Online Student Newspaper

Did you know that NOVA's student newspaper is now available online? Check it out and point it out to your students.

Faculty meeting follow-up

Please post your comments, questions, etc. from the faculty meeting here--especially whatever ideas and thoughts you want to share on the issue of session timing. Thanks!

Welcome to the New Academic Year

So here we are, back again... although most of you who teach for ELI didn't take the summer off! As always, the new academic year will bring with it new initiatives, fresh challenges (and some perennial ones), and hopefully a renewed appreciation for why we have chosen to work at one of the nation's top community colleges.

Our fall faculty meeting is coming up next week. I'll send a reminder email late this week or early next week with the links, date/time reminders, etc. Meanwhile, please let me know (post a comment or drop me an email) if there are particular questions you have or issues you have heard about and want to better understand, and I'll see if I can fit them into the faculty meeting (or inform you about them another way).

Copyright Laws and Online Courses

If you're ever uncertain about how copyright laws apply to materials you might want to use in your online courses, here's a great resource--the American Distance Education Consortium's Learning Resources page. Scroll down to the "Intellectual Property, Copyright, and Fair Use" section and you'll find more than 20 conference presentations, websites and other sources dedicated to explaining these laws to educators.

More Details on Obama's Plan for Online Education

The Chronicle has an article this week describing Carnegie Mellon's Open Learning Initiative and how it may be the basis for what the Obama administration has in mind for online learning. Take a look at the article--and if you're looking for some really good teaching materials, you might also want to look at the Carnegie Mellon materials themselves! I saw them demonstrated at a conference a few years ago, and there are some really useful modules in statistics, math, economics, and more.

Another repository of teaching materials

If you have ever used MERLOT, you know how useful a repository of learning materials can be to your teaching. Here's another one you may want to check out (thanks, Diane!): Teacher's Domain. The site links you to digital resources from public broadcasting and other media producers, organized by subject area. It's overtly pitched at a K-12 teacher, but the resources are things like clips from "All Things Considered" and other PBS radio programs, so they're really appropriate for our students as well. The resources also often provide background information, discussion questions, and other activities to help you plan your use of the materials.

Do You Recognize Yourself in This Piece?

I think a lot of us have fallen into the trap of spending more time policing our students than teaching them. What do you think of this article about that tension? How do you keep yourself from being too much police officer and too little teacher? Or do you disagree with the premise and think the police officer role is more important than the author suggests?