Cooperative Learning (2)

An accepted wisdom in higher education is that students’ learning depends mostly on what they do in and out of class and not on what the instructor does, i.e. they learn best when they are involved in their own learning. This kind of learning has been coined “active learning”. The last New Chalk Talk issue (Volume 2, issue 2) addressed the subject of cooperative learning as a strategy that could be conducive to active learning when it is implemented properly. As mentioned, the three most important aspects of cooperative learning are the group, the task and the assessment. This issue will address the last two features

Fair Use Guidelines for Educational Multimedia

Faculty at AUC are facing questions that many educators in the US and around the world are facing: What guidelines are there for the production of multimedia materials? Under what conditions can we introduce video and audio clips, digitize images and text for educational purposes? How do we take advantage of innovative instructional technologies and changing educational needs without running the risk of violating the copyright law

The New Plagiarism

As a “newcomer” to AUC, I attended this year’s Newcomer’s Orientation program, where plagiarism and cheating were discussed at length in one of the sessions. Although plagiarism is not new, it is apparently on the rise, and is a topic of great concern not only here at AUC, but at institutions of higher learning in the US and the UK among others

Toward a Scholarship of Teaching and Learning: Classroom Action Research at AUC

Recognizing the success of recent pedagogical innovations, and in keeping with our mission to support and promote excellence in teaching, the Center for Learning and Teaching has launched a new “Classroom Action Research” (CAR) Program. Through this program, instructors, supported by CLT staff, can use data collected from their classrooms to assess the effect of certain pedagogies/practices on the learning process. This could (but does not have to) include the effect of a particular technology on teaching/learning

CLT’s new initiative: mid-semester feedback for instructors

For many reasons, end-of-course evaluation data are not enough. They come in too late to benefit the students doing the evaluation and they do not give us the details we need. They are a one way communication, and students do not believe they make a difference. Feedback activities during the semester are much more effective, and faculty who use these techniques learn more about how to improve their course than they would from end-of-semester evaluations

Active Learning (3): Three Easy Pieces

One of the most common obstacles in introducing active learning in the classroom, is the perception that it takes away from the lecture. The typical 40+ contact hours that a professor has with his/her students during a semester are usually considered to be barely enough to cover the “content” of the course. Yet thanks to excellent classroom research (McKeachie et al., 1990) we know a great deal about how learning happens, and not much of it will be happening in the classroom unless students are actively engaged

The Student Technology Assistants (STA) Program: A progress report

The Center has hired graduate students and has trained them (with the collaboration of Academic Computing Services), to assist interested faculty members in preparing instructional materials and/or using WebCT (the course management system adopted by AUC). This has involved assisting faculty members, on a one-on-one basis, “at their own pace and on their own schedules”, on how to use and develop these tools in and out of the classroom. In other words, our STAs have made the equivalent of “house calls” to our faculty

Provost’s Teaching Enhancement Initiative

As part of his Academic Strategic Priorities (August 2015, ‘Enhancing Teaching Effectiveness’), the Provost directed the Center for Learning and Teaching (CLT) to develop a Teaching Enhancement Program that would address the needs of all AUC faculty and that would lead to a certificate of participation, which would count towards promotion, tenure, renewal of contract, and the AFR

The 2 + 2 schedule: revisiting active learning in the classroom

The Center for Learning and Teaching (CLT) has long been an advocate for „active learning‟ and numerous “New Chalk Talk” issues and CLT workshops have been devoted to the subject* . But the urgency to sound out the call again comes at the onset of the new 2+2 schedule which AUC is implementing on a trial basis this year