The End of the Quarter (and Year!)

As we near the end of Spring Quarter 2011, we're also putting the finishing touches on Academic Year 2010-11. These resources will help instructors get through the next two weeks and begin planning for next year:

Try adding customized questions to your online teaching evaluations.

Design tests and quizzes that assess student learning and also motivate them to engage with the material.

Be sure to submit grades through Campus Connection. As a number of faculty members have asked recently, releasing grades in D2L is not the way to record official course grades.

It's never to early to start thinking about your courses for Academic Year 2011-12. This might involve revising your syllabus, rethinking your course goals, or designing new assignments.

Spotlight on Teaching & Learning: May 2nd Edition

It's the beginning of the month, which means that a new Teaching Carnival is now available on ProfHacker!

A Prezi by Brandon Lutz called "60 in 60: Web 2.0 Tools" highlights 60 websites and applications that teachers can use to enrich their courses.

Faculty Focus offers some quick, practical tips for facilitating better discussions in class.

A Northwestern professor's post on the University of Venus blog offers a unique perspective on the quarter system

Teaching and Sustainability

DePaul's new sustainability website illustrates some of the important new initiatives taking place across the university. After learning more about sustainability at DePaul, these resources may provide some ideas for bringing the subject into the classroom:

An easy-to-use online Carbon Footprint Calculator will prompt students to consider their own impact on the environment.

Vanderbilt's Center for Teaching offers some concrete tips for teaching sustainability and points to further resources on the topic.

The Ecological Society of America provides helpful ecological fact-sheets that instructors could use to spark discussions or in-class writing exercises.

Spotlight on Teaching and Learning: April 7th Edition

This month's Teaching Carnival is now posted on ProfHacker and features dozens of carefully selected teaching articles, resources, and blog posts.

An article from Inside Higher Ed addresses the NCTE's "Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing," which points to the ways in which teachers must increasingly adapt traditional measures of "standard" student writing.

Faculty Focus offers an interesting perspective on how the language used in online discussion rubrics might not be sensitive to increasing international and cultural diversity at most schools.

Melissa from Faculty Instructional Technology Services (FITS) addresses how instructional technologies are evaluated and adopted at DePaul and why it's so important for faculty voices from across the university to be part of that process.

The First Two Weeks

Welcome back from spring "break"! Or, in reality, welcome back from your week of grading! Here are some helpful resources for the first two weeks of class:

Make the most of the first day of class and take the time to introduce yourself effectively.

Spend some time getting to know your students (without relying too heavily on the Beloit College Mindset List...).

Gauge your students' prior knowledge early in the quarter. One good way to do this is through the use of low-stakes assessment exercises.

Design effective assignments that in some way reflect the course goals and learning objectives that you articulated on the syllabus.