It wouldn’t be the end of the year without a few top 10 lists, so this year we’ve put together one of our own: the top 10 most popular articles on Faculty Focus.
Throughout 2010, Faculty Focus published more than 250 articles. The articles covered a wide range of topics—from online teaching to philosophy of teaching. Yesterday we highlighted numbers 5-10. Today’s post lists the top five most popular articles, starting with number 5.
5. Dealing with Difficult Students: the Narcissist
Students with a narcissistic personality style are apt to challenge instructors on relatively minor matters, as well as cast scathing aspersions on their professors’ characters and their very qualifications to teach. There is some indication that this current generation of students includes more people who exhibit self-entitled behavior. Assuming this is correct, we can expect to have to deal with more narcissistic traits than we might have seen a mere generation ago. Continue reading »
4. Good Teaching: The Top 10 Requirements
Good teaching is as much about passion as it is about reason. It’s about motivating students not only to learn, but teaching them how to learn, and doing so in a manner that is relevant, meaningful and memorable. It’s about caring for your craft, having a passion for it and conveying that passion to everyone, but mostly importantly to your students.
Continue reading »
3. How to Design Effective Online Group Work Activities
There are many reasons why students don’t like group work, and in the online classroom the list of reasons grows even longer as the asynchronous nature of online courses not only makes collaboration more difficult but almost counterintuitive. But there may be another issue at play that you haven’t even thought about, and it has to do with how group work is designed in the first place. Continue reading »
2. Integrating Social Media into Online Education
As online learning grew, so too did the functionality of course management systems. As the systems grew more and more complex, they became more and more fragile, necessitating the new administrative function of instructional designer to manage the systems. Control of distance learning gradually shifted away from faculty. Continue reading »
1. Blogging to Improve Student Learning: Tips and Tools for Getting Started
Most universities press their faculty to add technology to their classroom by adopting the Learning Management System. This is a mistake. Faculty often end up spending hours learning the system and loading the same content that they use in the classroom, and finish wondering if the benefit was worth the effort.
Instead, I encourage faculty to start by adding a blog to their class. Continue reading »
