Deb Poese with On Course facilitated a fantastic training session for the LMAR 1101 instructors yesterday. Skip Downing's program, that is being used by numerous institutions, provides an exciting and creative platform that will allow LU students to experience active and collaborative learning. The personal responsibility aspect resonated with many of the attendees. Deb modeled all of the various active learning methods and demonstrated how they can be used to create student-centered learning experiences. The next training session for instructors is June 13 beginning at 9:00 AM. Those interested in attending should contact Ashley Boone. There is still time to submit your ideas for Faculty Learning Communities for the 2012-13 academic year. The High School to College Transition FLC is working hard to gather data from incoming freshmen and high school students. In time, they will use this data to help the University Undergraduate Advising Center and the Center for Academic Success. In addition, several of the FLC members intend to present their findings at conferences and will submit papers for publication. If you are interested in accessing the data once it is available, contact Drs. Tanya Goldbeck or Paul Hemenway. The staff of the CT+LE will be attending the Texas Faculty Development Network's annual conference this coming Monday and Tuesday. This year's conference is being hosted by Lone Star College in Kingwood. Once we return, we will be turning the information we receive into tools to expand your toolbox. "Teaching in the early years of an undergraduate degree will gradually cease to be via lectures and will instead take the form of online presentations produced by professionally trained presenters backed up by teams of academics. This online content will be paralleled by peer tuition (or teaching by questioning) which, when done well, is clearly effective, and the associated growth of so-called learning analytics. Lectures may well become special occasions in which the best-known academics make their presence felt. Meanwhile, small group teaching will make a come-back in all years, especially in the best universities. In other words, a new hybrid will take the place of the old, one in which I suspect that face-to-face experience and other forms of direct experience (like international experience) will actually become more valued." That is the opinion of Nigel Thrift who has written an interesting op-ed piece on the future of undergraduate education. As a leader in online education, we at LU already know some of this to be true. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has selected an architect of the University of California's online learning strategy to lead its efforts in postsecondary education. Daniel Greenstein, vice provost for academic planning, programs and coordination at the University of California system, will become director of the postsecondary success strategy at Gates. Nate Kreuter, a regular blogger for Inside Higher Ed, writes, "Don't blow summer off. Effectively, you aren't being paid for the time, but scholarly work still needs to be done. It’s also a good time to get ahead of preparing classes for the upcoming academic year. You may be on a nine-month appointment, but you aren't really 'off' during the summer." CT+LE is here all summer for those of you looking for help. Feel free to contact a staff member to set up a convenient time to visit.

The University Success Seminar or LMAR 1101 is on track for the pilot run this coming Fall semester. Notices are going out now to those who have been selected to teach the new course. Planning is in the final stages for the upcoming training sessions for all the LMAR 1101 instructors. The first training session will occur on Tuesday, May 29 in the Setzer Student Center Ballroom beginning at 9:00 AM while the second training session is set for Wednesday, June 13 at the same time in 127 Communication Building. Instructors are required to attend one of the sessions but are welcome to attend both. You can contact Ashley Boone or Melonee Fife for more information about attending these two events. Save the date of Tuesday, August 21 for the annual CT+LE Faculty Development Blastoff. Look for updates on speakers, topics, places and times on this blog throughout the summer. Congratulations to all of the new LU alums who received their degrees at ceremonies last Saturday. Lamar awarded 1,354 degrees including 27 for doctorates, 599 for master’s degrees, and 704 for bachelor’s degrees. For those involved with May Mini-Session, we encourage you to integrate active learning strategies into your courses as they can provide great benefits to students who are involved in this type of environment. Learning experiences delivered using think/pair/share or stop/start/keep doing are ideal to provide formative assessment feedback for the instructor when the amount of time-on-topic is extremely critical. CT+LE is here for you throughout the summer session, so do not hesitate to contact us. Kathleen Taylor and Annalee Lamoreaux in their article Teaching with the Brain in Mind note that "The brain uses analogy to connect new input to existing patterns: How is the current experience like some earlier experience? Being able to use the past to evaluate present situations is an evolutionary advantage that no doubt came in very handy each subsequent time our cave-dwelling ancestors faced things with fangs and claws. Even more significant, the brain’s “rules” (algorithm) for analyzing connections between new and old patterns become more complex over our lifetime. The phenomenal power of the human mind derives in large part from the fact that the brain learns to change its own algorithm to account for variations, contrasts, and more integrative metaphors, leading to more inclusive, creative, and flexible responses to unfolding experience." They conclude "Though too much stress greatly inhibits learning, insufficient challenge can also have a negative impact; a bored brain stops attending. The most successful learning environments from the perspective of developmental intentions are those that provide high support and high challenge. Scaffolding is an effective strategy that offers both. A scaffold is a temporary structure that enables builders to work beyond a level that is mostly formed in order to start construction of the next, higher level. Similarly, when adult learners construct new meaning, scaffolding enables them to operate beyond their certainties, at what Daloz calls their growing edge. The combination of high support and high challenge may be the “optimal” stress that enhances production of dendrites, which are the parts of neurons most responsible for the “connectedness” of neuronal patterns." The bottom line is to find the right balance between challenging your students while scaffolding onto past learning. Joshua Kim has written an interesting op-ed piece on MOOCs. He says, "In short, while I believe that MOOCS are wonderful for the people who teach them and can be wonderful for our institutions, I don't believe that MOOCs offer any sort of solution to increase access, raise quality, or decrease costs in the higher ed marketplace. MOOCs are a welcome addition to the puzzle, but if we are serious as a society about investing in the human capital of our citizens (and thus provide opportunities for economic self-sufficiency and even economic mobility) that we need to invest public dollars in higher ed. I worry that MOOCs are a distraction to this need for investment, and will divert attention from the systematic dis-investments we are seeing in post-secondary funding by government at all levels."

The Faculty Learning Communities Showcase held this past Monday was a great event mainly because of the outcomes each group presented. The effort from each FLC was evident as we heard one terrific idea after another. The top picture includes President Jimmy Simmons and Provost Steve Doblin talking with members of the Sustainability Across the Curriculum FLC. They offered up four unique ideas including creating an undergraduate minor on the field of sustainability, enhancement of the recycling program at LU, a plan to encourage the use of alternative energy vehicles, and proposing that LEED certification guidelines be used for all renovations or new-builds on the LU campus. If you would like to view the poster created by this FLC that outline their proposals, you can find them adjacent to the CT+LE suite on the sixth floor of the Mary and John Gray Library. The Active Research and Scholarship of Teaching and Learning FLC was much more individually focused on classroom teaching. FLC members have been implementing active learning into their courses and several of them have captured their student's reactions using surveys and classroom assessment. The High School to College Transition FLC is planning a full-scale survey to be collected

over the coming months. They are focusing on two specific groups: incoming high school students and LU freshman. The plan is to use the results of the survey to help guide several new initiatives at LU including the University Undergraduate Advising Center and the University Success Seminar also known as LMAR 1101. The main focus of the FLC was uncovering impediments to retention. Look for results from their survey later this year. The Creating an Online Course of Substance FLC dazzled us with examples of templates for courses using technology to deliver content. They also emphasized how effective online course can be for student learning. Here is good news for all of us who devote our lives to student learning every day. A new report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Center for Health Statistics finds that education may not only improve a person's finances, it is also linked to better health habits and a longer life. For instance, people who have a bachelor's degree or higher live about nine years longer than those who don't graduate from high school. "Highly educated people tend to have healthier behaviors, avoid unhealthy ones and have more access to medical care when they need it," says the report's lead author, Amy Bernstein, a health services researcher for the National Center for Health Statistics. "All of these factors are associated with better health." The report also found that in 2010 24% of boys and 22% of girls were obese in households where the heads of the family had less than a high school education; the figures are 11% of boys and 7% of girls where the head of the household had a bachelor's degree or higher. Poor people sometimes live in less healthy communities with less access to healthy foods and places to be physically active, Bernstein says. "It's all interconnected." For those of you who are about to start teaching in the mini-session, here is a tip to get you started right from the first day of class. You should do three things that first period including presenting the syllabus to your students, introducing the course topic with the expected outcomes and at least some initial material, and require at least some students to participate. James M. Lang in his book On Course: A week-by-week guide to your first semester of college teaching, suggests that "determining how students can participate in the course, and can make their voices heard in and outside of the classroom, should factor into every decision you make in your pedagogy, including decisions you make about the first day of the semester." Building on the "Flipping the Classroom" concept, we would suggest that you create a video of yourself reading the syllabus and send it to your students as a reading assignment for the first day. You can even give a quiz, a low stakes formative assessment that will not only set the tone but allows them to see what your tests will look like from the first day.

We are celebrating the best of what the Academy has to offer today in the inaugural Faculty Learning Communities Showcase. Everything kicks off at 2:30 PM in the Setzer Student Center Ballroom. The formal presentations by each FLC begin at 3:00 PM. Everyone in the LU community is welcome to join us for this exciting event. Are you thinking of using lecture capture as part of your learning experiences next semester? If so, you might want to participate in an upcoming webinar. The University of Texas-Austin will be sharing best practices from their experiences with lecture capture, blended learning and active and collaborative engagement. The webinar takes place this Wednesday, May 16 at 11:00 AM and is free but you must register to participate. When you begin to talk about who is offering educational opportunities, the shorter list may be who is not. With recent announcements by Harvard, MIT, NBC, WalMart and now National Geographic the possibilities seem endless. The questions about quality and content are certainly weighing heavily on this topic. Online learning is part of the options currently available to students who are pursuing a college education. LU has been at the forefront of this option for a number of years and the options continue to emerge for our students with the addition of College of Business. The CT+LE will be offering a series of workshops in the Fall semester to provide faculty development opportunities for all who are interested in creating a blended class, online course or those just looking to upgrade their technology skills. Watch this blog for more information. Collaborative learning is an umbrella term for a variety of educational approaches involving joint intellectual effort by students, or students and teachers together. It has long been recognized as an effective approach to the learning process. It has been reported that a collaborative learning community plays a significant role in promoting learning, sharing knowledge, and social and intellectual involvement. Nicole Anderson and Chi-Cheng Lin, in their article Exploring Technologies for Building Collaborative Learning Communities among Diverse Student Populations, write that "Formats for collaborative learning include in-class activities such as peer teaching, writing groups, and seminars, as well as outside classroom cooperative activities such as team projects and study groups." Anderson and Lin discovered in their research that students responded most positively to the use of blogs as a learning experience.

As LU is deep into the final exam period, it is very interesting to watch the ever growing number of students frantically walking around the MGJL looking for a place to study. When they do finally settle, many of them are taking out a stack of note cards or reading their notebooks. Some are working on the blackboards that are provided in the study rooms. But I have seen a substantial number of them working in groups. I notice that they are "teaching" each other the various lessons they learned over the semester. It is interesting to watch them go from a video clip on the Web to notes they have collected on their e-tablets. They are constantly using various forms of electronic media and then engaging in conversations about problem-solving or other dilemmas created by new questions that arise. I am struck that they are not simply talking at each other but truly engaging in conversations. It is active learning at its best and we hope that they are mimicking what has been modeled in their classrooms. Now is a great time to begin to look at your course plans for the next semester. Your impressions of your current courses are still fresh in your mind. You are also about to receive feedback in the form of student ratings, many of you from the ACES survey which is used to measure the amount of traditional and active learning methods occurring in your courses. Whatever formative assessment you are using to measure how effective you were in achieving your learning outcomes is a really great place to begin but don't stop there. Dig deeper and take a look at the things that did not work so well. Start now to closely examine where your students seemed to lose their way. That is a great opportunity to take a learning experience and implement an active learning strategy or two. You will only become comfortable with the facilitator model if you begin to use it in your classes. It is through practice and critical self-reflection that we improve as teachers. Let us know how we can help. The end of the semester is also a good time for change to occur. Dr. Randy Smith, who has served as the Associate Director of the Quality Enhancement Plan or QEP for the past two years, has decided to step down from that role. His contributions can never be properly measured or appreciated. He has been instrumental in helping to improve the ACES Fellows program and we will miss his leadership. Taking his place in the Associate Director's position is Melissa Hudler. She is currently and will continue to be the Director of the LU Writing Center. Melissa brings years of classroom and online instruction experience to this task. She was also an ACES Fellow in the the first cohort. We are thankful that she has agreed to join us in CT+LE. Paula Krebs has written a terrific article on how failing may be one of the best lessons students can encounter. She uses the discipline of computer science to illustrate her theory. She writes, "Over the years I have pushed against my students' fear of failure in minor ways. When I taught first-year writing, I developed a grading rubric that allowed me to give students low grades in some categories and high grades in others, blinding them with numbers so they couldn't figure out a letter grade and would, instead, focus on the categories that needed improving." Massive open online courses or MOOCs continue to make headlines in light of the item we reported earlier about edX. “MIT and Harvard will use the jointly operated edX platform to research how students learn and how technologies can facilitate effective teaching both on-campus and online,” the universities said. Anant Agarwal, the president of edX, said the scale of the courses, along with the data-rich environments in which they will be held, should enable researchers to glean “How people are learning, what works and what doesn’t.” The founders of another MOOC platform, Coursera, said they plan to work with their own data and university partners to “understand human learning at a scale and depth that has been never been possible before."

We are exactly one week away from the inaugural LU Faculty Learning Communities Showcase. It will be held on Monday, May 14 at the Setzer Student Center Ballroom. The event begins at 2:30 PM with formal presentations being made for each of the four current FLC beginning at 3:00 PM. Judging by the excitement of the FLC members, this promises to be a terrific event. Everyone in the LU community (faculty/staff/students) are welcome to come and enjoy refreshments, fellowship, and to hear about what each of the four FLC have been working on this past academic year. If you are interested in creating a FLC for 2012-13, you can submit your ideas online from now until May 16. The FLC program has enhanced the sense of community among the participants and assisted the formation of networks and research groups. Several of you have asked for suggestions for summer reading. We are still very impressed with Ken Bain's book What the Best College Teachers Do which is very much about faculty development. We are just as impressed with Martin Seligman's latest book Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being, which is more about improving your life in general rather than career development although the ideas can be applied to any situation. Jean Twenge's book Generation Me: Why Today's Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled--and More Miserable Than Ever Before is a great read and very focused on understanding many of the students enrolled in your courses. You might want to take a look at Skip Downing's On Course: Strategies for Creating Success in College and in Life. This is the textbook that we will use to teach the LMAR 1101 class this fall. If you are interested in submitting an application to participate in the Active and Collaborative Engagement for Students (ACES) program, you should pan on attending one of the two informational sessions. Both will be held in 622 MJGL. The first session will be on May 10 at 3:30 PM. The second session will be held Wednesday, May 16 at 3:30 PM. You can find more information or download the request for applications on the ACES website. Nik Osborne, the head of Indiana University's e-texts program, lays out how his institution plans to "disrupt" the traditional textbook publishing model with the help of publishers themselves. Five other universities will also be running pilots based on the model developed by IU through a program set up by Internet2's NET+ service. Participating universities will get McGraw-Hill e-texts, the Courseload reader and annotation platform integrated with their learning management system, and the opportunity to be part of a joint research study of e-text use and perceptions. Are you looking to create a massively open online courses or MOOC? Jim Groom, an instructional technologist and adjunct professor at the University of Mary Washington, says his open online courses are not about scale and efficiency but about imagination and anarchy. Groom decided to take his course on digital storytelling, DS106, into the open waters of the Web, inviting anyone, anywhere, to create, submit and comment on assignments. The reins have been slipping from his hands ever since, and Groom says he could not be happier. There is no textbook in DS106 and Groom does not lecture or teach media editing skills. In Groom’s section of the course, in-person attendance is optional. The instructors consult with students about the design of the course and its website. Two of Groom’s students are building out a new section of the DS106 website where students can vote up each other’s work. Levine and his students are in the process of planning another area where students can remix each other’s work. “The students are in many ways running and designing this as it goes,” says Groom. The weekly assignments, which make up 30 percent of the final grade, are created by the students themselves -- the 75 enrolled at Mary Washington and the hundreds of others participating free on the Web -- and aggregated in an assignment bank on DS106's website.

The call for applications for the 2012-13 cohort of Active and Collaborative Engagement for Students (ACES) is now open. We will be accepting applications through May 31. Two upcoming information session will be held in 622 MJGL: Thursday, May 10 at 3:30 PM and Wednesday, May 16 at 3:30 PM. Visit the ACES website for more detailed information or contact a member of the CT+LE staff for an application packet. Lee Bessette has written a fascinating blog post on peer-driven learning. Bessette says "This semester, I gave students the choice of either doing a traditional presentation over two classes or building something that they talk about for one class that the rest of the students could “play” with outside of class. One of the advantages of the peer-driven course is that the students know their material, which allows for a more immersive discussion, rather than a lecture that simply makes up the gaps in their informational knowledge. But, I have to be ready to jump in wherever the students are, instead of leading the students where I want them to go. It’s reactive, and I have to be able to react quickly, intelligently, and openly." At a recent CT+LE workshop the conversation turned to the idea of "flipping" as it relates to the classroom and active learning. Some folks seemed very open to the idea but some had concerns. What we learned from the fascinating conversation is that we could all use some more information to help us make a decision on whether flipping is for us. The folks at NC State have an ongoing project called FIZZ that focuses on flipping. Relying on the research that shows that engagement is at the core of student success, they have decided to focus on teaching instructors how to be more engaging while creating a classroom for 21st century learning. The Faculty Learning Communities Showcase will occur on Monday, May 14 from 2:30 until 4:30 PM in the Setzer Student Center Ballroom. The four FLC who have been hard at work during the 2011-12 Academic Year will be presenting their outcomes. In addition, you will have the opportunity to hear about plans for AY 2012-13. Come and enjoy refreshments and fellowship at the FLC Showcase. We are very excited to welcome Melonee Fife to the CT+LE. She is returning to LU after a recent stint at Sam Houston State and will serve as the office manager and coordinate all aspects of the QEP. Be sure to stop by and welcome Melonee who is located in 612 MJGL.