January 2015

I have finished creating an online version of ENH235 -- Gothic Literature.  Since I developed the course using OERs (Open Educational Resources), most of the course material involves older works, which can be used without copyright restrictions.  This works out well for the course since most of the course competencies relate to these older works.  However, the students need to be able to apply what they have learned about the historical development of gothic literature to a modern work.

I developed ENH114 (African-American Literature) as an online course that uses primarily OERs (Open Education Resources, which are free, online resources that can be used and shared.)  I am interested in finding out how this approach works for students -- on the plus side, it will save them money and insure that they have access to course materials when they need them.  However, I want to see how the use of OERs seems to be going -- how effective this approach is, and whether there are any issues.

Students in MAT156/157 preparing to be elementary school teachers sometimes struggle to think of ways to make learning math creative and fun.

I piloted EDU221 Online for fall 2012. All EDU courses mandate a Field Experience (FE) where students spend the required number of hours (for this class it is 30) in a K-12 classroom. This is a tedious process with multiple steps, including the acquisition of a Fingerprint Clearance Card, which is an additional cost. As a result, it is not uncommon for a student to drop a class, receive an incomplete (until they finish their FE the subsequent semester), or, worse yet, fail the class due to incompletion of the FE.

This assessment modifies the Democratic Decision Making assessment I developed a few years ago. It makes use of discussion boards and surveys to allow students in online and hybrid classes to participate in a democratic process to decide what topics they will study and present.

I use the dicussion feature on Canvas to guide class discussion of which topic (among choices decided upon by the instructor) they would like to study in more depth and present to the class.

I have been teaching PSY of Gender (PSY 235) online for many years and typically receive excellent reviews for the class from students. This (Spring 15) semester, I am offering Introduction to Women's Studies (WST 100) online for the first time. While developing the class I was uncertain of several particularly difficult content elements because of the level of the course and my assumption that many of my students come from disciplines far more diverse than the the social science backgrounds of my PSY 235 students.

In Fall 2014 I started several CATS and collected 3 data sets for the analyses. Upon return from break I found that 2:3 datasets were erased irretrievably from the server, making analysis impossible. I do however, still have one data set looking at a variety of success and satisfaction factors in a 16- week PSY 101. I want to use the data painstakingly collected, so I included the same assessment instrument in my 16- week 101 this semester with the intention to compare satisfaction and success between Fall & Spring students.

Need to find a simple survey to evaluate the motivation to stay or satisfaction survey - intervention - systematic mentoring 

Motivation-having new instructors to the class room setting

improve decreasing the anxiety of the new instructors

Remedy- open journal for all instructors can see and comment on

Successful-YES?

Pleased- YES

The main accounting curriculum involves a sequence of ACC111, ACC230, & ACC240, which is part of the ABUS AAS, Accounting AAS, and Accounting CCL.  I'd like to see the ACC111 faculty develop a common/standardized exam to make sure the students have the basic foundation (accounting cycle) before moving on to the last two accounting courses.  Since we're moving to a new textbook, we'll have to wait until it is adopted next fall.

The classroom communication is not alway transfer to my students correctly or to their understanding. I would like to be more clear and concise in my communication. I like to get my idea across with the first communication if possible. 

This fall I compared (Like Becky Baranowski had done for Calc 2) students coming from the PHY 121 traditional class versus those in PHY121/MAT221 Learning community on the Conceptual Survey of Electricity and Magnetism. While the numbers are small (n=12 from LC and n=10 from traditional) it was interesting to compare. Both groups had essentially the same pretest score (LC 18.2% and Trad 18.3%) but differed on the post test (LC 67% and trad 52%). Since the numbers are small I will be adding the students from this spring semester to try and get more statistically reliable numbers

Since Spring 2013, I have required students to submit their drafts to the Online writng center for feedback.  Over the past several semesters, I have seen their average scores go from 43 out of 60 on increase to 52 out of 60 on the short essay and from 62 out of 80 on the long essay to 70 out of 80 on the long essay.  I have made some revisions using submission links to canvas and hope to close the loop at the end of the semester for RDG 095, RDG 091, CRE 101 and RDG 081.

Although students do a lot of small group work (and participate in class discussions), they often don’t know each other’s names – sometimes not even those of their own groups. At the end of the semester, students still ask me who “so and so” is so they can return peer reviewed papers.