NOVA Q&A

I spend a lot of my time in meetings of various college groups, so I tend to know a lot about what's going on with different college initiatives that you as a faculty member may not have a chance to hear about.

So, let me share the wealth! What NOVA questions do you have? (I'm thinking of things like, "Hey, whatever happened to initiative xyz I remember from a few years ago?" or, "Why did we change to doing x this new way?" or, "When is xyz going to happen?")

And, if you want to learn a lot about where NOVA and the VCCS may be going in the next couple of years, don't forget to come to the Chancellor's town hall meeting in the CE Forum this Friday (the 17th) from 9:30-11:00.

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.

Finding New Faculty to Teach at ELI

For the first time (at least that I'm aware of), we put ELI in the adjunct block ad HR publishes each term--and wow, have we gotten a huge response. I've heard from people around the region, the state, the country, and even internationally who want to know more about teaching for us. It's amazing to see how much distance learning is growing and how many people want to try it out.

I've put together a brief FAQ to tell interested parties a few basic things about ELI. Take a look and tell me what you think. Are there things I'm missing that I should include in this first, overview-type FAQ? (We of course provide more information later, like sharing the MOU.)

(As a related aside, some of you may remember that long ago, I asked you for feedback on the faculty portion of the ELI site and how we could redesign it to make it more useful to you. That's still coming--and so, no need to comment on the layout of this document in terms of web design--just content.)

Attention, Grammar Police!

One of my pet peeves is people who use quotation marks inappropriately (I know--we should all have such problems), so I got a laugh out of this blog, which posts photos of signs and notes people have found with these kinds of errors. Some of them are pretty funny--and, English and Communication Studies faculty, this might be fun to use with your students!

VA Higher Ed Blog

I've added a new blog to the links on the left--the Virginia Higher Education blog. If you're interested in following the bigger picture of higher ed in Virginia (beyond the VCCS stuff we normally hear about), such as budget concerns and pending legislation, you'll find the blog useful.

Happy Holidays!

I'm signing off for the holiday break. Wishing you all happy holidays, safe travels, and good luck for the new year!

Digital Storytelling and QEPs

If you don’t know what a QEP is, you will very soon, as NOVA is about to launch into our SACS (Southern Association of Colleges and Schools—our accrediting body) reaffirmation process, which includes identifying an area we wish to focus on improving over the coming 10 years at our college. This area of focus, and our plan on how to address it, is our QEP (Quality Enhancement Plan), and we’ll all be asked in the coming spring term to be a part of the process of deciding what NOVA’s QEP should focus on.

I’ve just returned from the SACS annual conference, where many of the sessions were presentations of the results from other colleges’ QEP efforts. The most interesting one I saw was from a North Carolina community college that had chosen to focus on student writing skills for their QEP. They worked to improve student writing skills by creating a Writing Center, using paired courses (like the learning communities we have in place at NOVA for our Achieving the Dream project), and, most interestingly, implementing a digital storytelling component in their English composition courses.

In the selected courses, students were required to complete a final project where they told a personal, cultural, historical, or social narrative in a 3-4 minute digital story (a video with photos, music, and script read by the student). The presenters provided strong preliminary evidence of how much the project increases student engagement, teaches strong writing skills (such as brevity, audience, and the drafting and revision process), improves students’ understanding of citing sources, increases technology skills and critical thinking abilities, and helps students gain self-confidence. It was a pretty impressive project! You might want to read more about their work and how they guide students through the process (maybe you’d even like to get your students working on projects like this!). It’s inspiring, and surely the type of engaging and challenging project we want our students to do.

American Education in 2025

Apologies for my absence from the blog... I was at the SACS conference learning about the upcoming process of reaffirming our accreditation, and I neglected to set up some entries to post while I was away!

I just saw an interesting piece in Inside Higher Ed about a recent report by the College Board about how we could improve education by 2025 to keep the U.S. competitive. One of the key points was a goal for 55% of Americans aged 25-34 to hold at least an Associate's Degree by 2025. Reaching that goal would require a 1% increase every year--which means we at the community college have got our work cut out for us! It's one thing to bring students in, but it requires different sorts of work, attention, and student services to get that many more students each year to graduate with a credential.

And although the piece does not mention distance learning or other technology-based solutions, they will surely have to play a major role if we're going to meet this goal. Many of these students will be working and will need flexibility while they complete their courses. And, we simply don't have the classroom space to hold enough face-to-face classes for that many more students to complete degrees over the coming 17 years.

As always, it is an exciting and challenging time to be in higher education!

Change Strategies to Get More Work Done

I often think about teaching online as similar to writing a dissertation. It's very different in that the dissertation is one big project, while online teaching is generally a lot of small but endless tasks (grading, responding to email, reading and responding to BB posts, more responding to email, etc.). But it's the same in that it can be isolating, and in that when we are working in isolation, it can be easy to get overwhelmed, to procrastinate, to develop a bad attitude, etc. I still subscribe to a newsletter I started getting when I was ABD (All-But-Dissertation), and it recently published a short piece on some changes you can make if you are feeling some of this isolation and its related problems (like using every excuse possible to put off your grading). Check it out here (note: not for those who don't like self-help-y reading). And if you are writing a dissertation yourself, I definitely recommend subscribing to the newsletter!

Work/Life Balance and Online Teaching

Debbie Naquin passed along a blog post and short discussion from the Chronicle about teaching online and how to manage your time so that you are not working 24/7. What strategies do you use to stay responsive to your students while also keeping reasonable work hours to avoid burnout? Or, where have you made mistakes on this front, so others can avoid them?

One thing I do that helps a lot is sending my weekly message to the class. Sending one big set of announcements each week means fewer individual questions to answer as I go.

One thing I'm planing to start is keeping a file where I include text I've sent to students on common questions. (For example, every semester I have to explain the difference between income and wealth and why the racial wealth gap is increasing even while the income gap is down.) This way, I can not only reuse (or slightly edit, depending on the student's error) these answers during one semester, but also use them across semesters. I'm sure many of you are way ahead of me on that one...I just somehow never got around to starting the file until now.

Please share your tips and mistakes! I know we could all use some timesavers.

For-Profit Colleges and Career and Technical Credentials

There's an interesting blurb in a recent edition of the Chronicle indicating that there's been a shift toward more career and technical credentials being awarded by for-profit institutions rather than community colleges. (We still award most of these credentials, but the proportion has shifted--or, is shifting.)

I will ignore the various bizarre comments people posted in response to the blurb (though you might want to read them, for your entertainment and aggrivation)... my question to you is this: why do students choose for-profit institutions rather than community college, when we offer the same credentials at much lower cost? We need to serve this group of students better. How could we better let them know that we are here for them?

Random Bullets Friday

• Thanks to all of you who have already RSVPed for a session for the ELI Fall Faculty Meeting on eNOVA. If you haven't yet RSVPed, please do so! I thought I'd see whether anyone has particular topics you would like to hear about during the meeting. Any burning issues or questions you want me to be sure to discuss?
• In the past week, I have given presentations about ELI to NOVA's new full-time faculty and to the LRS Working Group (composed of the Deans of Educational Support Services (formerly called LRS Directors), librarians from across the college, and some instructional technology folks), and have distributed tip sheets on how to advise students about ELI at the Manassas Campus convocation. One of the most important parts of my job is reaching out around the College to be sure that as many people as possible understand ELI. What are the things you most often hear your colleagues misunderstanding about ELI that you want me to work on clarifying around the College?
• I hope many of you were at yesterday's convocation, or at least viewed it from off site, to see two of our own wonderful ELI faculty, Pat Daron and Walerian Majewski, receive well-deserved honors. Congratulations again to you both!

Welcome Back, and Summer Reading

Today all full-time faculty return to campus. I know that most of you taught this summer, but perhaps some of you are just now returning yourselves. I always enjoyed this week as a faculty member; it was always hectic, but also fun to catch up with friends and get really geared up for fall courses.

Let's take a break from ELI for a moment. What was the best book you read this summer?

After some random browsing at Barnes and Noble, I picked up The Best of Friends, a memoir by Sara James (Dateline correspondent) and Ginger Mauney (wildlife filmmaker), and ended up really enjoying it. It was not the best quality writing, and the cheesy title is a bit alarming, but there was actually a lot of really interesting stuff in there about some of the stories James has covered (child slavery in Sudan, the first Gulf War, the Oklahoma city bombing, etc.) and about the emotional and cultural lives of baboons and elephants as studied and filmed by Mauney. It's also a memoir of a lifelong friendship and the women's experiences with marriage and children alongside their careers--don't read it if you don't like that kind of material, or you will be very bored.

I'm taking a Labor Day Weekend vacation, and I'd love some book suggestions from all you smart and interesting colleagues!

Stupidity, Literacy, and Technology

I was just reading the most recent post over at Geeky Mom (http://geekymom.blogspot.com/), and she's pointed out an article you all might find of interest. "Thomas Benton," Chronicle columnist, has written an essay about several recent books describing the illiteracy, ignorance, etc. of the American public, including some discussion of whether modern technologies are part of the problem. As heavy users of these technologies, of course, we all have a stake in this debate! You can read the article at http://chronicle.com/jobs/news/2008/08/2008080101c.htm. What do you think?

And as an aside, you might enjoy reading Geeky Mom's blog in general. From what I can tell, her job is at least fairly similar to that of our instructional designers at ELI, so in addition to her discussions of technologies and tech trends you might find interesting, it can give you a window into how the professionals who help you learn to use technology and design your courses effectively feel about working with faculty, and some of the frustrations faculty (usually inadvertently) give them.

RateMyProfessors.Com

A faculty member just emailed me to let me know about RateMyProfessor (http://ratemyprofessors.com), a site where students can post ratings and comments about their professors to help other students decide which courses/faculty to take. (The most notorious aspect of this site is that students can also assign faculty "chili peppers," which means they are hot--although I have spoken to some students who interpret that as more like cool/hip rather than physically attractive.)

I personally always checked my ratings when I was teaching at Loudoun (my favorite comment was the student who complained that I was not aware that my class was an ELECTIVE, "not BIO or something!"). I also know deans and provosts who use the site to check up on their faculty. Although many of us are a bit leery of student comments, especially on a site like this, I find that the general trend of the comments is usually pretty accurate, both about one's strengths and one's weaknesses.

At any rate, I'm passing it along, since if one person wasn't aware of the site, she was probably not the only one! You might enjoy checking out your comments (and if you want to be devilish, those of your colleagues...).

Enjoy!

Random Bullets Thursday

It has been a crazy week, so just some random bullets today:

• Today was the ELI Beach Party--and it was great that we had some faculty attend as well as ELI staff. I hope to see more of you at the next event! We always have a good time. We even had sand (albeit contained in a plastic shell).
• How did it get to be only one month left until fall classes start?!
• Please vote in the poll on the left, if you haven't already.
• The new trend for ensuring that students are taking their own exams is using things like webcams that scan the environment for 360 degrees around the student (to ensure no one else is in the room feeding answers), palm or other scans to verify a student's identity, and even typing pattern recognition software (you capture a student's pattern early in the course and then make sure the same pattern appears when the student takes the exam). What do you think? Useful, or creepy? How do you imagine ELI students dealing with such measures (which might allow them to take their exams at home and not have to arrange a proctor or go to a testing center)?

Here Comes the Competition...

An editorial in Sunday's Washington Post reports that there is increasing pressure to create a community college in D.C. Apparently, UDC currently offers some two-year degrees, so one option would be to expand its mission more fully in this direction by having it create a sort of community college "branch." Other proposed options (for some reason, the city felt it needed to get the Brookings Institution to give it advice on this matter) included just creating an independent community college and creating some sort of joint venture where multiple institutions would offer courses toward two-year degrees. You can read the whole article here:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/04/AR2008070402129.html?nav=rss_print/outlook

Of course, I'm sure that whatever road the city takes, it will be a long time coming, so nothing much will change in the short run. And having access to a community college will be wonderful for DC residents, who for whatever reasons (probably significantly because we have not been very metro accessible, but I doubt that's the only reason) have not chosen to come to take classes at NOVA in large numbers. But it seems to me it will also really change the landscape we are working with. Will this push NOVA to focus more and more on its western locations? Might students in Alexandria, Arlington, etc. who work (or like to hang out) downtown choose to attend classes at DC's community college rather that at NOVA (assuming they could get favorable tuition rates, which might well be in the city's interest to offer)?

How do you think a DC community college would affect NOVA?

Gotta Love the Internet

Some of you who are more "hip with the kids" may have already seen this (a couple of years ago, actually). It just makes me laugh every time I see it (yes, I am a bit easily amused), in part because it is the perfect example of the bizarreness, and wonderful-ness, of the internet. Why in the world would such a thing exist? Who would spend that much time making such a thing? (And yet, I'm glad they did...)

http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/badgerphone

(Warning: this may stay in your head for weeks...)

What's your favorite example of an internet item (a flash video, a mashup, or whatever) that is wonderful for its mere existence?

And now for something completely different...

If I may step away from ELI and distance learning issues for a moment, I'd love to hear your thoughts and advice on something else.

Next spring, I'll be teaching a graduate course for UVa (EDLF 762, Sociology of Education). It'll be really fun to teach a grad course for the first time, to teach for my undergraduate alma mater, and to spend some time working with the areas of the literature I used in my dissertation but don't get to engage much when teaching at the freshman/sophomore level here at NOVA.

So here's my question: what were the key characteristics of the best graduate courses you took? I certainly have my own ideas about what worked, and what didn't, in my own graduate studies, but I'm curious about what suggestions you all might have to help me as I craft my syllabus.

Random Bullets Friday

[Explanatory note: For those of you who are not big blog readers, "random bullets" refers to a day where the blogger has several small points to make but no one large theme to write about, so instead of one topic, the day's post is several unrelated bulleted points. You will often see this called RBOC ("Random Bullets of Crap").]

Apologies for not updating in the past week--I went away to visit a friend with a new baby for the long weekend, and then was at a VCCS meeting. Here are a few things on my mind now that I've returned:

• I spent the last couple of days in Staunton at the Joint ASAC/Deans meeting. (ASAC is the Academic and Student Affairs Council of the VCCS, composed of VPs, AVPs, some Directors, and some provosts.) One of the things we discussed is that it's time for a new VCCS strategic plan. Can you believe that Dateline 2009 is actually just about here?
• I've heard from a few faculty members that they experienced higher attrition this past semester (spring) than usual. Are you experiencing that, or does it seem about the same to you? Have any thoughts on what might have caused it, and/or what we could do to reduce it?
• As of yesterday, ELI enrollments were up 13.1% over last summer (which is 2.6% above our growth target for the summer term!). The College overall is up 7.6% over last summer. So those of you who have been getting lots of queries from students about getting into full classes--that's part of the reason! If you do get those queries, please let Joanna Knoll (our new faculty liaison) know. It helps us to figure out where we need new sections and new instructors.
• Have you tried yet to create your own avatar? (Do you know what an avatar is?) It can be a fun way to express yourself online. Nantana (one of our IDs) just shared with us one site where you can make them--check it out and play around a little! The IDs can help you put your avatar into your course, if you'd like to. The site is: http://uk.avatars.yahoo.com/index.html. If you want help with something like this, contact ELI ID Help (eliidhelp@nvcc.edu).