On September 17, Dorothy Mollise (Student Academic Success and Retention) led an excellent Teaching Seminar on Learning Outcomes.  Her presentation was centered around two basic questions;

• What are learning outcomes?
• Why do we need them?

She explained that learning outcomes are tangible descriptions of what we expect students to know at the conclusion of a lesson (or course or program).  The important thing about this is that they are measurable and are directed toward student behavior, not instructor performance.  This significant shift in emphasis doesn’t consider what the instructor covers or does, only what the student learns.

Dorothy also stressed that learning outcomes should not only be in the syllabus, but also communicated every class period.

The reason we need learning outcomes is because they help us improve student learning by giving instructors a guideline for designing instruction, assessing student performance, and evaluating our performance.

We can determine if our learning outcomes are any good by asking if students will have the opportunity to practice and receive feedback, and if we can apply an appropriate assessment method to measure whether students have achieved them.

On September 22,Phil Carr (Archaeology) led a panel of faculty members in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Social Work in a Teaching Seminar on Teaching Social Sciences Online.  Phil, Roma Hanks (Sociology), Nicole Carr (Sociology), and Mark Moberg (Anthropology) each spoke about their experiences of building and teaching online courses, and while they all approached teaching online very differently, several of them said they wouldn’t want to go back to the traditional classroom.

Mark said that instead of speaking his lectures in the classroom, he simply types them out and makes the lecture available to his students as online text.  His approach was to inundate students with information.  He also doesn’t give exams, relying instead on papers and online discussions.

Roma tried service-learning and chat in the past, but neither seemed to go over very well with her students.  She has had success with group projects, and she loves the threaded discussions.  She gives students half credit for their first post and then the other half when they respond to someone else or refer to the readings.

Phil added that his favorite online activity is peer review.  He will take the student’s name off a paper and send it to another student for feedback.

Perhaps the best thing about the seminar, however, was a note I received soon after from a faculty member who had attended.

Great workshop.  Very useful to have one that was more about content than about the technical stuff.  I feel more optimistic about on-line teaching.

And that is what drives everything we do in PETAL, whether it’s a Teaching Seminar (as this session was) or a Technology Workshop.  We’re not about the “technical stuff.”  Sure we’ll talk about that to some extent, but we try, as much as possible, to talk about ways to improve teaching and learning.  Sometimes technology is involved in that, but teaching strategy is always involved.

If you are interested in technology in the instructional process, I would highly recommend subscribing to the ProfHacker blog, which can be found at http://www.profhacker.com/

Here is an article worth checking out:

Writing in the Internet’s Margins
by Brian Croxall

Apparently, this has been out awhile, but I’d not seen it.

College Advice, From People Who Have Been There Awhile

Published: September 5, 2009

Educators give some helpful advice to young adults entering school this fall.

The Hunt for a Good Teacher
By STANLEY FISH
Find the best teachers and take a writing class.

An Argument Worth Having
By GERALD GRAFF
Cut through the jargon, analyze and debate.

Get Lost. In Books.
By HAROLD BLOOM
Read the authors that are difficult and demand rereading.

Don’t Alienate Your Professor
By CAROL BERKIN
Once in class, participate.

Play Politics
By GARRY WILLS
Have passion for learning and for your beliefs.

Go the Wrong Way
By MARTHA NUSSBAUM
Think about life, not just a job.

Off-Campus Life
By JAMES MacGREGOR BURNS
Read a good newspaper; it will be your path to the world at large.

My Crush on DNA
By NANCY HOPKINS
Fall in love with your vision of the future.

Change Course
By STEVEN WEINBERG
College is never what one expects.

I have written many times in this space on CommentPress, which is a theme for the WordPress blogging system that allows for reader comments to be made at the paragraph level.

One of the problems with CommentPress has been that it’s not been upgraded for quite some time.

However, I discovered this week that the person who led the development of CommentPress for the Institute for the Future of the Book, Eddie Tejeda, has just released a completely overhauled version of CommentPress called “digress.it.”

The goal behind the system, as they state it, is “turning a document into a conversation.”

The major advantage of digress.it over CommentPress is flexibility.  There are several different “looks” available, and blog owners can add a variety of features to the right-hand sidebar.

I am using it for my American Lit course this semester, which you can check out at http://usapetal.net/wpmu/eh226/.  You can also learn more about digress.it at their website.