approach reflects what researchers call self-regulated learning: the capacity to track how well you’re doing in your classes and hold yourself accountable for reaching goals. So if you aren't doing it already, add another tool to your teaching toolkit and share this information with your students. If you want to read more, here is the entire article.

Beginning another semester always draws our focus to the tools of teaching. Things like the syllabus, the text, our learning experiences, and the course learning objectives. Good learning outcomes are a helpful reminder for us and our students. I challenge students to use the daily learning objectives as a tool to measure their learning. Using Linda Nilson's suggestions in her book Creating Self-Regulated Learners (BRCC Library LB1060 .N55 2013) helps us to understand how we can facilitate life-long learning habits in our students. Inside Higher Ed has a good article today written by Cathy Davidson about learning outcomes and the path that a senior faculty members takes as she tries to understand (in her own words) "what we require, how we organize knowledge, how we facilitate learning and what we hope our students will gain from what they learn." It is a terrific starting point to help us decide what it is we will truly focus on during that precious class time (or synchronous instruction time in our elearning courses). As our students move through the material we teach, how will they themselves know when they have truly learned something? Ms. Davidson concludes the article with samples of what she has come to determine to be good learning objectives. One of her aspirational learning objectives is, "Form an appreciation of the importance of critical and creative thinking and problem-solving and use these to guide my future life and work." A good standard for all of us to use I think.

As we enter the last week of planning for our fall semester, I wanted to share just a few tips for the first day of class/semester. A great way to start a class and semester is having your students write a letter to their future selves. Have them list the things they want to learn and accomplish in your class. You should have them turn them in so that you can use the pre-feedback (is there a better word for that?) to shape your class throughout the semester. Be sure and return it to them at or near the end of the term so that they can reflect and use that experience for their next course (or life in general). Why not give the final exam on the first day? I have advocated in the past for this idea. It really provides a road map to guide your students throughout the term. It also identifies very clearly what they can expect to know by the end of the course. Give a low-stakes quiz on the course syllabus during which students can use their mobile devices to access a Canvas quiz. Alternatively, begin an interactive poll that involves students using their classroom response device after which they can see their results. Follow the poll with a classroom discussion before having students retake the poll to improve on their initial answer (Poll everywhere works well for this type of learning experience). Create an inclusive classroom that values all students, their perspectives, and contributions to the community of learners. There are several ways to create inclusive classrooms including using icebreakers, incorporating meaningful and worthy classroom policies, helping students contribute to the learning process, and using teaching strategies that engage students and motivate them to learn. Calling students by name helps to engage with them and shows them that they are important to the class. Establish a culture of feedback where you encourage students to share their classroom experiences. Explain that the feedback you give to students is as meaningful as the feedback they share with you about the course and that you will listen and consider all suggestions. Got more ideas? Please share them in the comments section or forward them to me and I will post there here. Have a great semester!

The beginning of a new semester is always an exciting time. Instructors are excited about new learning experiences they want to try. Students are excited about moving one step closer to graduating but many of them are anxious about what the semester will bring. I like to start the first class by sharing the journey ahead with my students. It puts them at ease, excites them about the possibilities, and motivates them to learn. It also takes care of the number one expectation of current students, "How is this going to be relevant to my life?" Another topic I spend some time on is the typical misconceptions new students have about college. Dr. Stephen Chew has a classic article about this very topic. He notes there are four things that students typically are misinformed about. He writes, "Students think that learning can happen a lot faster than it does. Take, for example, the way many students handle assigned readings. They think they can get what they need out of a chapter with one quick read through (electronic devices at the ready, snacks in hand, and ears flooded with music). Or, they don’t think it’s a problem to wait until the night before the exam and do all the assigned readings at once. 'Students must learn that there are no shortcuts to reading comprehension.' Teachers need to design activities that regularly require students to interact with course text materials." You can read the rest of his short and concise article here.

If an instructor delivers a lecture and no one learns anything, did teaching really take place? Is this one of your recurring nightmares? I know I spend a lot of time assessing the effectiveness of my teaching and this question really resonates with me. I just finished a good article by Alla Kushniryk and Kenneth J. Levine about multitasking (or switch-tasking as some of the literature describes it). It validates what others have discovered as well; basically that it is very difficult for anyone to listen well and write good notes that will allow them to learn. They write, "It was found that multitasking significantly decreased performances on both the listening and writing tasks. The experiment also uncovered that the degree of social presence did not affect students’ performances on the listening or writing tasks in the learning environment. The perceived degree of social presence was the same in the virtual- and live-presenter groups." The social presence portion of their findings is crucial information for our eLearning colleagues. Teaching in an online or hybrid environment presents its own challenges but this research notes that learning can be done well even when the mode of delivery isn't in the traditional face-to-face version. The scientists did add, "In the virtual-presenter condition, the participants of the study might consider the listening task as being secondary and the writing task as being the most important." Understanding how learners perform in different settings is crucial if we are to deepen our understanding of effective teaching. This study certainly helps but more should be done to discover what works best in 21st century learning environments.

While we often talk about moving from lectures to more active learning methods, we sometimes forget an important component. Student feedback can be very useful when we are transitioning. That is why Dr. Grant Wiggins post about engaging lessons caught my attention. His results are from high schoolers but so many of the comments could be put to good use in our college classrooms as well. One student wrote, "I thought that making your own nation in politics was extremely interesting and fun. It was interesting because it gave us students the ability to design our perfect environment." How many different discussions can you see coming from this type of learning experience based on that response? In a time when students are becoming hyper-interested in the political system, assigning this type of learning experience could really allow students to develop critical thinking skills. Another student wrote, "For our AP French class we had to construct a resume and cover letter for a foreign French related career opportunity that we found. This is interesting as we learned a highly useful life skill that should’ve been taught in another class but also because we got to explore opportunities around the world." This illustrates the very critical need to make lessons as relevant as possible. It is one of the most repeated complaints that many students share about their classroom experience. How many times have you heard the question, "Why do we have to know this?" Luckily, active learning lends itself to these types of lessons. So as you begin thinking about increasing the amount of active learning you have in your classes, take a look at your student rating comments and use them to help shape your teaching.

The story about Dr. Carl Wieman in Inside Higher Ed is terrific. It begins, "As a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, Carl Wieman could probably get away with being a mediocre teacher. Yet he’s devoted much of his career to improving the ways colleges and universities teach science, in his own classrooms and in one of the grandest experiments of his life: the multicampus Science Education Initiative. Wieman’s new book chronicles the latter effort and makes a strong, evidence-based case for pursuing broad changes in science instruction: out with lectures and in with active learning. It’s also an easily digested how-to guide for interested parties, including deans, department chairs and other faculty members. The project has major implications for administrators, too." I am looking forward to reading the book. As a proponent of active learning I am glad to see additional evidence-based results that prove its worth. You can read the entire article here. If you are interested in active learning, there is an abundance of information on this blog.

What skills did you possess as an undergraduate that made you successful? Who taught you about the methods you used to navigate college? Were you lucky enough to have a mentor? A recent discussion about our undergraduate experience made me take a new look at the current research about student mentoring. As expected, having a mentor increases a students chance to persist and graduate under the right circumstances. In Buffy Smith's Mentoring At-risk Students through the Hidden Curriculum of Higher Education, she notes three actions that mentors should do in order to help students including: (1) telling students what they should do (advising), (2) advocacy, defined as motivating and connecting students with individuals on campus, and (3) showing and empowering students how to acquire the highest degree of capital from the mentoring relationship (academic apprenticeship). Many institutions include mentoring as part of their first-generation programs. Joya Misra and Jennifer Lundquist provide a really nice overview of mentoring in their article for Inside Higher Ed. The article focuses on what faculty can do in the form of mentoring to help students succeed. One of the points they make is about the relationship itself as they note, "Individual faculty mentors also should recognize the backgrounds, resources and needs of their students, rather than assuming that students are all the same and have all of the resources they need. Students benefit from faculty mentors who see them as whole people. By recognizing who a student is beyond their role as a student, faculty members can develop trusting relationships with them."

A recent conversation with a colleague about problem-based learning (PBL) prompted me to take a look at the latest research on the topic. What I found is there is a lot of material and the research studies are very often giving what looks like conflicting results. A closer look however led me to understand that very often the context has a lot to do with whether PBL is beneficial to learners or not. If you are just jumping into PBL, John R. Savery has a nice overview with definitions that are helpful. One of the areas I am always interested in looking at is how to help learners develop their critical thinking abilities. It is one of the many topics we teach in the College Success Skills course and I often share with students that people who can solve problems will always find a job. Agnes Tiwari, Patrick Lai, Mike So, and Kwan Yuen tackle this issue in their study and found that PBL did aid in the development of critical thinking skills versus students who only received traditional lectures. Serkan Sendağa and H. Ferhan Odabas also found that using PBL in an online environment increases learners critical thinking skills. Cindy E. Hmelo-Silver found that using PBL methods can also improve learners collaboration skills and intrinsic motivation. Now you should be really intrigued and want to learn more about how you can implement PBL into your courses. Look for a follow-up post soon that will share some tips on how you can do just that. By the way, if you are already using PBL, be sure and post your comments so that we can all learn from your experiences.

Before adult learners will learn something, they often need to know why they need to learn it. That sounds really easy right? Just like you and me, understanding the relevance to our lives will cause us to focus more deeply on something. So translating that to our classroom makes great sense. Just develop and deliver learning experiences that have direct applicability and relevance to our student's lives. The other important concept to remember as we develop our curriculum is that adult learners are autonomous and self-directed. Now this may be where some of our student persistence issues begin to occur. If most of your students are first-timers and recent high school graduates, they are very much set in something we like to call the 80/20 model. Eighty percent of everything that happened to them in high school was delivered by their teachers. Books are free. The bell rings to change classes. The bus picks you up and takes you home. You get a study guide for all tests. So it is understandable that many of our students are expecting the same thing from us. But college is not high school in so many ways. So getting our students to not resist the college experience begins with that simple statement. Turn 80/20 on its ear and tell your students that it is time for them to begin to write their own future. Asking them questions like "what do you want to do with your life or what type of job are you hoping to find once you earn your academic credential" (degree/certificate/etc.) can begin to help them understand that college is the beginning of their adult life. Then have them create goals for themselves. Suggest they do this for each class, for the semester as a whole, and for the next 5 years of their lives. You should also remind them to revise them as the semester progresses. It is a subtle thing but it helps them to begin to understand that becoming a self-guided learner is the optimal goal. After all, once they complete college, they will still need to continue to build their knowledge base on their own. Holding this type of conversation during the first class session will certainly help our students to begin the semester moving in the right direction and should also improve our student persistence rates.

Our summer session starts on June 5 and as veterans will tell you, it moves quickly. Students accustomed to the (somewhat) more leisurely pace of fall and spring, usually underestimate the time they now have to stay current and fully prepare for assessments. This is an area where you as an instructor can really help. Spend some time in the first class session allowing your students to create a semester calendar. Remind them to mark off all of the dates when the big projects, tests, and presentations are due. Their calendar should also include the other events that require a lot of their time like jobs, possibly travel time, etc. In this way, they can begin to see the times when they are free to read, study, consolidate notes, or meet with a study group. Getting off to a quick start is paramount in semesters that have limited sessions. Please remind your students that there will be a sign-up table to join Study Groups for the summer in the Magnolia Building during the June 5-8 week from 9 am until 3 pm each day. If you need more information, please contact Academic Support Specialist Barbara Linder ( linderb@mybrcc.edu or 216.8228). Study groups can really provide that needed support during abbreviated semesters. Good luck on the upcoming semester.

David Gooblar has a new post that represents what many of us are feeling right now. He writes, "It’s been a long semester. We’ve all worked hard, tried out new things, adapted on the fly, managed to keep our heads above an ocean of work while still being present for our students. We’ve made it through the mid-semester doldrums. Depending on how much grading we’ve got left, we’re now within sight of the end. If you’re anything like me, to say that you’re looking forward to the end is an understatement. Does anyone else visualize entering that last grade, closing your folder of class notes, and then throwing that folder into the sea? Today I’d like to suggest that you not be so quick to move on from this term, no matter how desperately you long for a summer away from teaching. So this year, maybe when your students are filling out their evaluation forms, take a little time to evaluate yourself. What worked well? What didn’t? What would you change if you could teach the course over again? Answering even these few questions will pay dividends well worth that slight delay in getting you to your much-deserved summer break." Continue reading here.

Have you ever thought about what we are all doing in higher education (or any level of education for that matter)? We are teaching students from the things we know now to help them be the leaders of the future. We are literally teaching then for things that will happen that we may or may not know anything about. It really drives the point home that we can't just worry about covering the material but must focus on helping them become self-guided learners. They need to be adults who can learn things on their own so that they will be able to handle the problems of the future. That was one of the reasons I was excited to attend the American Association of Community Colleges conference in Louisiana last weekend. As I participated in a session about innovative learning going on at several of the City University of New York schools, I marveled at how most of my colleagues are wrestling with the same issues that we are encountering. Today I encountered a special section in the The Chronicle of Higher Education that talks about a student leadership development program at CUNY. The program is aimed at creating leaders for the future. The City University of New York’s Futures Initiative, founded in 2014, is a program that advocates for both authentic innovation and equity. According to Cathy Davidson, the Initiative’s founding director and a distinguished professor of English at CUNY’s Graduate Center:  “Normally when we think of innovation in higher education, we think of extremely well-funded programs for typically wealthy students who plan on going into jobs at the very top of the technology world. Not necessarily innovation that serves the good for the most people. Our credo is that unless your innovation has equity built into it, it’s not really innovation.” It certainly raises a lot of questions as we come to the end of the spring semester.

This is the time of year when we can smell the fear in the air. It is the end of the semester and that means that finals are just around the corner. Our students anxiety levels are raised and some of them begin to panic. But it doesn't have to be this way. Maryellen Weimer posted a letter to students about finals back in December 2016. It is still a great piece and the relevance echoes throughout higher education. I also found it very useful in teaching College Success Skills (CSSK 1023) as we spend a good amount of time on helping students figure out how they learn best. Weimer begins where we also begin in CSSK--start with a plan. Very often students jump into finals prep with no game plan and that is surely a recipe for disaster. One of my favorite parts of the post is this gem: "Believe in yourself. Your brain is plenty big enough to handle any question I might toss at you. You’ve just got to get the information stored in a place where you can retrieve it. Build connections between the new material and what you already know. Short-term memory is like a sponge—once it gets full, it drips. If you truly understand something, it’s much less likely to leak out." I strongly encourage you to share this letter with your students. We have sent it to the student who are participating in study groups and have received some positive feedback from them as well (letting your students know it is peer-endorsed may get them to read it). You might also remind them that the Academic Learning Center provides assistance for all students and the Long Night Against Procrastination is occurring on May 2 from 4:00 until 10:00 pm in the Magnolia Building on the Mid City Campus.

As our yearly spring break week winds to a close, there is anticipation in the air. It is always a mystery as to just how many of our students will check back in. It is the time of year when we may have seen the last of a student yet we didn't know it. Many of us, with the small taste of sprummer (spring/summer Louisiana style), can empathize with our students who check out at this point of the semester. Why does this happen? Does the break someone trigger feelings of being done or hopelessness or both? It reminded me of a recent article on NPR.org that encouraged us to not schedule early classes because our students learn better later in the day. It also said, "College classes start too early in the morning for students' brains. While most colleges have start times of around 8 a.m., Jonathan Kelley advises NPR Ed that the ideal start time would be more like 10 or 11 a.m. The reason: People fall into different 'chronotypes,'which people know as 'early birds' and 'night owls.' In this sample, night owls outnumbered early birds by far. The reasons for this are biological, says Evans. There has been evidence over time from specific studies indicating that teenagers' body clocks are set at a different time than older folks, she says. Medical research suggests that this goes on well into your 20s, so we decided to look at college students. While there is no ideal start time for everyone, up to 83 percent of students could be at their best performance if colleges allowed them to choose their own ideal starting time for a regular six-hour day, according to Kelley." Food for thought. By the way, we are strongly encouraging our study group student participants to plan some meeting time to discuss how they plan to finish the spring semester strong so please encourage your students to spend some time on this idea as well.

Whenever we enter into conversation about teaching and learning, we inevitable end up talking about how distracted our students have become. We ponder ways to pull them back in, something active learning has proved to be adept at but there is still room for improvement. Reading James M. Lang's latest post, tells me that the faculty at BRCC are joined by colleagues around the world who are facing the same situation. One of the quotes from the post that really stuck with me is, "The arrival and widespread adoption of new technologies has occurred in increasingly intense bursts. In The Distracted Mind, Gazzaley and Rosen point out that, if you assume a benchmark of 50 million worldwide users, radio arrived at that level within 38 years of its invention. The time frame shrinks with each new invention: telephone, 20 years; television, 13 years; cellphones; 12 years; the internet, four years. Social media amped up the curve: Facebook, two years; YouTube, one year. And the winner, at least at the time of their writing the book? "Angry Birds" took over our lives in 35 days." We know our brains grow and adapt. We know that we continue to learn throughout our lives. We know a lot about how technology disruption changes things for us no matter the delivery modality. What we don't know is how to effectively use the technology (usually smart phones or tablets) without causing what education scientists call the "lingering effect." I think we do what we have always done and that is to try different approaches using the new tools. But we must share our results with each other and grow the research resources so that we can improve student success and continue to add tools to our teaching toolkit. What do you think?

Have you ever had one of your students ask you why they needed to learn something? Many of our students feel like anything they spend time learning should be relevant. Have you ever been stumped when they asked you the question? Rohit Metha found himself in just that sort of situation while teaching a wireless communication class to senior engineering majors. He writes, "Personally, wrapping my head around the concepts of probability took me several years. As a result, it has had a serious effect on my understanding of the world in general, including my position on some crucial political, medical, and spiritual issues. When my student asked me for why it was relevant, I tried to explain why I cared about it and how it connected to wireless communication. I could tell that he did not care about either of my reasons. This bothered me for weeks, perhaps, months. Well, it still kind of does. But, it led me to wonder what could I have done differently? Last year, now working as a researcher in literacies at MSU, I found my answer." Sometimes it is beneficial to look at what we are teaching and consider why we are teaching it. Maybe like Rohit, it will help you enhance your teaching skills. He didn't stop there. He decided to write down his five ways that we can make learning relevant for our students which you can access here. He closes the post with what could be his teaching philosophy saying, "Our goal is to have them on-board with the things that we have learned to value and care about, so they can be good, literate, and emotional citizens who value each other and the world they live in."

Attending a conference is always a good thing for numerous reasons but one of the best for me is learning about new resources or getting reacquainted with old favorites. While attending the Louisiana Board of Regents annual eLearning conference last week, Dr. Curtis Bonk of Indiana University shared a number of new resources. I spent some time each day this week and last week taking a look at the many ideas he shared with us. I found Flipgrid (which can be embedded in Canvas) to be something I could easily use to encourage more participation in pre-class discussions. Using Vocaroo to give audio feedback to students was also very useful and you can even encourage them to use it for peer critiques. Finally, Polleverywhere came in handy  with the various questions I usually ask during a class session but you are limited to forty free responses. As for getting reacquainted, I spent some time on the Merlot site after being reminded by Dr. Gerry Hanley of all the wonderful (and free) resources there. If you use the Stop-Start-Keep Doing student feedback survey during the semester, you might want to look at FAST (Free Assessment Summary Tool) instead. You know that students like to do things online and the app does a lot of the work for you. Want to teach your students about information literacy? Try the University of Idaho's Merlot contribution. You can spend hours on the Merlot site alone so be careful and set some time limits for yourself. Better yet, share resources you have created that worked best for you.