If you are an international faculty member, you face challenges in teaching beyond those of other faculty members. Challenges in Teaching offers some suggestions for overcoming those hurdles, gathered from your peers.

Jaesoon An, Ph.D. | Center for Teaching and Learning | UNC Charlotte

Social networking is an increasing trend among students. However, should social networks be viewed as another means of communicating with students? Where do you set the boundaries for using tools such as Facebook as a means for engaging with students? Is Facebook the new classroom commons? Social networking will continue to increase in popularity, but how we incorporate it with our professional and personal lives can overlap.

Melanie

Melanie Smith | Center for Teaching and Learning | UNC Charlotte

The Google Docs development team has been working on several enhancements to make the tool more useful for students:

1. Equation editor: for completing problem sets online, writing papers that include equations, taking notes in class, or answering questions using Google Docs.
2. Superscripts and subscripts: for expressing chemical compounds or algebraic expressions.
3. Integrated translation features: for translating either a single word or an entire document.
4. Conducting surveys: for making it easy to show participants only those questions that are relevant to them, there is now a "Go to page based on answer" option in Google forms.
5. Different bulleting styles for lists: for outlining term papers in a more customizable way.
6. Printing footnotes and endnotes: for a cleaner-looking paper.

Many UNC Charlotte faculty and students have been using Google Docs as a collaborative tool.  Some universities have already integrated Google Docs into their university systems (i.e., as a replacement to or supplement to MS Office).  As Google keeps adding features, it really just keeps getting better and better.  In my experience, it can be used as a replacement to MS Word in about 95% of all cases.  Word does formatting better for publication purposes, but for collaboration purposes, Google Docs is without peer.

Garvey

J. Garvey Pyke, Ed.D. | Center for Teaching and Learning | UNC Charlotte

In response to a recent post about grading policies, Dr. Maria Yon (College of Education and the Center's Faculty Fellow) posted this as a reply:

Student response system, commonly referred to as clicker, can be an effective tool for engaging students and assessing learning, especially for large classes. This article on Successful Clicker Standardization gives insights on how to select and standardize a good Clicker system campus-wide based on the experiences of four universities.

Jaesoon An, Ph.D. | Center for Teaching and Learning | UNC Charlotte

Want to know what students think of technology infused learning environments? Malcolm Brown, Director of Academic Computing at Dartmouth College, conducted a focus-group to gather data about student perspectives on technology integration. The focus-group was comprised of 14 college students from “geographically distributed” regions. Students made the following observations:

• technology should not separate the student from instructor or peers,
• value is added by contact and mentoring from instructors,
• learning precedes technology, and
• connections should be made to justify the use of technology.

According to the students, “What distinguishes a good use of technology is when the technology is well integrated with real-time, personal interactions and is not a replacement for them.” You are encouraged to read the full article, Learning and Technology — “In That Order.”

Melanie

Melanie Smith | Center for Teaching and Learning | UNC Charlotte

Michelle Everson from the University of Minnesota has been teaching online for five years and has compiled her 10 lessons learned from her experiences.  She explains each one fully, but I will repost the list itself here:

1. Teaching online is a lot of work.
2. Students appreciate regular communication and timely feedback on their progress.
3. Many great tools exist but aren't always necessary.
4. Assignments and activities take more time online.
5. Students need extrinsic motivation.
6. Give deadlines.
7. Online courses are not right for all students.
8. Ask students what works and what doesn't.
9. Share ideas, collaborate, and commiserate about the online teaching experience.
10. Teaching online can inform what you do in the classroom if you have opportunities to teach both online and classroom-based courses.

Which of these mesh with your own experiences?  I hear a lot about items 1 and 4 when meeting with different people, and Everson provides some excellent advice for dealing with each of these and more.  Very constructive, very helpful.  Really, it is worth reading her discussion of each one.  I may pull out each item as its own blog post in the future.

Garvey

J. Garvey Pyke, Ed.D. | Center for Teaching and Learning | UNC Charlotte

Are you (and your students!) tired of the same old text-heavy PowerPoint presentations? Looking for some inspiration to create more engaging PowerPoints?

Here's a slide show by Sidney Eve Matrix, Queen's University, that uses great visuals with limited text to explain a timely topic -- clickers in the classroom. Thanks to Derek Bruff for the link.

Sam Eneman
Center for Teaching & Learning

While I personally agree with the "no significant difference" side of things, I still like reading about comparison studies (i.e., which show such-and-such is "better" than so-and-so).  The real value, to me, is when the studies point to success factors as to why one medium or delivery style is (supposedly) superior to another.

A new study from South Texas College "showed that...82 percent of students of hybrid courses were successful, compared to 72 percent of classroom courses and 60 percent of distance courses."  The caveat: "When broken down by individual instructor, the data show no difference in the outcomes across the different delivery methods..." [OK, OK, I already covered that in paragraph 1--JGP.]

The article shows several interesting findings and/or areas for further study regarding hybrids:

• Students and instructors are more accountable to one another, and students benefit from being able to talk to their professors in person.

• How well students perform in a given course-delivery system is almost certainly tied to their individual needs.

• Students who require more prodding in order to get the work done probably perform better with the increased sense of accountability that comes with time in the classroom.

• Students who are more self-motivated, or those whose personal obligations cause them to benefit from maximum flexibility, might do best in courses that are exclusively online.

• The study assessed only how well students did in the courses, not how much they learned, which is much harder to determine.

• South Texas’ preliminary research into the question of hybrid outcomes merely satisfied the college’s question of whether it was an acceptable alternative to traditional and Web-only courses; whether it turns out the be the preferable alternative will be a question for subsequent studies to answer.

Garvey

J. Garvey Pyke, Ed.D. | Center for Teaching and Learning | UNC Charlotte

Are you interested in improving your course? Then take a look at these five principles of successful course redesign and accompanying examples of real projects provided by National Center for Academic Transformation (NCAT.)

Jaesoon An, Ph.D. | Center for Teaching and Learning | UNC Charlotte