CREATING HIGH-QUALITY ONLINE COURSES
As many of you know, the eLearning program at BRCC was relaunched about two years ago. The new program guidelines called for quality and consistency based on a number of national benchmarks. Since the fastest growing part of most colleges is their online course offerings, we wanted to make sure that BRCC stood out by offering our students the best academic experience delivered in an electronic format. By moving to a approval system that certifies our courses and our instructors, we have been able to quickly build an eLearning presence approaching 80 classes. Many of you have participated in the eLearning institutes (the next opportunity will be offered in spring 2015) and have been certified to teach. We have undergirded that process with numerous professional development workshops offered through the Teaching+Learning Center. So we read with a lot of interest the recent column written by Jennifer Patterson Lorenzetti who offers us four factors in high-quality online classes as noted by Joseph McClary. He writes, "Distance learning is here to stay. Educational institutions should have a vision for what type of distance learning programs they will implement and the standards they will hold to. Institutions will master distance learning, or in some cases, distance learning trends and demands will master the school.” We are happy to say that you will find that all of the elements mentioned in this article are present in our eLearning program but we are not standing still and will continue to improve our processes.


IMPROVING RETENTION IN ONLINE COURSES
Drs. Claire Wladis, Katherine Wladis, and Alyse C. Hachey have written a great research paper that allows us to understand why many of our students are doing so poorly in online classes versus their counterparts in the face-to-face offerings. While the authors acknowledge that there is much research about the disparity, their new focus allows us to determine some of the possible causes. Looking at student's reasons for enrolling in online classes produced some surprising results. They found that the student's reason for taking the course, either as an elective or required, had a lot to do with their performance and effort. They write, "This research suggests that online course retention rates can be improved by providing extra support targeted specifically to lower level courses which are typically taken as electives or to satisfy distributional requirements. Such support could include self-assessment and orientation tools which could be used to help students assess their perceptions and preparedness for the course. At the course level, E-advisors could provide an early mechanism for academic counseling, additional technical support staff could assist students with technical difficulties specific to the online environment, and peer tutors could assist students with the course content." You can read more by logging onto the Blackboard Teaching and Learning Faculty Development Community where you will find the paper (Advising for Online Course Retention) in the Online Resource Library in the Advising folder.

UNDERSTANDING MOTIVATION CAN PRODUCE STUDENT SUCCESS
Motivation is a powerful learning tool. If we as teachers, seek to meet the needs of our students, then discovering their motivation is paramount. Cengage Learning recently conducted a survey looking for the motivation that drives non-traditional or adult students back to college. They were able to gather 2,600 responses from students who are 25 years or older. While there are many of the responses you would expect like retraining for a new job or finishing what they started in their teen years, some of the responses are surprising. Take a look at the top ten reasons and see if these resonate with your adult students the next time you are meeting with them about their schedule or another academic matter.

SUMMER OPPORTUNITY FOR FACULTY DEVELOPMENT
If you are looking to spend some time this summer enhancing your teaching toolkit, the Teaching+Learning Center will be hosting a Faculty Learning Community (FLC). The topic will include strategies to strengthen students' self-awareness and learning skills. We will meet five times at a date and time to be determined by the FLC membership and will use Dr. Linda Nilson's book Creating Self-Regulated Learners (which will be provided by the Teaching+Learning Center). If you are interested in participating or need additional information, please send an email to pourciaut@mybrcc.edu.

DISRUPTING OURSELVES: THE PROBLEM OF LEARNING IN HIGHER ED

Dr. Randy Bass has written a thought provoking post about the intersection of what we know about teaching and the application of that knowledge to enhance learning. A growing appreciation for the porous boundaries between the classroom and life experience, along with the power of social learning, authentic audiences, and integrative contexts, has created not only promising changes in learning but also disruptive moments in teaching. Our understanding of learning has expanded at a rate that has far outpaced our conceptions of teaching. This tension between an expansion of learning and the limits of our structures is intrinsic to the learning paradigm. Read the entire post here.

WHERE IS ONLINE EDUCATION HEADING

Yoram Neumann and Edith Neumann tell us what we have learned about online education over the past few decades. In its infancy, online learning was viewed as a more accessible alternative for students unable to commit to the traditional higher education path. But in recent years online education has been gaining more acceptance. The most recent U.S. Department of Education data from fall 2014 indicate that 5.8 million students took at least one online course, with 2.85 million of them studying exclusively online. After thousands of online launches and millions of students, it is important to assess the advancement made in online learning as we look to further enhance online learning for future students. Read more here.

BIG CHANGES FOR ONLINE LEARNING AT BRCC
Those involved in online or eLearning at BRCC know that there is change on the horizon. With a renewed commitment to establishing an eLearning program of excellence, we have recently hired Susan Moak Nealy to manage the eLearning Program at BRCC. Nealy was most recently interim department chair of business at BRCC, holds a MBA from Louisiana Tech University, and has been a faculty member here since 2006. In that time, she has taught a number of classes using the online delivery method and has received certification from the Quality Matters program. BRCC has recently migrated to Blackboard 9.1 and is implementing several new policies designed to enhance our student's learning experience in the online environment. Nealy joins the Office of Teaching and Learning, directed by Dr. Todd Pourciau, and has some exciting innovations planned for all involved in the eLearning program.

THE PLEASURE OF MOTIVATION

Research has shown that students remember things that matter to them. It is why education scientists encourage teachers to use examples and design learning experiences with real world applications. Discovering what interests your students is an important part of the initial engagement process and should begin on the first day of your course each semester or term. In 2009, Min Jeong Kang’s research team published a brain imaging study that confirmed the importance of a well known but often under-utilized condition for enhancing learning: curiosity. In Kang’s study, the participants guessed the answers to a set of trivia questions, were then shown the correct answers, and were tested one to two weeks later to see which answers they remembered best. These answers turned out to be the ones about which they had already known something, but had guessed wrong, so that they had been very curious to learn the right responses.It was precisely at the moment that the participants guessed incorrectly that their brain images showed the most activity in their caudate nucleu, a structure that plays a central role in the motivation to obtain rewards and the pleasure that comes along with them. Kang’s study showed that this structure also seems to be behind the intellectual pleasure we get from adding a new item to our store of knowledge.

BUT I AM A VISUAL LEARNER
While the learning objectives are the same for eLearning and traditional classes, we know that the delivery method can cause some students to encounter new problems. As the delivery method naturally favors students who self-identify as visual learners, there are a number of things that faculty should do to make the experience effective for all types of learners. A research article entitled Knowledge Construction in Online Learning by Shalni Gulati notes that learners should be reminded that they should explore various learning pathways. Faculty need to construct their learning experiences so that they are flexible and accessible, taking into account the learners personal learning interests and goals, the time they have for learning, their different learning preferences, and the learners’ personal and professional responsibilities outside the course. Gulati adds that faculty need to recognize the importance of personal control, emotions and emotional connection for participation in online discussions. Any online discussion strategies need to ensure the discussion tasks are relevant to learners with different professional needs. A pre-course induction may be necessary where learners can develop technical skills and practice online communication to openly discuss and challenge each other.

USING THE STUFF FROM LAST SEMESTER
James M. Lang has written a fascinating piece about his frustration with students who seem to use and dispose of the knowledge he is helping them to learn. He noticed this when he participated in a program that allows him to have the same set of students for two classes that follow each other in the academic sequence. He says, "For two years I taught in a special program in which the same cohort of students took two consecutive courses with me: freshman composition in the fall and introduction to literature in the spring. In the composition courses, I worked hard to help students move beyond the standard strategies they had learned in high school for writing introductory paragraphs: Start with a broad statement about life and narrow down to a specific topic." In their book, How Learning Works: Seven Research-Based Principles for Smart Teaching, Susan Ambrose and her co-authors label the cognitive activity of applying learned material from one course to another and beyond as "far transfer." They note that it might be the most fundamental expectation faculty have for students. "Far transfer is, arguably," they point out, "the central goal of education: We want our students to be able to apply what they learn beyond the classroom."

WORDLE TIPS
Rebecca Wesley, Clinical Coordinator and Instructor in our Veterinary Technology program, says that she and her students love using Wordle in the classroom. I have heard from a few of you since talking about that online resource at Vice Chancellor Cross's fall semester kickoff meeting. Wordle does not provide a way to save your projects but there are ways around that. Of course you can print it but you may also want an electronic copy. The best way to create your file is to use this technique. In Windows you can always hit the Print Screen button. Next open up Word, Open Office, or graphics program such as Paint and paste it in. Use the cropping tool in that program to get what you want. In Windows 7 you may wish to use the Snip It Tool which gives you a lot more options including the ability to save as an image and crop. Send me some of your favorites and I will post them to the blog.

CONFERENCE OPPORTUNITIES
The call for proposals is now out for the 5th annual conference on Higher Education Pedagogy to be held at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, VA on February 6-8, 2013. Proposals are due by October 8, 2012. The conference showcases the best pedagogical practice and research in higher education today. Sessions address disciplinary and interdisciplinary instructional strategies, outcomes, and research. Registration is now open for the Designing and Improving an Effective Online Science Course annual conference to be held November 1 and 2, 2012 at Parkland College in Champaign, IL. This conference will allow for the sharing of ideas, experiences, and research on online education in the fields of physics, chemistry, astronomy, earth science, and biology, focusing on courses which are both 100% online and hybrid. The goals are to promote a high quality online science education and to improve student learning in the online environment. If you have taught online classes and have something to share, or are new to online delivery and need a few pointers, this workshop is for you. 

YOUR OPINION MATTERS
If you have not completed the Teaching+Learning Center's needs assessment survey, I urge you to take it now. The survey is short but will provide valuable information as we move to begin programming for the coming months.

SHIFTING THE TEACHING PARADIGM March is coming in like a bear with the powerful professional development workshop Shifting the Teaching Paradigm to be facilitated by Dr. Jim Johnston on Friday, March 7 in the Dumas Room. This workshop is being co-sponsored by the Teaching+Learning Center and Cengage Learning TeamUp Faculty programs. The half day workshop begins with registration at 12:00 noon, followed by the first session at 12:25 and concludes with a question and answer dialogue that ends at 3:30 PM. In between, you can sign up to attend such dynamic sessions as What You See is What You Get: the Power of First Impressions (the most powerful three minutes of your class), Motivation Matters: Control the ANT Population and Improve Retention/Academic Success, and Reaching Higher Levels of Thinking and Application of Knowledge through Group Learning Activities. Dr. Johnston is Director of TRIO Student Support Services at Harding University in Arkansas.There will be breaks and snacks provided throughout the half day. Participants can register for individual sessions or opt to attend the entire workshop. If you are committed to improving student success at BRCC, you do not want to miss this workshop.

ANNUAL GIVING PITCH By now I am sure you have heard that BRCC has kicked off the internal portion of our Annual Giving campaign. I want to urge you to participate in this worthy endeavor aimed at helping to change lives. If you would like to direct your donation to an area that will directly benefit the teaching faculty at BRCC, I encourage you to indicate that your contribution be placed in the Teaching+Learning Center's Foundation account. This fund is targeted towards faculty development by providing travel funding to those of us who have proposals accepted for presentation at professional organizations focused on the scholarship of teaching and learning. One of the best ways to enhance your teaching toolkit it to try new active learning methods and use your classroom as a living laboratory. Your findings as an active researcher are important to the study of the scholarship of teaching and learning in the various disciplines. In addition, interacting with colleagues from around the world allows you to bring that expertise back to our campus. Please give to the Annual Giving campaign and if you are inclined, I strongly encourage you to direct your funds to the Teaching+Learning Center.

WHAT DOES AN ONLINE STUDENT LOOK LIKE Matt Reed raises an interesting question in his article What's An Online Student? He admits that he is "not entirely sure what an online student is" because of the multiple ways that students can engage with learning at college. He writes, "The sheer heterogeneity of ways that students engage with online learning is making it harder to generalize. We have far students who mix and match than we have students who go entirely online. That makes it hard to answer a question like 'how many online students do you have?' It also makes it difficult to know just how much to scale certain online student services; many of the students who mix and match transact certain kinds of business on the days they’re on campus. And some students who do most of their coursework on campus would greatly prefer to address the bureaucratic stuff online."

ENDING WITH A BANG
Here we are at the end of another semester in the week of final exams. For some of us, it is our very first semester teaching. For others it is something we feel we have always done. So what do we do at the end of the semester that will help us to improve our teaching and in turn increase our student's learning in the next semester. As Dr. Margaret Walsh pointed out in her terrific article from the past, "The ending of a course deserves greater attention than it typically receives. While we have thoroughly ritualized the start of a new semester often somewhere between weeks 11 and 14, what seemed like reasonable plans are regretfully sidelined and we launch into catch-up overdrive." She offers this suggestion among a number of other useful tips: On the last day of class, hand out a list of suggested readings from your own bookshelf, along with a brief commentary on why you’re recommending them. Dr. Maryellen Weimer also shares some of her wisdom about the end of the semester. She urges "everyone to write about the courses that have just ended. What do you think you will remember about them in five years? Are there students you will remember? Others you hope to forget? What were the best and worst moments in those courses? How did your relationship with each class begin, evolve and end? What was new, different and exciting about the content? Did you teach well? Did students learn well? If you could change one thing about your teaching and their learning next semester, what would it be?"

COURSE REDESIGN ON TAP
The breaks between our semesters are a perfect time for course redesign. I have already pulled my journal entries made throughout the semester (usually right after class had ended) that deal with this issue. I am using those notes to redesign my class in the hopes that the new approaches and learning experiences will create a more fertile learning environment for my students. I recently read an interesting article related to this topic. It focused more on gateway courses that have been shown to give students the most problems. The article suggests that peer instruction may be just the active learning method that turns the light on for our students in those gateway courses. The research has shown that peer instruction is a great teaching method to use in larger classes. The article is very well done and includes videos and lists the research on this topic. If you are beginning to work on your course redesign, you should take a look at the article. The information on how to get started with peer instruction is very useful. Also, feel free to reach out to me throughout the semester break if you are looking for advice or help in finding resources.

THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ONLINE
Dr. Michelle Miller, a professor of psychological sciences and co-director of the first-year learning program at Northern Arizona University, has a new book out about how to best use the online environment to improve learning. Her book Minds Online: Teaching Effectively With Technology, published this fall by Harvard University Press is highly recommended by many educationalists including James Lang. He says, "If you teach with technology in any form, at any level, I recommend you put this book at the top of your tottering pile of required reading on higher education. It’s an outstanding book that provides a road map for truly effective online teaching." He goes on to say that what distinguishes her book from much of the research available on teaching with technology, and pushes it beyond arguments about improving access, is her emphasis on the ways in which online teaching tools can actually improve learning for all students—not just those who have no access to traditional face-to-face classrooms. Online courses—or an online component of a traditional class—offer a way to "give students repeated, challenging practice with the concepts we want them to know and the skills we want them to master," Miller said. "When I started out as a teacher, we cognitive psychologists already knew that things like frequent quizzing were incredibly beneficial to learning. I was excited to apply these findings, but when I got into a real classroom environment I found that it was overwhelmingly difficult and time consuming to actually do so. In many traditional courses you also can’t do things like offer repeated quiz attempts with different questions, or adapt the quiz to the topics that individual students are having the most trouble with."

Have you ever considered teaching an online class? The eLearning Program at BRCC offers online and hybrid class delivery as options for our students. One of the next options could be a synchronous course taught live from wherever your internet, camera, headphones, and mic will allow you to broadcast. Is that something that excites or creates anxiety for you? Dr. Devoney Looser recently posted a very revealing essay on this topic. Initially she was very nervous about teaching online but a family situation challenged her to take another look at online teaching. She writes, "The stereotype that online instruction is less rigorous, or that students cannot be engaged in it with appropriate rigor, isn’t borne out by my experience. Anyone who’s taught an on-the-ground class has looked out into the classroom and seen boredom or disconnection. By comparison, my online students were choosing when to log on to do their work. They seemed very tuned in when they did. It’s possible I’m just not as skilled at recognizing online students merely going through the motions, but I found them, as a group, exceptionally dedicated, motivated, and talented." If you are interested in becoming certified to teach in the BRCC eLearning Program, contact Susan Nealy. You can continue reading Dr. Looser's post here.

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.

RETENTION, PROGRESSION AND THE TAKING OF ONLINE COURSES
As the amount of students taking an eLearning course at BRCC continues to grow, our focus on student success in courses offered online also grows. Scott James, Karen Swan and Cassandra Daston conducted some interesting research in the area of student success in face-to-face (f2f) and online classes. What they found was there really is no difference. Just as students experience success barriers in f2f classes, the same can happen in online classes. One of the more interesting findings is that older students typically have higher retention rates than younger students in the online environment. They conclude the article with the validation that online courses offer the best access to the widest number of students. You can read the entire article here.

MORE SUPPORT FOR STUDY GROUPS
By now we are used to hearing about issues related to student success and persistence. We also know that it is rarely one issue that causes a student to fail. Elizabeth J. Krumrei, Fred B. Newton, Eunhee Kim, and Dan Wilcox took a look at the various factors that can assist student success. Their findings are useful because they specifically sought to identify real solutions that could be implemented to help students succeed. They write, "An initial strategy is to help students increase opportunities for successful performance. Professionals can aid students in selecting courses in which success is probable. Second, finding role models in the domain where the student lacks efficacy is a helpful strategy for increasing self-efficacy. Students can be encouraged to observe peers who are performing successfully (this is where our Spring 2017 Student Success Initiative: Study Groups can play a big part). You can find more solutions in the full article here.

ARE YOUR READY FOR YOUR STUDENTS AND ARE THEY READY FOR YOU
I find it fascinating to look at lists and I can say with confidence that most of us do. If not, why would so many of the websites we browse provide lists of things like most viewed article, top story of the day, or other articles you might be interested in? The most read article from the Journal of College Student Retention: Research, Theory & Practice is "Are College Faculty and First-Generation, Low-Income Students Ready for Each Other?" Now I think we can all understand why it would be popular. Doesn't the title just draw you in wanting for more? So I did take a look at the article and found it to be useful. Three major findings that emerged from the study are: (a) faculty beliefs about student readiness impact the degree to which faculty serve as cultural agents for First-Generation Low-Income (FGLI) students, (b) faculty who serve as cultural agents enact particular practices and dispositions that enable students to become more academically prepared, and (c) FGLI students arrive at college with diverse forms of readiness that require varying forms of nurturing and support. Read the entire article here.

PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT OPPORTUNITY
Are you using the discussion board function on your Blackboard site? Do you receive angry emails for your students related to technology use in your courses? Have you ever wondered how you can increase your engagement by utilizing online resources? An answer of yes to any of these questions suggests that you should plan on attending the Transforming the Challenging Online Students into a Master Student webinar. It is being held in the Teaching+Learning Center on Thursday, February 6 from noon until 1:00 PM. Shawn Orr will deliver an informative webinar utilizing her more than 18 years of experience as a professor, department chair, adviser and dean. Orr also received the 2010 Post-Secondary Teacher of the Year for the Ohio Business and Technology Teacher Association and the 2011 North Central Educators Association Educator of the Year. She hold a Master's degree with a curriculum development specialty. Come and learn from her experience and the ideas and input from your faculty colleagues. You can register now for the faculty professional development webinar sponsored by the Teaching+Learning Center.

USING TECHNOLOGY TO ENHANCE LEARNING
We tweeted earlier about an article by Rob Kelly that explains how to create a learner-friendly online presence for your classes. Kelly points to Cynthia Schmitt, senior director of continuing education at Florida Institute of Technology, as a good example. According to the article, Schmitt tries to make the online learning experience comfortable and efficient for students. I'll share one of her tips here. "One way to increase the students’ comfort in the online classroom is to conduct synchronous sessions." Each unit in Schmitt’s course includes one-hour synchronous sessions. "Students select the time for these sessions at the beginning of the course and meet with the instructor in groups of 10 to 12 using Adobe Connect, which enables them to see the instructor on camera and hear her or his voice. (Adobe Connect has the capability to allow students to use video and voice as well, but students in remote areas typically do not use these features because of bandwidth limitations and instead communicate via text chat.) Remember that Susan Nealy, eLearning Program Manager is ready and willing to help you enhance your online presence.

TEACH FOR THE BRAIN
Terry Doyle and Todd Zakrajsek have put out a great little book entitled The New Science of Learning: How to Learn in Harmony with Your Brain. I have actually started using some of the information from the book to improve my teaching and my students learning in my CSSK classes. In the chapter on memory, Doyle and Zakrajsek point out that "when learning something new, it helps to be interested in it, see a value to it, pay a lot of attention to it, and practice it a lot. The human brain is wired to more easily learn things that are important, and for the most part, what's important is also interesting." They recommend distributed practice to take advantage of this scientific breakthrough. By repeating important information numerous times over the course of your semester, your students are more likely to make the links to memory stronger which will allow them to retrieve it more easily. Repeated exposure to the new knowledge is also enhanced by making your students use it often. If you want to read more from this terrific book, the BRCC Library does own a copy (LB1134 .D68 2013).

FACULTY DEVELOPMENT OPPORTUNITIES
There are two additional professional development opportunities open to all BRCC faculty. The first occurs on October 8 and continues our Blackboard Series. This interactive workshop will focus on the Gradebook function and there will be a session for beginners and for more advanced users. The two sessions will begin at 3:00 and 4:00 PM that day. On October 10 the Teaching+Learning Center will present a workshop about test preparation. It will focus on the areas of alignment, rigor, and reliability. You will also learn about using a blueprint to build the perfect test. This workshop will be held in 311 Magnolia and begin at 3:00 PM. Look for registration information in your email-box in the very near future but save the dates now.

THE PLIGHT OF OUR ADJUNCT COLLEAGUES
The recent discussion about the effectiveness of adjunct faculty at our nation's colleges, reminded me of a study focused on this area. Although it was published in 2011, it bears a second glance. As the number of adjunct faculty continues to grow on campuses across the U.S., there is growing concern that due to a lack of training and/or time, most adjunct faculty are not using effective teaching methods. Roger Baldwin and Matthew Wawrzynski, two faculty at Michigan State, conducted the research and stressed in an interview that they fault the conditions part-time instructors work under, and not the instructors themselves, for their failure to use effective teaching methods more often. The researchers found that, compared with full-time adjuncts or tenured or tenure-track faculty, part-time adjuncts "are less likely to use learning-centered strategies such as essay exams, term research papers, multiple drafts of written work, oral presentations, group projects, or student evaluations of each others' work," the paper says. Such learning-centered practices are generally regarded by practitioners as some of the most effective means of teaching students and are certainly what the Division of Innovative Learning and Academic Support is suggesting all of our faculty use in their courses.

FREE YOUR MIND ONLINE
Audrey Heinesen has written a fascinating opinion piece about the need for more faculty who are willing to teach using the online course delivery method. She notes, "Online instructors can revel in a newfound ability to defy some of the most fundamental aspects of a typical classroom. The whiteboard is no longer erased at the end of the day. Your best moments reach beyond students in your physical presence. Your teaching can be set free in your online classroom. You’re free to structure content in new ways to reach your students. Try different types of content and multimodal teaching strategies that might not work in a traditional setting. Experiment with new course ideas that are harder to champion in more structured environments. Backward design, flipped classroom, video-based instruction? Instructors can return to a creative place by developing new ideas around curriculum and teaching." As we continue to expand our eLearning offerings, we are certainly looking to add to the number of faculty who are certified to teach using the online delivery method. Contact your dean or department chair if you are interested in receiving the training to teach for our eLearning department.

STOPPING BULIMIC LEARNING
One of the ideas recently discussed at the Common Reader Faculty Learning Community was the topic of comprehensive testing. The idea is to have each test that you give in your class not only build on the previous test but actually include material that should have been learned before. Craig Nelson, a biology instructor from Indiana, notes that comprehensive tests help us to avoid creating bulimic learners. He explains that this is the student who learns things for the test and then purges the information, thinking they will never have to use it again. Research shows however that continued interaction with content increases the chances that it will be remembered and can be applied subsequently. An article in the August/September 2013 issue of The Teaching Professor also supports this claim. Preparing for Comprehensive Finals contains a number of great suggestions that we can use to help our students prepare for their encounter with this type of assessment.

ARE YOU STRESSED OUT?
Instructors who regularly use stress-reducing strategies increase their abilities to cope with the demands of the career and are positioned to do a better job educating students, according to results from a program administered by the University of Virginia’s Curry School of Education. Want to learn more? Register for the upcoming professional development session sponsored by the Center for Teaching+Learning Enhancement. You can view other professional development opportunities here.

MOVING TO HAPPINESS
It’s helpful to know that the brain is plastic and can adapt to challenges. And when it comes to learning new things, we can build up mental resources through intentional effort. People can get better at realizing self-regulation, executive functions, a sense of perspective or meaning, positive emotions like gratitude, a sense of strength and the feeling of being cared about. “Any kind of mental activity, including experiences, entails underlying neural activity,” said Rick Hanson, a psychologist and senior fellow at the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley, at a Learning & the Brain conference. He has developed practices to help people build up their mental capacity for happiness by creating patterns of neural activity that with time and repetition become neural pathways. Read the entire article here.

KEEPING THE HUMAN ASPECT IN ONLINE COURSES

“Wow. I always thought my online instructors were computers.” An online student shared this comment with his instructor after receiving an email from her that included feedback on an assignment. This story, shared with me by the student’s instructor several years ago, resonates with me on an emotional level each time I reference it. It motivates me to ensure online instructors understand how vital their authentic, human presence is to their students, and it conveys how deeply meaningful online classes can be when they are facilitated and designed with a focus on the student experience. To continue reading Michelle Pacansky-Brock's post click here.

PEER FEEDBACK IS A TWO WAY STREET
If you were ever dissatisfied with the quality of peer feedback in your classes, Christina Moore's article can definitely help you and, most importantly, help your students offer and receive better feedback from their colleagues.She writes, "I started teaching students that peer review is a two-way street. Getting useful feedback depends on how students frame their requests for it. Developing this skill not only teaches students how to receive effective feedback, but also gets them in the habit of reflecting on and analyzing their work."

MAKING LEARNING RELEVANT
Are you considering how you can create opportunities for students to apply course content outside the classroom? The IDEA Center has a great paper on this topic. Here is a brief excerpt. Although there are many examples in academia, nursing education offers one of the clearest examples of applying course content outside the classroom. Learning content in the classroom is supplemented with field-based application, in some cases, from the very first courses in a nursing program. Nursing students complete many hours working in hospitals alongside licensed nurses to apply their learning and sharpen their skills. And it doesn’t take a nurse educator to understand that this learning outside the classroom is vital to a nursing student’s education. No one would want to be treated by a nurse that only had classroom experience!

CREATING ENGAGEMENT OPPORTUNITIES ONLINE
Creating online courses doesn’t end at uploading videos to your site and getting enrollments. As an online educator, you need to ensure that your students are actively participating in your course and getting real value out of it. This will pay off in the long run as people come to recognize your course as the most valuable in the market. In this post, Dr. Eileen McGurty, an expert in online education, shares her strategies for boosting participation in online courses.

WHY ARE YOU SITTING ON THAT SIDE
Looking for a good active learning method to kick off the second part of your semester? Forced debate is a great way to focus on critical thinking, allow your students to practice their communication skills, and gauge where the class is in terms of learning. To get started, identify an issue about which there are two clearly defined and opposed positions, and let students know one class in advance that they will be required to select a side and defend it. On the discussion day, divide the room physically into two sides and ask the students to sit on one side or the other. You should leave space in the middle for undecided students who, however, have to move to one side or the other before the class has ended. In fact, any student who changes their mind can move during the class: from one side to the other, from one side to the center, and back again. You can, of course, begin forced debates with a writing exercise, asking students to write a one‐paragraph explanation of why they are sitting on a certain side. Opening a forced debate is the easiest question you’ll ask all year: “Why are you sitting on that side?” Ask a handful of students on one side to respond to that question; by the time they are finished, the students on the other side are frantic to refute the points they are hearing. The physical division of the classroom facilitates the discussion as well, since whenever someone moves, you can pause and ask them why; it also helps the students see that others are changing their minds as a result of the discussion, as they learn from their peers. It is recommended that you use this learning experience at least once a semester in every class you teach. You can find more learning experiences like this one in the Active Learning Manual which is available on the Canvas site under Teaching and Learning Faculty Development under the Modules file.

KEEPING THEM ENGAGED IN AN ONLINE COURSE
Dr. Paula Bigatel, an instructional designer and instructor at Penn State University’s World Campus, has some good information for those of us teaching in the online environment. She writes, "During the past year and a half, our faculty development unit has been gathering data from students about how engaged they felt in their online courses. We wanted to use this data to develop a variety of strategies for faculty to use to better engage their students. Research provides evidence for the connection between higher student engagement and persistence and retention in online programs. We gained valuable insights from students when we asked: Define what it means to you to be engaged in a course." Read the full article here.

I WASN'T IN CLASS BECAUSE I GOT EVICTED
When a low-income parent gets evicted, what happens? Matthew Desmond’s new book, Evicted, looks closely at what happens to a series of low-income people, mostly parents, in Milwaukee. It should be required reading for anyone who works at a community college or a public school in a low-income area. Desmond insinuated himself into the lives of dozens of people in the Milwaukee area at the onset of the Great Recession, and followed their lives closely for years. The book is written mostly as a series of character-driven vignettes, rather than as academic sociology, though he connects the dots in passing and at the end. Continue reading Matt Reed's post here.

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.

Don't Worry, We Will Get Through This Together

The move to digital delivery has gotten us to this point and we can see the final exam period at the end of the tunnel. Now the real work begins. How do we take the classes that we taught onsite, that were then altered for distance learning, and create a robust, engaging, and interactive elearning course that will provide the deep learning our students need to compete in the new career landscape (Maloney and Kim do a good job of explaining the various stages of where higher ed finds itself). Recent research indicates that a well designed online course can have the same or better completion and retention rates as an onsite class. Another benefit of our current situation is that as our students become better at navigating online and hybrid classes, the larger their skill set becomes in tech literacy, one of the key abilities employers are looking for in new hires. We are certainly not alone in this transition but luckily we have a strong history of providing the training and support needed to create elearning courses of excellence. As we prepare for the summer semester, the eLearning Program will be offering a Training Institute Bootcamp. As in the past, the eLearning Training Institute will be conducted fully online. New for this next iteration is training that will combine what is needed to teach either online, hybrid or both. This multimodal training will essentially set us up for whatever comes next. Any faculty who plan to teach in the summer semester that are not currently certified to teach eLearning courses should notify their department chairs that they would like to participate in the Training Institute Bootcamp. For those looking to begin teaching eLearning courses in the fall, there will be another Training Institute in the summer. For those looking for resources  now, check out the on-demand webinars on the Center for Teaching and Learning Enhancement events calendar.

From Science Daily: Study shows for first time that a free, online course can change students' mindsets towards their mathematical abilities, leading to increased academic achievement. A free 'massive, open, online course' (MOOC) designed to change students' attitudes towards mathematics makes them more engaged in class -- leading to significantly higher test scores. Published in open-access journal Frontiers in Education, these findings go against the discouraging results of previous studies. It is the first of its kind to show the impact of an online course in changing students' mindsets and beliefs about mathematics and their achievement, with the potential for more widespread dissemination. Continue reading here.

From Faculty Focus: So much of what determines the overall success or failure of a course takes place well in advance of the first day of class. It’s the thoughtful contemplation of your vision for the course — from what you want your students to learn, to selecting the instructional activities, assignments, and materials that will fuel that learning, to determining how you will measure learning outcomes

From Univ. of Washington's The Daily: With all the recent advancement in science, from virtual reality to genetic editing to artificial intelligence, one issue that still plagues society is how best to teach students how these things work. Dr. Carl Wieman, one of the world’s leading thinkers on science education, spoke to a sizeable crowd at Kane Hall on Thursday, April 26 to outline techniques for finding more effective teaching tactics. Wieman holds a joint appointment as professor of physics and of the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University. He won the Nobel Prize in 2001 for his research in atomic and optical physics. Wieman, 67, argued for a shift away from lecture-style teaching toward what he calls an “active learning” process where students spend more time working with their peers than being talked to by professors. In his physics classes, Wieman isn’t just teaching material, he is teaching his students to become physicists through classroom activities, tests, and critical reasoning.

From Education Week: Contrary to popular stereotypes, many young people are acutely concerned about online privacy, spending significant time managing how they present themselves on social media and worrying about what happens to the digital trails they leave behind. That's the takeaway, at least, from new research presented here Sunday at the annual conference of the American Association of Educational Research by Claire Fontaine. As part of a small study, Fontaine and colleagues interviewed 28 teens and young adults, ranging from 16 to 26 years old. All were low-income New Yorkers, all owned a smartphone or similar mobile device, and all regularly used at least one social media platform. 

Economist James D. Miller now thinks online education could increase demand for instructors, not destroy their jobs. He posted an op-ed in 2011 sounding the bell that online education would replace instructors with technology. He writes, "In 2011, I thought that much of online education was boring, but I expected content creators to eventually succeed in making their material interesting enough to hold the enthusiastic attention of most students. I further forgot to take into account that teachers have, for literally thousands of years, tried to make their lectures more interesting and yet, as most of us can attest, we have still not succeeded in consistently producing lectures that most students find more enjoyable." One of the benefits we are seeing at BRCC is that faculty teaching eLearning classes are using the tools and technology from their online classes and applying it to their face-to-face courses. Next week, there are two additional professional development opportunities. Join us on Monday at the N. Acadian Instructional Site to learn about some new active learning methods. On Tuesday, the session on overteaching is at the Frazier Instructional Site. You can learn more about both events and register here.

LOOKING FOWARD TO 2015
Welcome to the year 2015. I hope that you had an enjoyable holiday break. I spent part of mine reading Dean Man Walking by Sr. Helen Prejean and am looking forward to her visit to the Black Box Theatre at noon on January 16. The bi-annual faculty development workshop that kicks off each semester will be held on Wednesday, January 14 beginning at 8:30 a.m. in the Louisiana Building's boardroom. We will spend some time on purely pedagogical and assessment issues but you will also hear from the Academic Learning Center, as well as the eLearning and Innovative Learning programs. Looking forward to seeing you next Wednesday. I will be sharing the spring schedule of professional development opportunities with you on that day as well. Since they have proved to be so popular, we will again offer two faculty learning communities. One will use the classic What the Best College Teachers Do which we have used in three previous instances at BRCC. Check with your colleagues if you need to hear personal testimonials but I can tell you that the FLC format is a wonderful way to deeply explore teaching and learning and Dr. Ken Bain's book (which we will provide) is a great compass. In addition, I will offer a FLC using Inspired College Teaching: a Career-Long Resource for Professional Growth by Dr. Maryellen Weimer. This will be the first time I use this book but I also spent part of my break reading it and I have found it be very useful. You can sign up for either or both FLCs next Wednesday. Another new program that has proved popular is the Mid Day Musings held on the second and fourth Wednesdays at noon of each month. We meet in the faculty and staff lounge in the Bienvenue Building which makes it easy for you to grab lunch before joining the discussion. The topic for each session will be announced on the Monday preceding the gathering. If you have ideas for topics you would like to have discussed, feel free to send them to me (pourciaut@mybrcc.edu).

TEACHING WITHOUT WALLS
Even though distance ed, online or eLearning classes have been part of the educational landscape for quite a while, there are still some that have not fully embraced the delivery method. Michelle Pacansky-Brock has posted an interesting piece about what she describes as teaching without walls. She describes how faculty attitudes can be improved when it comes to online teaching. She writes, "Given the correlation between attitudes and behavior, we should be pondering the impact that skeptical faculty have on the future of high quality online learning.  Institutions should be making an effort to explore ways to improve faculty attitudes about online teaching and learning. To change a person's attitude, one must be engaged at both a cognitive and emotional level.  For example, if you wish to convince me that I need to exercise every day, you'll need to provide me with information, as well as engage me emotionally by making connections between this new behavior and the things that are important to me.  Just telling me to exercise because it is good for me will not be enough to sustain a change in my attitude." Read more here.

COMMUNITY COLLEGE FARM SYSTEM
I encourage yo to take a look at Dr. Matt Reid's community college-related column. He writes, "Western Governors’ University is sending applicants who aren’t quite academically ready to enroll to StraighterLine to get themselves up to speed before coming back to WGU. I won’t speak to that arrangement specifically, because I don’t know the details well enough. But the concept strikes me as making all kinds of sense. It’s setting up a farm system, like minor league baseball. In a farm system, players who aren’t yet ready for the big leagues aren’t just turned away; they’re sent to the minors to develop and prove themselves. The ones who succeed at the minor league level eventually make it to the bigs." Once you have read the column, give him some feedback int he comment section.

THE DAY THE WORLD STOPPED TURNING
For the past 11 years, we have commemorated of one of the most tragic of days in our nation's history. We join with people around the world who mourn the losses we incurred that horrific day. As educators it is certainly an opportunity to engage with our students about the events of that day. While it easy to imagine tackling this topic in history or political science, there are just as many opportunities to create a discussion in biology, English, or psychology. However you choose to approach it, I hope that you take some time today to honor the memories of all that lost their lives on September 11, 2001.

FREE WEBINAR OPPORTUNITY
There is still time to register for the free webinar How To Help Students Discover Their Ideal Learning Environment that will be held on Thursday, September 13 at 2:00PM. This webinar will focus on a new program being implemented at Colorado State University, called LifeTraits. This innovative 20-question assessment is designed to profile both students and staff to map their individual personalities to their ideal environments. Unlike other personality profiles, LifeTraits helps students express the needs and wants they seek in their surroundings and gives staff a vocabulary to aid in that approach.Some of the specific topics scheduled to be covered include: understanding which students are most likely to drop out and identifying behavior indicators prior to a stressful encounter; identifying the ideal environment/stressors based on student and staff personality; developing strategies for adapting to the environment to promote learning; and, using student personality data to better reach and communicate with students.

ONLINE COURSE REDESIGN TIPS
If you are looking to revise a current or create a new online course, we recommend Dr. Robin M. Smith's book Conquering the Content: A step-by-step guide to online course design (LB 1044.87 S617). Dr. Smith developed and directed the Center for Web-Based Learning at Southern Arkansas University Tech and was the first WebCT trainer in the South Central United States. Not only is her book filled with useful advice, she includes templates and forms that help guide you to create an online course of excellence. Each chapter begins with learning outcomes as she models the behavior she is championing. Levin, Cox, Cerven, and Haberler in their article The Recipe for Promising Practices in Community Colleges identify and examine the key practices of California community college programs that have demonstrated success in improving (or that have shown significant potential to improve) the achievement of underrepresented groups. They note, "Programs in our study were prepared to work with the students they served while addressing their surrounding social, geographic, and economic contexts. The college program with promising practices, often as a result of faculty behaviors, develops and maintains relationships with local communities, industries, institutions, and agencies."