Spring 2014 Newsletter 2

LEARNERS

CFE on the Road Did You Know?

Visionary Status Hot Five Book Review

Center FOR Faculty Excellence

The Center for Faculty Excellence on the Road Professional development workshops at your place, at a time that works for you.

The new Center for Faculty Excellence will soon be “hitting the road” to bring faculty training to the colleges! CFE “Road Shows” can be customized for specific area needs, and CFE staff will come to your location to deliver the presentations during departmental meetings or other convenient times for faculty. Here are just some of the programs we have ready to roll: Creating the Learner-Centered Syllabus Participants in this workshop will receive informational handouts and sample syllabi to generate thoughts and questions about developing learner-centered syllabi.

Encouraging Students to Read Course Materials This workshop is designed to help equip you as an instructor with activities to support the development of critical reading skills within course materials.

Group Projects: Structure, Substance, and Slackers This session will provide a solid introduction to successful group projects.

Increase Student Engagement Using the Inverted Classroom Come to this workshop to learn what it means to “flip” either an entire course or individual assignments.

Integrating Course Design Components to Create Significant Learning Learn about integrated course design and how to use it for your courses.

Peer Assessment Join us to discuss how to teach students to be effective peer assessors.

Teaching Students to Reflect on Learning There is a good deal of evidence that students learn best when they are able to articulate what they have learned, how they learned it, and how new information connects to their prior knowledge. Join us in this discussion about teaching reflection.

Canvas 201 This presentation is designed for faculty who will be teaching online and/or building an online course in Canvas. It will cover select pedagogical aspects of teaching online as well as the basics of online course design. Faculty are asked to have completed Canvas 101 Open Lab Workshop prior to attending.

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Communicating for

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(Continued) Quality Matters in Online Courses!

This presentation introduces faculty to the Quality Matters rubric and process for building online and blended courses, describes the online course peer review process, as well as presents additional professional development opportunities for faculty.

Go Here to learn more about each of these workshops: http://www.bgsu.edu/cfe Contact Karen Meyers (meyersk@bgsu.edu) to schedule a CFE Road Show.

Not quite ready for prime time and coming soon . . .

Cool Tools in Canvas This presentation will introduce the Canvas LTIs (otherwise known as Learning Technology Integrations): a set of tools that extends the functions of the Canvas Learning Management System.

Did you know?

Handwritten Notes A recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education (March 28, 2014) cites new research on the subject of note taking in class. In an article slated to be published in Psychological Science entitled “The Pen is Mightier than the Keyboard: Advantages of Longhand over Laptop Note-taking” researchers Daniel M. Oppenheimer and Pam Mueller discuss their findings about the advantages of handwritten notes over typed. When students typed notes, they wrote more than their low-tech counterparts, but they tended to transcribe the lectures almost verbatim. While that sounds like a good strategy for note-taking, it turns out that the high-tech students were actually doing less processing of the information than those who hand wrote their notes. While both groups scored similarly on factual tests, the students who took

handwritten notes scored better on conceptual tests.

The researchers conclude that “While more notes are beneficial . . . if the notes are taken indiscriminately or by mindlessly transcribing content , as is more likely the case on a laptop, the benefit disappears.”

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The Center for Faculty Excellence on the Road

Visionary Status Derek Bok Derek Bok is a lawyer, an educator, the 300th Anniversary University Research Professor, University President Emeritus, and the faculty chair of the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations at Harvard University. He has been a professor of law at Harvard University and continues to teach at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. He also serves as chair of the board of the Spencer Foundation. In 1958, he taught law at Harvard and served as Dean of the law school from 1968 to 1971. He became Harvard’s 25th president from 1971 to 1991. In 2006 to 2007, Bok served as interim president of Harvard University, and became the only person in modern times to twice serve as Harvard president.

During his 20 year term as president, Bok restructured the University’s central administration and oversaw creation of a Core Curriculum that became the framework for undergraduate education at Harvard.

He advocated for an increase in the number of female undergraduates and supported equal-access and financial aid policies in admissions. He facilitated the establishment of academic programs and research centers addressing issues such as AIDS, energy and the environment, poverty, professional ethics, smoking, and international security. He was also a strong vocal advocate for student participation in public-service programs, so much so that by the end of his presidency, more than 60 percent of Harvard undergraduates were engaged in some form of public service. He established the Bok Center in 1975 (then called the Danforth Center for Teaching and Learning) to explore innovations in undergraduate teaching.

His current research interests include the state of higher education in America. He has written two books that examine his project on the adequacy of the U.S. government in coping with the nation’s domestic problems (The State of the Nation and The Trouble with Government). In addition to his most recent book, Higher Education in America, he has written six books on higher education: Our Underachieving Colleges, Universities in the Marketplace, The Shape of the River (with William G. Bowen), Universities and the Future of America, Higher Learning, and Beyond the Ivory Tower.

Bok had his Bachelor’s and law degrees from Stanford University and Harvard Law School respectively. He studied at the University of Paris’ Institute of Political Science as a Fulbright Scholar and earned an A.M. in economics from George Washington University.

Bok’s wife, the sociologist and philosopher Sissela Bok, née Myrdal, is also affiliated with Harvard, where she received her doctorate in 1970. They have two daughters and one son.

Below are examples of Bok’s quotes: • “If you think education is expensive, try ignorance” • “Ever since economists revealed how much universities contribute to economic growth, politicians have paid close attention to higher education” • “Freshly minted PhDs typically teach the way their favorite professors taught” • “Fewer than half of all university professors publish as much as one article per year” To read more about Bok, check out the following sites • http://www.harvard.edu/history/presidents/bok • http://www.hks.harvard.edu/about/faculty-staff- directory/derek-bok • http://bokcenter.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do • http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/d/derek_ bok.html • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derek_Bok

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Hot Five

In this issue we look at 5 hot apps for iPads and iPhones.

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Wi-Fi Finder This free app uses the GPS on your device to help you find nearby wi-fi hotspots, and it will filter results by the type of connection and location.

JotNot Pro This 99-cent app acts as a portable scanner. After you take a picture of the document you want, JotNot enhances the image and will even darken light text or fix contrast.

Mind Jet This app creates mind maps and allows you to use a variety of different shapes and colors, attach notes, and reorganize topics. This app sells for $7.99

History: Maps of the World This free app will allow you to study highresolution maps of the world from various historical periods.

About CultureGPS Lite This is a tool for the iPhone and iPod touch. It is based on Professor Geert Hofstede’s research on national cultures and allows the user to analyze visible behavior differences in intercultural encounters.

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Book Review Higher Education in America: Derek Bok (2012) In this comprehensive and meticulously researched tome, former President of Harvard University, Derek Bok, examines many of the current criticisms of the American system of higher education, including high costs, low graduation rates, bureaucratic governance systems, conflicting goals, and unmotivated students, and he does all this in an extremely thoughtful and balanced manner.

He looks at the criticisms from all sides, debunking some and validating others. He proposes no solutions until he has examined the issues in detail, articulating multiple perspectives clearly and objectively. This book is a model of how issues should be discussed in every arena, in measured tones, without shrillness or exaggeration, buttressed with research, and with cleareyed appreciation of the complexity of the topic.

Bok’s book is divided into five parts. The first examines the larger social context in which institutions of higher education operate. The second looks at undergraduate education, followed by sections on graduate education, professional education, and research.

In a particularly interesting section devoted to undergraduate education, Bok points out that the most common teaching method on college campuses today is still the lecture, “a method repeatedly shown to be one of the least effective means of developing higher-level thinking skills or helping students to achieve a deep comprehension of challenging subject matter.” He rejects arguments that faculty are not invested in teaching or that they concentrate on research to the detriment of teaching. Faculty continue to lecture, he says, because they are largely unaware of the extensive and unequivocal

research on teaching and learning that shows the superiority of active learning pedagogy. Research has consistently demonstrated that students learn better and retain what they’ve learned longer if they use class time to grapple with complex problems, work collaboratively in groups, are given feedback on their progress, and reflect on how and what they’ve learned. Bok discusses a number of simple and inexpensive ways to make learning more engaging for students, but he insists that making any changes to teaching should be accompanied by rigorous assessment. And he makes it clear that the assessment methods, if they are to be accepted by faculty, must be used to provide information to faculty about how they can improve and not used “for the purpose of imposing penalties or distributing rewards.”

Given the disconnect between research on pedagogy and the prevalence of lecture, Bok examines how teaching reform might be undertaken. He frets about the danger of governmental and accrediting bodies attempting to impose change and notes here and elsewhere in the book that unintended and negative consequences are very likely to result from coercion. Rather, he says, “The key to educational reform lies in gathering evidence that will convince the faculty that current teaching methods are not accomplishing the results that professors assume are taking place. Once that is acknowledged, the underlying values of the faculty will usually compel them to seek corrective action.”

In addition to offering careful suggestions on how to improve teaching, Bok also offers some thoughtful solutions for how to cut costs, govern more effectively, reform the curriculum, and help students stay in school and graduate on time.

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