PLANNING FOR COLLEGE CLOSURES
The weather is wreaking havoc with our academic calendar this spring semester. We will not be holding classes on Tuesday, January 28 due to icy (and possibly snowy) conditions which also caused us to cancel classes on Friday, January 24. Losing one class time may not be too disruptive but two days lost may be causing you some stress. We suggest you look over the missed lessons and decide what is the most important information that students will need for future learning. When you do get back to class, focus on that and perhaps post videos or fact sheets about the other material you had planned to teach during those class meetings. In addition, you can certainly use your Blackboard page to assign readings, hold virtual office hours or give an online quiz. You could even have an online discussion with your students using Blackboard. This assumes that all of your students will have access to the web and that our electricity will withstand the freezing temperatures. We recommend that, at minimum, you remind students of important upcoming dates and deadlines now by posting this information on your Blackboard page and sending an email blast to your classes. This will allow you to continue to move forward with student learning despite the weather interruptions. By the way, the last day to add or drop classes has been extended to January 31 because of the weather disruptions.

CELEBRATE ENGAGEMENT DAY

We celebrated engagement at BRCC today and captured some pictures from classrooms and support Division of Innovative Learning and Academic Support staff also wore their t-shirts to celebrate engagement at BRCC. Research shows that using engagement techniques early and often is one of the best ways to improve your class participation and retention rates. As Dr. Mary Clement Keep Calm and Be Engaged t-shirts on today. All of the members of the pointed out on BRCC Faculty Development Day, engagement also improves your student ratings. Faculty Focus provides us with a nice overview of engagement practices and I want to mention two here. First, recognize that teaching and teachers are central to engagement. Much research places teachers at the heart of engagement. For example, one study found that “if the teacher is perceived to be approachable, well prepared, and sensitive to student needs, students are committed to work harder, get more out of the session, and are more willing to express their opinion.” We continue to promote active learning as the preferred delivery method for your teaching. The engagement research provides another opportunity to create self-directed learners. There is no agreement in the research literature as to what motivates learners to engage, but the

offices around the Mid City Campus. You may have seen some of our faculty engagement experts with their

dominant view is that students engage when they act as their own learning agents working to achieve goals meaningful to them. This means that what students believe about themselves as learners is very important. They must believe they can learn, including that they can overcome and learn from failure. Giving students some control over learning processes helps develop this confidence and commitment to learning. Remember to Keep Calm and Be Engaged and sign up as a follower of the Teaching+Learning Center's twitter site @brcctlc to receive the latest news.

STUDENT ENGAGEMENT IDEAS THAT WORK
Drs. Ned Zepke and Linda Leach offer us some great engagement approaches in their article Improving Student Engagement: Ten Proposals for Action that appeared in Active Learning in Higher Education. The authors propose definitions broad enough to include more specific descriptions. For example: engagement is “students’ cognitive investment in, active participation in, and emotional commitment to their learning.” Or, engagement is “students’ involvement with activities and conditions likely to generate high-quality learning.” Two of their top ten ideas include the following. Enable students to work autonomously, enjoy learning relationships with others, and feel they are competent to achieve their own objectives — “When institutions provide opportunities for students to learn both autonomously and with others, and to develop their sense of competence, students are more likely to be motivated, to engage and succeed.” Maryellen Weimer says that the focus here is on cultivating intrinsic motivation, which fosters the self-determination that leads to engagement. Zepke and Leach also suggest that we recognize that teaching and teachers are central to engagement — Much research places teachers at the heart of engagement. For example, one study found that “if the teacher is perceived to be approachable, well prepared, and sensitive to student needs, students are committed to work harder, get more out of the session, and are more willing to express their opinion.” You can take a look at the full article here.

ACADEMIC ADVISING ON TAP
Many of you have asked that we offer a faculty professional development workshop on academic advising and here it is. Join us for Focus on Academic Advising: Bring on the Questions on Tuesday, October 7 at 1:00 pm. The workshop will include a panel of discussants led by CSSK Assistant Professor Vinetta Frie and Career Center Director Lisa Hibner and will be held in room 311 Magnolia Building (Mid City Campus). This workshop is sponsored by the Teaching+Learning Center. Registration is now open.

CLARITY OF EXPECTATIONS IMPROVES RETENTION
As the How Learning Works Faculty Learning Community enters its sixth week, they wanted to share a retention tip related to what types of practice and feedback enhance student learning. FLC members include Jo Dale Ales, Gabriel Aluko, Pearce Cinman, Gery Frie, Vinetta Frie, Wes Harris, Steven Keeten, Jennifer Linscott, Divina Miranda, Todd Pourciau, and Kate Schexnayder. Research has shown that learning and performance are best fostered when students engage in practice that focuses on a specific goal or criterion for performance, targets an appropriate level of challenge relative to students' current performance, and is of sufficient quantity and frequency to meet the performance criteria. The book's authors (including Susan Amrose, et. al.) suggest that we be very specific about our goals in our course material. They note without specific goals for the course as a whole or for individual assignments, students often rely on their assumptions to decide how they should spend their time. This makes it all the more important to articulate your goals clearly (in your course syllabus and with each specific assignment), so students know what your expectations are and can use them to guide their practice. Students are more likely to use the goals to guide their practice when the goals are stated in terms of what students should be able to do at the end of an assignment or the course. The next Faculty Learning Community will use Ken Bain's book What the Best College Teachers Do and begins on October 24. If you would like to participate, please contact Academic Support Specialist Barbara Linder at linderb@mybrcc.edu or 216.8228.

PREVENTING BULIMIC LEARNING HABITS
We do not see things as they are or hear things as they are said. Instead, we catch bits and pieces, work them over, and reassemble what registers on our senses. To use the metaphors that currently dominate discussion of learning, we process information and construct meaning, and apparently we do so in stages (Erickson, Peters, & Strommer, 2006). We store this information in our short-term memory, which has limited capacity (seven plus or minus two bits of information), and cannot be stored there for long. Which brings us to long-term memory. If the new information is meaningful, it can be transferred to long-term memory, which is like a filing system. So how do we make the new information meaningful so that it will connect to one of the long-term files in our student's brains? There is another factor that comes into play. Students, especially first-year students, use a surface processing approach to learning. Frequently they memorize and then purge once they use it. To discourage this, we need to remind our students why the information is important now and how they will need to use it in the future. The deeper learning that we want is a product of active learning: reading, writing, talking, thinking, and applying the new information.

MAKING LARGE CLASSES ACTIVE
Since I have received a few requests for dealing with larger classes, I wanted to share some new information I found. Of course you can take a look at my previous posts on the subject. Deb Wingert and Tom Molitor with the University of Minnesota feel that "the difficulties of involving students in large classes can be overcome." They suggest a few approaches including interactive lectures, cooperative learning groups, jigsaws, games, constructive controversies, and group tests in their article Actively Engaging Large Classes in the Sciences. Daniel J. Klionsky with the University of California-Davis offers some ideas of his own in the article Tips for using Questioning in Large Classes. He suggests "setting the tone seems to be critical. In a general sense, I find that students will accept almost any rules for how I run a class, as long as I make them clear at the outset and am consistent in their application. This includes how I want the class to interact with me as an instructor. I want the students to be an active part of the class, to be thinking while they are sitting there and not simply writing down every word I say. On the very first day I make it clear that I want them to ask questions and interact with me during lecture.

WORKSHOP PLANNED FOR FEB 5
"Do You Know Who I Am? Creating a Culture of Engagement in Your Classes" is the title of the next professional development workshop to be held on Thursday, February 5 at 1:00 pm. We will discuss why engagement is important for student success. We will also be discussing what engagement looks like, the standard, pedagogies, and tools of engagement, and some of the methods you can use in your classes. This interactive workshop requires that you bring your questions and ideas so that we as a community of scholars can increase the overall level of student-faculty engagement. You can register now. The workshop is sponsored by the Teaching+Learning Center and will be held in 311 Magnolia Building (Mid City Campus). For more information, feel free to contact me (pourciaut@mybrcc.edu).

DO YOU HAVE AN OPINION
Are you looking to integrate active learning into your course or perhaps you want to use inquiry-guided learning in your class? Do you know why Millennial students are different from students you may have taught in the past? Did you know that student engagement has proven to be the most important deterrent to student attrition according to the latest research? These questions are just part of the Teaching+Learning Center's Needs Assessment survey now being collected. If you have not had the opportunity to complete the short survey, please take a few minutes to do it today. 

CONNECTING NEW INFORMATION TO MEMORY
Speaking of student engagement, there are a number of resources that can help you create a student-friendly classroom. Elizabeth Barkley says that engaged students are involved in the academic task at hand and are using higher-order thinking skills such as analyzing information or solving problems. In her book Student Engagement Techniques: A handbook for college faculty, Barkley notes that engagement is linked to active learning because learning is about making sense and meaning out of new information by connecting it to what is already known. Although the BRCC Library does not have access to Barkley's book, you can view large portions of it using the Google books feature. She concludes by saying that there is "no single tip, technique, or strategy that offers a magic formula or blueprint for student engagement. Yet some approaches and activities do engage students better than others." 

YOU CAN USE THIS NOW
If you are looking for a way to enhance the question and answer portions of your class, you might want to try to the Waiting Game technique. Tell your students that once you ask the question, they must wait until you say it is okay for them to answer. The wait time should generally be short (15 seconds or so) - but research shows this is one of the hardest things for faculty to do yet it creates a better learning environment for many reasons. It is important to insist that no one raise their hand (or shout out the answer) before you give the okay, in order to discourage the typical scenario in which the five students in the front row all immediately volunteer to answer the question, and everyone else sighs in relief. Waiting forces every student to think about the question, rather than passively relying on those students who are fastest out of the gate to answer every question. When the wait time is up, the instructor asks for volunteers or randomly picks a student to answer the question. Once students are in the habit of waiting after questions are asked, more will get involved in the process. 

DOCTORS OF THE FUTURE
A $1.3 million grant from the National Institutes of Health has been awarded to LSU and BRCC to establish a new biomedical and behavioral sciences education initiative called the Bridges to the Baccalaureate Program. The program will encourage underrepresented students in the biomedical and behavioral science fields to complete their associate degrees at BRCC, and then move on to complete bachelor's degrees at LSU.

CANVAS CHOSEN AS NEW LMS FOR SYSTEM
As you know LCTCS has asked for bids for a LMS to be used for all of the system's colleges. Canvas was the LMS selected and the contract was supposed to be signed yesterday. It appears that we will be moving to the new LMS for the Fall 2015 semester. If you visit the Canvas website, they describe themselves as an educational revolution with an industry-pushing platform and millions of satisfied users. I know that our eLearning Program Manager Susan Nealy has begun to share some resources with you including a free version of Canvas that will allow you to begin to build your course. I would encourage you to begin to become familiar with the product over the next several months. Take a look at this page which contains free webinars about the Canvas product and look for some professional development opportunities down the road as we move closer to implementation.

INSTITUTIONAL ENGAGEMENT CRUCIAL TO STUDENT SUCCESS
Last week a number of you attended a professional development workshop on the topic of engagement. We discussed four types of engagement including faculty-student, student-student, interpersonal, and institutional. Using the research literature from Chickering and Gamson, Bransford and colleagues, and Ambrose and colleagues (who's book How Learning Works was used in a Faculty Learning Community last semester at BRCC), we were able to discern what areas of engagement would best help us to improve our student success rates. Some of your colleagues wondered about the role of motivation and we were able to watch a TEDx talk from Dr. Scott Geller of Virginia Tech called the psychology of self-motivation. The brief fifteen minute YouTube video delivers a powerful punch that you can begin to use in your classrooms immediately. We also came to the conclusion that there should be a consistent institutional approach to engagement which will take a commitment on the part of all educators and academic support staff to achieve. If we as a community are committed to being flexible, attentive, and empathetic to our student's needs, we believe that our students will begin to succeed in greater numbers.

USING STUDENT RATINGS FOR TEACHING IMPROVEMENT
As you begin to plan for your Mardi Gras break, take some time to plan for the next faculty development opportunity to be held on Thursday, February 26 at 1:00 pm. Interpreting Your Student Ratings and Using Them for Professional Development is the title of the workshop that has been developed in response to your requests. Come and learn how to address student comments about how to address concepts more clearly, how to interpret what is most, more or less important, setting out clear objectives, pacing the class properly, and more. You can register now. For more information, please contact me at pourciaut@mybrcc.edu or 216.8534. This workshop is sponsored by the Teaching+Learning Center.

Light Touch Interventions Improve Student Success

Want to improve the student success in your classes this spring? Want to improve your student rating as well? The same approach can help both and it is something that is probably already in your teaching toolkit. Engagement is something that provides multiple benefits and while we know that it works, there are still some of us who struggle with implementing it effectively. Colleen Flaherty provides some good information in her article for Inside Higher Ed. She notes, "Students benefit from increased faculty engagement. Yet many professors still resist more student-centered teaching. Part of the problem is that graduate schools are slow to adopt pedagogical training, meaning that some professors may want to up their interaction with students but don’t know how. Another part of the problem is that becoming a better teacher takes time, an increasingly scarce faculty resource. What if engagement wasn’t complicated and didn’t take that much time? Preliminary research called 'My Professor Cares: Experimental Evidence on the Role of Faculty Engagement,' presented last week at the annual meeting of the American Economics Association, suggests that even 'light touch' interventions can make a difference to students." You can read the entire article here.

The future of teaching at BRCC.

NEW FACULTY ORIENTATION
The Division of Innovative Learning and Academic Support was thrilled to host the new faculty orientation on Wednesday. The program provided information on a diversity of topics including the scholarship of teaching and learning, how to help our student succeed, using library resources effectively, strategies for testing and assessment, using Blackboard effectively, and integrating college success skills into every course. Expert presenters included Dean Joanie Chavis, Testing Specialist Tressa Landry, Manager Susan Nealy, Dean Todd Pourciau, Director Jeanne Stacy, Dean Sandra Williams, and Executive Dean Elaine Vallette. The new faculty participants including: Catherine Doyle, Vinetta Frie, Belvin Givens, Emily Graves, Cyndy Giachetti, Jessie Herubrock, Loretta Jarrell, Jennifer Knapp, Albertha Lawson, Kristen Pasquier, Asoka Sekharan, and Bridget Sonnier-Hillis. Active learning and student engagement dominated the conversation. The future looks bright for teaching and learning at BRCC.

WHAT IS UP WITH THOSE GREEN SHIRTS
The Division of Innovative Learning and Academic Support team donned peaceful green shirts on Wednesday to kick off this year's theme of Keep Calm and Be Engaged. As we mentioned previously, BRCC is stepping up its efforts on student engagement. The shirts are a humorous reminder that we are all part of our students success. By the end of the day, some members of the team were receiving some outrageous financial offers for their shirts but no one wanted to part with them. Look for the shirts to reappear as we celebrate learning throughout the coming academic year. Who knows, maybe you too will be lucky enough to be recognized for engagement excellence and receive a coveted green shirt.

Anderson, Linder, and Harris join BRCC

BRCC WELCOMES NEW EMPLOYEES FROM CATC
We are very excited to announce the addition of some new team members in the Division of Innovative Learning and Academic Support. Barbara Linder has joined us as an Academic Support Specialist. Wanda Anderson and Karen Harris have joined us as Testing Center Specialists. The addition of new staff means that we can respond more effectively to the many requests we are receiving from faculty and students in the areas of testing, assessment, and pedagogy. There is a bit of sad news from the Testing Center as we are losing Tressa Landry, who is following her husband to Lake Charles. The good news is that in addition to our newest team members, Debbie Johnson remains with the Testing Center. Look for expanded hours coming soon to better meet your testing needs.

The BRCC community works hard at retaining students to completion (whether that be an academic credential, transfer to a bachelor's program or finding a job) and is not alone in searching for that "magic" solution. The truth is there isn't one intervention or approach that will serve all students. The solutions are as varied and diverse as our students. Looking at two research studies about retention and students enrolled in developmental education courses shows some surprising findings and useful interventions. In work done by Pamela S. Pruett and Beverly Absher, using data from the Community College Survey of Student Engagement, findings indicated that retention was significantly impacted by grade point average, engagement, type of remedial/developmental courses, time spent preparing for class, parents’ educational level, and students’ income level (measured indirectly by loans). They found that "Students who persist in college ask questions in class and contribute to class discussions, make class presentations, and work with other students on projects during class or outside the class (essentially engagement)." Gloria Crisp and Chryssa Delgado, in their study The Impact of Developmental Education on Community College Persistence and Vertical Transfer, demonstrate that developmental education may overall serve to decrease community college students’ odds of successfully transferring to a 4-year institution. Both studies offer suggestions for programming that could improve retention of students in developmental education courses.

How To Do College 101

Despite a great increase in the numbers of students enrolling in higher education, specifically at community colleges, the successful completion rates for these students has remained static since the 1970’s. When reviewing strategies to increase student retention and successful completion, the Student Success Course (SSC) has emerged as a promising and prominent strategy for community colleges. Given that, the purpose of the sequential mixed methods study by Kimbark, Peters, and Richardson (Effectiveness of the Student Success Course on Persistence, Retention, Academic Achievement, and Student Engagement) was to determine if participation in a SSC influences persistence, retention, academic achievement, and student engagement on a community college campus. Results of this study indicate that a relationship exists between participation in the SSC and persistence, retention, academic achievement in English and mathematics, and student engagement. Additionally, participants claim that taking the SSC not only altered their perceptions of the importance of the course, but their social and study skills as well.

ENGAGEMENT BRINGS DESIRED RESULTS
Do you call on one of your students in class every two to three minutes? Do you ask students what they know about a given topic before telling them what you know? Do you hold your students accountable through testing? These are just a few of the ways that Tara Gray and Laura Madson say you can engage with your students. They point to twenty years of research that shows that engagement in a classroom improves student learning. They point to one study of six thousand physics students that compared classes using passive lecture to classes using interactive techniques that allowed for discussion among students and between the professor and students. The study showed that students in classes that used interactive approaches rather than lecture learned twice as much. Their research paper gives some quick tips on improving engagement in your class.

YOUR BRAIN AND GOOGLE
Google wants to be the third "side" of your brain and they are not shy about admitting it. Google Glass, the wearable progeny of Ivan Sutherland's augmented reality display, the mobile phone, and science fiction -- accompanied by curiosity, excitement, and fear. Later this year, for less than $1,500, consumers will be able to get their hands on Google Glass, and we will begin to witness techies talking to their spectacle-mounted Google display and recording photos, video, and audio of their surroundings. "We want to make Google the third half of your brain," said Glass frontman and Google co-founder Sergey Brin said in 2010. That's what has some people worried about Glass. The third half of your brain could be perceived as your digital hemisphere locked in a Google cloud that captures all your interactions through the Glass lens and other Google access points, although Google would contend that the third half of your brain refers to a future search engine that "understands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want." Whatever the interpretation, Glass is a gateway to Google's goal to super-serve your digital soul.

UPCOMING WORKSHOP
The Center for Academic Excellence at Fairfield University is hosting their 12th annual Summer conference May 29-31, 2013. The Innovative Pedagogy and Course Redesign conference celebrates and showcases excellence and innovations in all areas of teaching, faculty support and development, the scholarship of teaching and learning, and community-engaged teaching and scholarship. The conference is interactive and provides an opportunity to learn from other participants, to build connections and collaborations and to reflect upon the meaningfulness and impact of our work as educators and scholars.

THIS IS OUR COMPETITION
Earlier this year Capella University and the new College for America began enrolling hundreds of students in academic programs without courses, teaching professors, grades, deadlines or credit hour requirements, but with a path to genuine college credit. The two institutions are among a growing number that are giving competency-based education a try, including 25 or so nonprofit institutions. Notable examples include Western Governors University and the Kentucky Community and Technical College System. These programs are typically online, and allow students to progress at their own pace without formal course material. They can earn credit by successfully completing assessments that prove their mastery in predetermined competencies or tasks -- maybe writing in a business setting or using a spreadsheet to perform calculations.

BLACKBOARD COMMUNITY UNDER CONSTRUCTION
One of the great features of Blackboard is the ability to create a community that allows us to discuss, share and communicate virtually. I am currently working on creating the Teaching and Learning Faculty Development Blackboard site. It will include a discussion board and online resource library among other things. As soon as it is ready to go live, all of the faculty will be added so that you can access the resources and interact with your colleagues. Hopefully it will be useful to you and become the place for online discussion about the scholarship of teaching and learning at BRCC.

NEW FACULTY ORIENTATION
The Office of Teaching and Learning will be coordinating an orientation session for all new faculty. It will be held from 9:00 AM until 12 noon on Wednesday, August 21 in room 311 Magnolia Building. The focus will be on providing our newest faculty colleagues with a good foundation as they begin their teaching career at BRCC. The topics will include faculty development, using Blackboard effectively, closing the loop with the Academic Learning Center, utilizing the Testing Center, exploring the Library, explaining what our CSSK course is all about and the eLearning certification process. While the event will be open to our new hires, we are also extending an invitation to our colleagues from the former Capital Area Technical College.

TEACHING AND LEARNING FROM BOTH SIDES
The recent announcement by Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs that the Academic Learning Center had joined the Teaching and Learning team means that the loop is now closed. The combined forces will allow us to provide unique solutions for some of our more pressing problems related to retention and student learning. The combined expertise of Jeanne Stacy, Yvette Ferguson, and Donna Newman brings the student experience into play. The Teaching and Learning team, which also includes the eLearning Program, Evening+Weekend, and the Testing Center, is here to work with all academic units and faculty to design and implement strategies and interventions based on the latest empirical research. We are excited about the possibilities created by this new collaborative and look forward to meeting the needs of our various constituencies.

ENGAGEMENT PROVIDES VALUABLE INFORMATION
Instead of doing one of the standard ice-breaker activities, why not give a pre-test? This type of learner-based assessment allows you to find out as much as possible about your students. Not only is it a great engagement tool but it will help you to modify your class to meet the needs of each of your students. You want to ask them questions about their ambitions, their approaches to and conceptions of learning, the way they reason, their temperaments, habits, and the things that attract their attention on a daily basis. Ken Bain, in his book What The Best College Teachers Do, notes that this type of activity is endorsed by the best teachers. Once you have the information, you should use it to build a class profile and compare it to the learning experiences, projects, and assessment instruments you plan to use in the course. You can then use this information throughout the semester to generate conversations and to make specific points to motivate your students. The pre-test also allows you to understand the complexities of your students.

BRAIN NEWS WE CAN USE
There is good news and bad news on the brain front depending on which side of the neural network you are on. According to a recent article in Popular Science, the concept of brain emulation has a long, colorful history in science fiction, but it's also deeply rooted in computer science. An entire subfield known as neural networking is based on the physical architecture and biological rules that underpin neuroscience. Computer engineers have created artificial neural networks capable of forming associations, or learning. However, any neuroscientist will tell you that artificial neural networks don't begin to incorporate the true complexity of the human brain. Researchers have yet to characterize the many ways neurons interact and have yet to grasp how different chemical pathways affect the likelihood that they will fire. It appears there are rules they just don't know yet. So in the battle between human and machine, it seems we are still winning. We are discovering new things about how we learn everyday, which is another reason that teaching continues to be such a fascinating career or vocation. A lesson for our students is to practice good living like getting the proper rest, avoiding high anxiety situations right before assessment, and developing healthy eating habits to make sure their neurons are firing properly.

MEMORY AND REPETITION
"The average person probably remembers more of what they see than what they hear," says Dr. Dave Yearwood in a great article about exposing your students to the same information multiple ties to insure it sticks. He writes, "according to molecular biologist John Medina, the key to more remembering what we see and hear is enhanced when repetition is involved. Don’t get me wrong, I am not advocating mass memorization of anything by anyone. Memorization is necessary in some cases, but given the easy access to all kinds of information, I see little reason for my students to commit large amounts of information to organic memory as opposed to knowing how and where to find it. What I am merely suggesting is that frequent re-exposure to snippets of content will likely aid understanding of what was presented or discussed."

STUDENT ENGAGEMENT CREATES LONG-TERM BENEFITS
Raise your hand if you believe it is a professor's job to stimulate, care about, and encourage their student's hopes and dreams? Put your hand down and take a look at this article by Scott Carlson in The Chronicle of Higher Education. He writes, "If you believe the new Gallup-Purdue Index Report, a study of 30,000 graduates of American colleges on issues of employment, job engagement, and well-being, it all comes down to old-fashioned values and human connectedness." Harold V. Hartley III, senior vice president at the Council of Independent Colleges said, "The thing that I think that is of particular value of this survey is that it is looking at outcomes of college that are different from the outcomes that we typically look at—like did you get a job, what is your salary, and those kinds of things."

MOTIVATING ONLINE STUDENTS
It seems that we talk a lot about motivation but it truly is such a complex topic that it needs lots of study. Michelle Pacansky-Brock provides the latest bit of thought on this topic and how it specifically impacts students taking courses online. She writes, "It’s not a fixed trait that some humans either have or don’t have. Rather, motivation is more like water; its qualities are impacted by other forces. Water can be serene and glass-like one day and rough and choppy the next, depending on factors like the weather or the number and type of boats in use. Motivation is similarly influenced by outside factors." Continue reading here. 

PREPARING STUDENTS FOR THE MIDDLE SKILLS WORKPLACE
In the next year alone, an estimated 2.5 million middle-skill jobs will be added to the workforce, accounting for a whopping 40 percent of all job growth. These professions — welders, pharmacy technicians, paralegals, automotive technicians, and aviation workers— offer a solid pathway to the middle class yet require less training than a traditional four-year degree. Still, these jobs require a specialized skill-set which is usually provided by community colleges. Dawn Gerrain has written an article for Educause Review on this topic. Read more here.

USING GAMIFICATION TO IMPROVE STUDENT ENGAGEMENT
Gamification was one of the topics we discussed in the Creating Self-Regulated Learners Faculty Learning Community today. Many faculty have successfully implemented gamification techniques and the research shows that it can be highly effective. One of the areas that has shown improvement is student engagement with the course material and participation in discussions. Barata, Gama, Jorge, and Gonçalves provide some good examples in their Improving Participation and Learning with Gamification article. Stott and Neustaedteris provide a good review of existing literature on the subject as well as a case study on three different applications of gamification in the post-secondary setting. As in all course redesign it will take some time to add gamification, but the research literature seems to be demonstrating that it can improve student success.

LEARNING REFRAMED
Dr. Donna M. Qualters uncovers some interesting information in her research study Do Students Want to be Active? Four important themes emerged from the analysis: the students had an overall positive attitude toward active learning; active learning was perceived to enhance their ability and efficiency in studying; active learning was perceived to improve the learning environment; and, active learning promoted their thinking about their learning and thus helped them to better understand their individual learning style. She also uncovered a few negatives that could easily be converted using the right interventions. She concludes by writing, "The most important need to be addressed is the inability of some students to deal with change. Many of these students come to higher education with expectations of very passive classroom experiences and those expectations must be uncovered, probed and altered. For some students it may go as far as the necessity to reframe what learning is: learning is not about covering material or gathering facts, learning is about integrating and using information in a meaningful way."

USING FACEBOOK IN CLASS

Research shows that there is a correlation between social presence and student success. When students feel connected to a community of inquiry they are more enthusiastic, motivated, and they perform better. If that engagement, communication, and awareness happens continuously and in real-time, as it does in a face-to-face classroom — all the better. Sidneyeve Matrix wrote a recent blog entry about bringing students together who are enrolled in a class that is being taught face-to-face and online concurrently so that the e-students would feel connected and not isolated online? Feeling out of the proverbial loop is one of the most oft-cited challenges for distance learners. Traditionally, a face-to-face classroom, “requires a disciplined commitment from the students to actually participate in the learning activities and reach out to others in the class,” observes Cory Stokes, director of the University of Utah's Technology Assisted Curriculum Center, in charge of testing for online courses. Matrix concludes, "In an online course, the onus is on the student to be self-disciplined enough to engage in self-study, often without the benefit of a class community to drive engagement and interest."

DISRUPTIVE INNOVATION

Joshua Kim has written an interesting post about Pearson's OpenClass. He discusses how it fits in the LMS ecosystem and how it compares to Blackboard and Moodle among others. Now that BRCC has decided to move forward with Blackboard 9.1, it is beneficial to take a look at the other add-ons out there. Stay tuned for more information about our eLearning and course delivery efforts.

FILLING IN THE GAPS

Here is an active learning method, pulled from the BRCC Active Learning Manual, that has proven to help students learn from each other and test themselves. Offer note completion time in your class. Towards the end of a class that you have provided a heavy dose of information, ask students to exchange notes and fill in any gaps they identify. This technique helps them generate complete notes as they review the course material. It also helps them to identify what they know and what they need to study. In addition, it allows less-skilled note takers to learn from those who are adept at taking notes. You could also have them share their note-taking tips with the class.

Culturally Responsive Teaching Increases Student Engagement

It has been great to hear from some of you about how you integrated things you heard from our convocation speaker Dr. Jennifer Waldeck into your classes. Her presentation was filled with so many things but one of the important topics she covered was how to be culturally responsive with your students. That ties in nicely with today's Faculty Focus article. Culturally Responsive Teaching (CRT) has been defined as a philosophy of education that centers students’ cultural backgrounds as essential to their learning by Gloria Ladson-Billings in 1995. Dr. Gwen Bass and Michael Lawrence-Riddell propose integrating Universal Design for Learning (UDL) with CRT to create "a powerful tool for preparing [students] for today’s professional environment, which increasingly acknowledges diversity as integral to success." They go on to note, "While educators need not be experts on every culture, they should make efforts to ensure that their students’ experience their own learning styles and their own cultures in the teaching and learning process." One of the ways they suggest we can do this is by giving students the opportunity to understand their own identities and to feel that they are honored in the class through identity mapping. They conclude by writing, "Simply providing choice for students in terms of the input of information, or their own output, is a step toward a culturally responsive classroom, as is inherent in the guiding principles of UDL—providing multiple means of representation, expression, and engagement."

ENGAGED SCHOLARS CIRCLE ADDS TWO MEMBERS

The latest inductees to be recognized by the Teaching+Learning Center for student engagement excellence are Dr. Marcella Hackney and Jamie Gurt, Esq. Dr. Hackney is an associate professor of science in the STEM Division. Mrs. Gurt is Paralegal Program Manager and an instructor for the program, part of the Business, Social Sciences, and History Division.  Both faculty are big proponents of active learning methods and use the full teaching toolkit to get the most out of their students. As we made the presentation of the coveted green t-shirts to them during class, their students were very excited. Many of their students came up to us to validate the honor as they spoke of ways in which each of these teachers created strong relationships that nurtured learning. Congratulations to Jamie and Marcella who join Paul Guidry, Sandra Guzman, Wes Harris, Mary Miller, and Amy Pinero as examples of faculty who not only believe in the power of engagement as a retention strategy but creatively introduce methods that promote student success.

Dr. Marcella Hackney

Paul Guidry and Jamie Gurt

JOINING THE ELEARNING REVOLUTION
I received a number of positive comments on the Tech Tuesday Tip sent this week. I wanted to follow that with a new article by Dr. Maryellen Weimer about the online learning conversation. She notes, "Is it time to change the online learning conversation? The debate about whether online courses are a good idea continues with most people still on one side or the other. Who’s right or wrong is overshadowed by what the flexibility and convenience of online education has offered institutions and students. Those features opened the door, and online learning has come inside and is making itself at home in most of our institutions. No doubt the debate over the value of online learning will continue, but perhaps it’s being judged by the wrong criteria." Read more here.

CRITICAL THINKING CAN BE TAUGHT
Carlos Sanchez, Silvia Rivas, and Sonia Moral, in their article Collaborative Learning Supported by Rubrics Improves Critical Thinking, report that critical thinking can be improved by paying attention to instructional design. If you are looking to redesign your course with learning experiences aimed at improving the critical thinking abilities of your students, this article is a good start. The authors write, "In previous works we developed and assessed a teaching program with which we aimed to improve the fundamental skills of critical thinking. The results obtained were positive, but modest. After analyzing the limitations of the program we introduced certain modifications and assessed the new version. The changes involved designing the activities programmed by means of rubrics and making the students perform them with less direct orientation from the instructor. In sum specificity and initiative proved to be the key variables in the improved program, ARDESOS v.2. The data collected pointed to a significant improvement of the new version over the old one in the following aspects: a) version 2 improved all the fundamental dimensions, mainly in the pre- and post-test measurements, to a significant extent; b) the effect size was significantly higher, and finally c) these improvements in the program elicited better performance. Accordingly, an improvement in critical thinking can be achieved via an instruction design that attends to the factors that really induce change. Currently, these results have allowed us to successfully add a new improvement to the instruction, which we have re-evaluated." You can read more here.

STUDENT RETENTION TAKES A VILLAGE
In the research article Promoting Persistence and Success of Underrepresented Students: Lessons for Teaching and Learning by Kinzie, Gonyea, Shoup, and Kuh, the authors note that new students tend to benefit from early interventions and sustained attention during the first year in terms of their academic performance. They go on to say that it is wise to send clear messages to students through precollege mentoring programs and sustained interactions with faculty and staff through out the first year about the value of engagement and what students who succeed do on this particular campus. All educators need to coach students in the development of expected study habits. Experiences early in the first year set in place patterns of behavior that will endure over students' years in college. Many of you have spoken to me about the problem of not having students come to your office for advice. This article suggests that we build in advising and teaching study skills as part of our class time. Offering general advising tips at the beginning and end of each class can have a profound impact on student persistence and retention. You can find the complete article here or in New Directions for Teaching and Learning (#115) fall 2008 which includes other articles about student retention.

HOW DOES YOUR TEACHING TOOLKIT LOOK
Professional development opportunities for October include today's Blackboard Series and next Thursday's Active Learning and Engagement workshop. Yesterday's Mid-Day Musings gathering was filled with lively discussion on the topic of civility. Using several recent articles about the topic, which is trending nationally, helped to set the tone for our local discussion. Turning our own experiences into teachable opportunities was one of the outcomes that the participants seemed to rally around. Many of the participants discussed how they use the topic of civility in their classes in hopes of helping their students become critical thinkers and active participants in the community. One of the best active learning methods is the use of debate to expose your students to complex issues. There are still a few spots for today's Blackboard session and registration is ongoing for the workshop on October 30. All of these events are sponsored by the Teaching+Learning Center.

ADDING PATHWAYS FOR COMPLETION
Have you heard about the Ability to Benefit rule? It allowed students who lacked either a high school diploma or its equivalent (usually a GED) to get into college if they could demonstrate the ability to benefit through a test score. But the rule was repealed by the U.S. Congress. Now, there is a move to bring it back. Matt Read's blog which appears on the Inside Higher Ed website provides more details about this additional pathway.