Persuasive leaders in higher education have advocated using evidence to support teaching under the guise of scholarship of teaching and learning without much success. This article explains why scholarship of teaching and learning has not been accepted as the standard practice in higher education. Instead, faculty may accept the concept of…

Active learning by faculty members complements and promotes active learning for students. Through The Andrew W. Mellon Teaching and Learning Institute at Bryn Mawr College, faculty members actively engage with one another and with undergraduate students positioned as pedagogical consultants to explore and to practice a wide range of pedagogies. In…

Student Ratings of Teaching (SRT) are widely employed to evaluate teaching for both formative and summative purposes. The appropriateness of items on these forms is one factor among many determining the utility and validity of SRT. Another is whether stakeholders are sufficiently knowledgeable to interpret the resulting data. Evidence gathered…

The term "netiquette" is the abbreviation for "network etiquette." It is derived from two French words: "net," meaning "bucket," and "iquette," meaning "of doilies." It is not new, dating back to 1983, but it certainly deserves the attention of both veteran and newbie Internet users, especially academicians. Rules for corresponding on the Internet…

A provincial initiative to encourage interprofessional education and research resulted in the implementation of three interprofessional PBL (iPBL) modules at the University of Saskatchewan. The ambitious target of 1200 student iPBL experiences over three years presented a substantial teaching development challenge. Training incorporated many of…

In the context of increased expectations for accountability and growing controversy surrounding sabbatical leave programs, it is important to address seemingly simple questions of who is or should be awarded a sabbatical and what the rationale is for the award. The study attempted to offer some insight on these issues by examining the factors that…

This article proposes facilitation of active learning in methods courses using collaborative survey research projects. Students form groups in which they develop and administer questionnaires that explore public attitudes and behaviors. Each step requires they apply key concepts toward completion of the project. Collaborative research project…

In a first-year engineering course with an enrollment of approximately 1900 students per year, seventy-eight undergraduate engineering students' perceptions of their graduate teaching assistants were obtained using a modified Adjective Generation Technique. Based upon student feedback, researchers identified three themes of highest concern to the…

Introductory science courses often have laboratory components in which students are required to write formal lab reports as homework. These reports often have problems such as incorrect data analysis, mistaken conclusions, and unclear graphs, all errors that indicate that students often fail to understand the experiments. Plagiarism is also…

Most faculty developers have a wide variety of rating scales that fly across their desk tops as their incremental program activities unfold during the academic year. The primary issue for this column is: What is the quality of those ratings used for decisions about people and programs? When students, faculty, and administrators rate a program or…

Prior research has called for rigorous evaluations of programs designed to improve college teaching, mostly in response to the missing literature supporting its practice. The purpose of this review was to explore whether such evaluations have taken place since the last examination in 1991. From a systematic review of nine leading publication…

This study used phenomenology to investigate doctoral student perceptions of "good teaching." Six semi-structured interviews were conducted and transcribed verbatim. Common themes were identified using domain analysis and four domains emerged. Participants perceived "good teaching" to involve an educator who: (1) exhibits passion which motivates…

The Two Survey Method (TSM) is a new time-efficient tool for gathering formative student feedback. Based on the Delphi technique, the TSM uses iterative surveys to develop student consensus about key strengths and suggestions for instruction. Evaluation data indicate that both faculty and students are satisfied with the method's efficiency and the…

Student learning outcomes clarify the focus of a course. In creating student centered, concrete, measurable outcomes, the instructor creates a framework for coherent, integrated course design. Faculty may be resistant to writing student learning outcomes because of lack of time, teaching philosophy, job descriptions, assessment pressure and…

A timeline is a flyover of history. It outlines shapes and helps define larger patterns. It is an efficient, if not comprehensive way to conceive of a long, complex span of time. This article presents a timeline of events, ideas, and technological innovation that provides a foundational historical record on the confluence of teaching and…