Why the Academic Blog?
Over the past decade blogs have proliferated on the Internet. Among those are the academic blog, which has all kinds of subgenres. We have a colleague, for inst...
Author: Hal Blythe
Making Mid-Course Corrections
As long as we’ve been writing blog posts on faculty development, we’ve been stressing the importance of innovating on the fly, of being willing to use the desig...
Making It CRISP: Using Information Organization and Retrieval for Deep Learning
In Achieving Excellence in Teaching (2014) we devote a chapter to the importance of organization in instruction, especially individual class organization. To he...
Is There Really a Teaching Revival Happening Now?
In Academically Adrift (2011), Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa present compelling evidence about the failure of American colleges and universities. “How much are ...
To Belong or Not Belong to POD in Higher Education?
We may be one of the few centers for teaching and learning (CTLs) that do not belong to POD (the Professional and Organizational Development Network in Higher E...
How Design Thinking Helps Innovate Faculty Development, Part 2
In The Ten Faces of Innovation (2008), Tom Kelley, general manager of the design firm IDEO, emphasizes the essence of design theory’s philosophy of rapid experi...
Going to WAR: Using a Weekly Assessment Report for Assessment Part II
As we explained in our previous post, the Weekly Assessment Report—the WAR—provides an excellent methodology for assessment. Unlike annual reports, the WAR prov...
The Higher Ed Professional Learning Community Oversight
Over the past ten years we have averaged sponsoring two professional learning communities (PLCs) per semester. It wasn’t until we organized the Faculty Innovato...
Behind the Scenes with The Wizards Behind the Faculty Innovators
Just as Oz couldn’t function without the wizard behind the scenes, so our Faculty Innovators program—discussed in the previous post—could not operate without th...
The Best Center of Teaching and Learning Service for Professional Development
A few years ago our state adopted the Common Core Standards and the legislature mandated that all state universities had to align college-level courses to these...