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."