Faculty Center: Comments

Comment on "Feedback Please!"

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 17:04:27 -0500

I feel for the ladies.

Without something specific, it's hard for students to know what to fix. Worse it gives students the ideas that grades are basically arbitrary. And ironically, that kind of thinking leads to practices like plagiarism.

From the instructor's side, there are benefits to being specific, one of which is that fewer students will "pester" you with grading questions. They will see the rationale and hopefully follow practice.

When I teaching and get a grading question it's almost always due to a genuine error on my part. And yes, a better rubric does result in more pleasing final projects to review (always a plus in my book).

- ELIZABETH J PYATT

Comment on "Open Educational Resources (OER)"

Sun, 30 Jan 2011 15:06:13 -0500

Hi Carol ... thanks for this great reflection. I am in the process of reviewing various OER initiatives and approaches and this is a great starting point. Would you be open to getting together in the coming weeks to discuss some of what you've learned in this space? I would really appreciate it!

- Cole W. Camplese

Comment on "Feedback Please!"

Wed, 21 Apr 2010 08:32:58 -0500

I do not defend bad teaching (and lack of learning?), but maybe its time to sit back and look at teaching from a business process point of view. We have a tenet in business that you have to do three things well to excel in business. 1) You need to define where you want to go (a strategy); 2) You need to measure progress towards that goal (good metrics); 3) You need to provide incentives for people to make progress towards the goal as measured by the metrics. Many call this the three legged stool that cannot stand without all three legs.

In higher education we have problems with all three legs. What is the strategic goal: higher enrollment, students with warm fuzzy feelings, higher-order learning? For anyone reading this, the goal is probably learning. but it is often not clear in many institutions regardless of what they say in their mission statement. If learning is the goal, then what is the metric. AACSB (accreditation for business) is just starting to require schools to assess and record what has been learned. Although these efforts are useful, they are mostly course or teacher based and not generalizable on a broader scale. What metrics are important to administrators? Here it is SRTEs or student approval of instructors and their courses. I'll just stop there on this subject or I am likely to rant.

What about incentives? SRTEs again. What do I get as a teacher for really preparing students for enriching lives. Admittedly there is an intrinsic value in doing so, but little financial benefit to me. So as part of the tenure process I am not all I can be because the risk of angering students is too great. After I get tenure, I will be able to take more risks, but will I be burned out by then?

If we really want to foster learning, we as an institution have to find some better way to reward actual learning by students, certainly for the teachers and possibly for the students as well. Learning is its own reward, but it sometimes doesn't pay the bills.

I guess this is a long winded way to say that it isn't always the individual that is the root cause of bad teaching. Sometimes its the system.

- PETER SWAN

Comment on "Blog vs. ePortfolio Consideration"

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 11:06:07 -0500

Using entries to post specific assignments, iterations, reflections, makes sense. You can pull these together using a category or tag, but as you describe here, Carol, creating a page with links to the specific entries allows the students to place the entries in context and provide a layer of meta-reflection.

There is an experimental feature of blogs@psu that aids in this.

http://blogs.tlt.psu.edu/projects/bloglab/2009/12/outcomes.html

I would be curious to hear if you think this would be useful and what we could do to make it more useful.

- Brad Kozlek

Comment on "Blog vs. ePortfolio Consideration"

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 09:04:48 -0500

Thanks for sharing Carol.

We are starting to look at similar issues here. I had a similar conversation with a few faculty members here. We decided to use blogs if it was and iterative process and pages to highlight finished projects or important material.

I agree with you about spending more time to explore the design and logistics of the material.

- WAYNE E ANDERSON

Comment on "Blog vs. ePortfolio Consideration"

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 08:30:14 -0500

Nice post Carol. I will be curious to see how you evolve the pedagogical side of using blogs for ePortfolios. One of the great hurdles in learning the tool is that we loose sight of the intent of learning the tool in the first place. As an education major, I would have really liked to have had a blog type of ePortfolio to use when I was student teaching, simply to allow my academic adviser here at UP be able to interact with me more than once during the experience. I think that the real work of using blogs, particularly in education majors, is in making sure that students understand that this is both a working tool for them, and a portfolio of work that can reflect very positively on them and their experience.

- MARK THOMAS HECKEL