With state and federal governments putting more and more emphasis on assessment and learning outcomes, these new-style accreditation processes can be grueling, to say the least. Here are a few valuable tips to help ensure a successful accreditation visit.
The lofty goals that capstone courses can accomplish make them worth the effort. We know how important first experiences in college are. We need a greater appreciation of how equally important a final summarizing experience can be.
Campus tragedies, like those at Virginia Tech and Northern Illinois University, served as a wake-up call for the need to refocus efforts and attention to campus safety issues, and the role that everyone plays in recognizing potential red flag behaviors among students and others on campus.
The number of hours spent in the classroom per week was significantly, negatively related to salaries at research, doctoral-granting, and comprehensive colleges both in 1992-93 and in 1998-99.
Has the rapid expansion of online education put your institution on a collision course with faculty incentive policies? Although more and more faculty are teaching online, few colleges and universities are proactively addressing faculty workload, promotion, and tenure policies to more accurately reflect the differences between teaching online and teaching face-to-face.
In yesterday’s post, it was argued that perhaps student evaluations were not, in Martha Stewart’s famous phrase, “a good thing,” given doubts about the qualifications
These student evaluations are so much a part of our system and have become so routine for our students and faculty that I have seldom questioned their value or necessity. But are they really (as Martha Stewart might say) “a good thing?” […]
The University of Missouri recently implemented its system-wide Faculty Accomplishment System, an electronic database that provides a convenient way for faculty members to document their achievements for themselves and for administrators. […]
Faculty careers are often divided into three phases: beginning, middle, and end. New faculty have been studied in some detail—probably because of the great influx of them. So have senior faculty, although less than new faculty. But what about that expanse in the middle? Researchers Baldwin, Lunceford, and Vanderlinden (reference below) quote sources describing mid-career faculty as “perhaps the least studied and most ill-defined period in life.”
Becoming a department chair does not always follow a smooth or particularly well-thought-out process. Most faculty, who have no academic leadership training, need real support to make this career transition a successful one. […]