Are Senior Faculty Members Still Effective Teachers?

Writing in Faculty Focus, Maryellen Weimer takes a brief, balanced look at what is known about whether teaching effectiveness meaningfully declines with age. She says that most of the research is from 3-4 decades ago, and thus was measuring a very different senior faculty that those we now have. Weimer concludes that if there is a decline, it is very small, a perception matched by surveys of students. However, the time demands of being a professor that aren't directly related to the time actually spent teaching, can be difficult for senior faculty, especially if they are socially isolated in their practice of teaching.

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Regional SCUP Events! Enjoy the F2F company of your colleagues and peers at one of three SCUP regional conferences this spring:

• March 14–16: Baltimore, MD
• March 24–26: Cambridge, MA
• April 5–7, San Diego, CA

Ten Things I No Longer Believe About Transforming Teaching and Learning with Technology

For more than this decade, the TLT Group has been at the forefront in experimenting with and learning from technology tools to transform teaching and learning. Steve Erhmann recently began a series of essays soliciting responses to which he will reply, about the ten things that - after so many years of paying attention - he no longer believes about teaching and learning with technology. "The first five weeks deal with five specific rewards for investing in technology (visibility and the resources it can attract, better learning, larger enrollment, cost savings, and time savings). Let's start with what I once believed about buying hot new technology in order to attract resources by making your program more visible."

The Cost of Innovation: Teaching and Learning and the Bottom Line

We enjoy Richard Ekman's essays in University Business magazine:

Graduates should be expected to demonstrate that they can learn through a variety of formats: lecture, seminar, independent study, internship, guided research, and online course. Lectures aren’t inherently bad, and seminars aren’t inherently good. An education received entirely through any one instruction mode doesn’t prepare students for the many ways in which information is received and must be presented in the postgraduation world.

The most effective forms of instruction are sometimes inexpensive, and the least effective are sometimes very expensive. We are all familiar with courses that use internet-based exercises in which the online material is simply a static textbook to be consulted and read online. Except for faster searching, the technology’s capability is not exploited for any of its distinctive features—dynamic capabilities for simulation or modeling, use of images (especially moving images), sound mixed with text, or graphical representation of complex data. A student learns little in these courses that couldn’t be learned equally well from a printed book.