Everyone hates student course evaluations. They don’t measure what students are learning or even how much good teaching is occurring (although it is probably not good to have persistent high GPAs and low student evaluations). At best, they tell us what students perceive.

It also turns out that most student evaluation forms have one predictive question, usually some version of “Would you recommend this course to your friends?” or “Your general assessment of this teacher?” All the rest is commentary.

I find it can be useful to see if a professor gets consistently low marks for “supportive of diverse ideas in the classroom,” but “How prepared was your professor for class?” or “Was the professor knowledgeable?” are completely useless.

There are great new survey tools, with tested questions,  and these should be required reading for anyone thinking of redoing their course evaluations, but student course evaluations should mostly be about improving teaching and retention.

1. Your course evaluations should reflect your institutional student goals. Reminding both faculty and students in every course will help bring focus and integration to key campus learning outcomes.

If you want to be the creativity place, then every course should ask “How much did this course improve your ability to think and work creatively?” If you want to improve the critical thinking of your graduates, the easiest and cheapest way is simply to remind students (and faculty!) that they do this in every course. Naming what we do is itself a pedagogy that works.

Every degree and department should have learning outcomes and these too should be reflected in every course evaluation: “How much did this course improve your ability to manage a business?” “How much did this course contribute to your ability to solve complex problems?”

Not every course is aligned with a single student learning outcome, and administrators will need to be sensitive to low scores in courses designed with a different purpose, but having a small and focused list of outcomes and evaluating them in every course is an extremely low cost way of improving focus.

2. Your course evaluations should reflect high impact practices and research-based pedagogies.
“How much did this course expand your appreciation for diverse ideas?” “How much did this course expand your ability to collaborate and work with others?” While these again are perceptions, they are perceptions that matter. I should also be measuring students’ actual improvement in self-regulation or motivation, but I also want to know what they think: “How much did this course expand your ability to think about your own thinking?” “How much did this course bolster your motivation to succeed in college?”

If we want faculty to make more use of active learning then asking “What percentage of class time did you spend in active learning?” (or negatively, “in passive listening?”) This will vary in different types of courses, and again, administrators will need to be sensitive to different goals. Most studio, lab and art courses will score high here, but that is not a measure of their relative quality. Still, if faculty think we lecture only 40% of the time, and students say it is 80%, this is important is good to know.

(I will note that in more than a decade of reading tenure files and sitting through P&T meetings, I find that most faculty and administrators are highly sensitive to the problematic nature of the numeric part of course evaluations. Institutions need to avoid averages, but I have never seen a tenure case fail only because of low numbers. I also think we should use course evaluations primarily for development—in the same way we should use assignments and assessments for how they can help students. I know we credential eventually, but if I wanted to spend my life sorting, I would have joined the postal service.)

If we are trying to improve teaching at our institutions, then maybe we should ask “How useful was the feedback for improving your work?”

None of this is a substitute for real assessment of learning outcomes. We need better tools to measure the actual critical thinking, creativity and cultural sensitivity of our students. At the moment, we often use the poor surrogates of grades or distribution (you took an art class or studied abroad). Requiring something only tells us about quantity or exposure (100% of students were exposed to science or passed a test in a foreign language–—yeah us!) but we need to understand about the quality of student learning. In the meantime, we should keep doing everything we can to improve learning and provide incentives for faculty to try proven pedagogies: course evaluations are low-hanging fruit.

In the end, you are what you measure. When we measure and assess, we set values and priorities. All colleges measure, but what we measure is often irrelevant. Measuring for accreditation will do little to improve our graduation rates. While it is true that much of what we do is hard to measure, or at least hard to quantify, that should not deter us. I’d rather have high standards and improving assessments, but we are the people of judgment. We evaluate all day long. We just need to turn more of our attention to better evaluation of ourselves.

Rankings in higher education don’t measure quality. Mostly they measure the status or brand of a college, so more and better applicants means a higher rank. Beyond the historical elites, most of what the public knows about colleges comes from football and basketball, both of which are essentially advertising programs for colleges. This is part of why you see so much investment here: a more visible sports program does increase applications, and often substantially.

Schools also tout their alumni networks, where the big state schools will always have more quantity and the elite privates more quality. A Harvard or a Texas transcript is about status—neither says anything about what students actually learned.

Students with the right grades and SAT scores in high school can get into a range of good colleges. The best strategy for poor students is to attend the best college they can afford: in other words, most colleges will offer a steep discount to students with better SAT scores than their current students. Students, though, often want to go to the highest ranked college to which they were accepted, and parents will either pay or borrow more money to fill these dreams. This is where colleges make money.

The average debt for graduating seniors is now almost $30,000.  When graduates borrow more money, it is often because of want, not need. At least some of the problem with college debt is because parents and students don’t want to attend a less prestigious school.

So is it worth it? Is your Ivy-league education worth $100,000 or $200,000 more than your state school?

The status of an elite degree surely has some additional value in the job market, but parents increasingly want to know the return on investment. There will always be some parents willing to pay for bragging rights, but more parents will want to know how much learning per dollar you offer. Is there really ten times more learning at a four-year college or is it just ten times the price? Will a Nobel Laureate (or her TA) really be a good teacher for introductory economics? The “draft” plan at Johns Hopkins Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, to reduce the number of graduate students (but pay them higher stipends) has drawn criticism for the suggestion that with fewer grad students to teach and fewer TAs, faculty might need to teach 3 undergraduate + 1 graduate course a year instead of 2+2.

Will a course on a college campus have more interaction than an online course, or will the teacher just stand and deliver? Colleges need to be prepared to answer these questions and how they relate to pricing and value.

University pricing resembles wine pricing: there is enormous price variation in the market, but it is difficult to tell how different the actual products are. Both wine and higher education are subject to complicated rating systems and a belief that the experts can truly tell the difference, but the abundance of exceptions seems to undermine the basic value proposition. With more than 6000 blind tastings as evidence, the relationship between wine ratings and price is small and actually negative: on average even wine experts enjoy more expensive wines less when they do not know the price! It does not matter if expensive wine is not actually better, but it tastes better if we think it costs more.

Similarly, it ultimately does not matter if a student learns more with an Ivy League education. As long as everyone else believes it is better, it will be in high demand and continue to bestow genuine benefits. In the same way that a bottle of wine is about the quality of the experience, a college degree, in the current market, is really more about buying a credential or a degree than it is about buying learning. Both consumers and providers have been willing to continue their shared misconception, since little else could justify the massive price variation in both wines and education.

Still, value will be an increasingly important proposition in the college marketplace. Parents and students already make decisions based upon cost. As competition increases and accountability provides easier ways of comparing outcomes, liberal arts colleges especially will need to justify the added expense. Knowledge is now freely available on the internet, but that only increases the value of being able to find, sort, analyze, evaluate, and synthesize that knowledge. Colleges talk about critical thinking, but we need to do more to ensure we are increasing the complexity of the mental models of our students. Employers are clamoring for graduates with better communication and thinking skills, ethical reasoning and the ability to solve complex problems. That value will only increase.

The liberal arts are under attack largely because they are misunderstood. College is the best opportunity in your life to expand your world view, think about your own thinking, expand your imagination, focus your gaze, and most importantly to prepare for the unknown. That can be delivered in different ways and at different costs, but that is our value: preparing students to explore the unknown, where they will be required to analyze new information, reinterpret what they know and maybe even, change their minds.

It’s time for course evaluations and grading: no wonder we love the end of the semester so much! Course evaluations are flawed mostly because they do not really tell us what we want to know—what did students learn and did we change them?

This semester, I’ve decided to look at my course evaluations differently. I will still look at the ratings (we all like to be liked) and even more carefully at the comments about what to improve and what went wrong. But this time, I am going to look deeply for signs that students have changed, are considering change, or might change in the future—that is the whole point of Teaching Naked.

Really, on the last day of class, a student walks by me and says “I hate your class. It changed my life.” Naturally, I ran after this student to ask,
“I’m sorry you hated my class, can you tell me more?”
“It was all of that personal, thinking about thinking, blogging, and those #$%)!! cognitive wrappers But I did figure out that I need to rethink my major and career. I realized there is a connection between my past and what I want to do in the future. I realized that I can integrate my passions, and that I really do have something I now want to do. All of that self-reflection made my other classes both harder and easier too.”

What luck! We often have to wait 20 years for this transformation, and both the student and I got the payoff and feedback immediately. This does not happen very often, and maybe it shouldn’t, but this is the change most of us seek. I am also not sure I should take too much credit. It might have just been the right moment in this student’s life, and many of the other students clearly just hated, without the epiphany.

The danger here is that it is too easy to ignore negative criticism and hope that students will look back in 20-years and thank you. It is very true that the best lessons and courses often settle months or even years later, but since we don’t track this is any systematic way, we don’t really know the long-term impact of our courses in most cases.

Still, it seems we might aim for a balance. We all know that “you can fool all of the people all of the time” (attributed to Abraham Lincoln, P.T. Barnum and a few others) but for teachers and academics it might be better with the word change or convince: “you cannot change all of the people any of the time.” So this year, I will look for signs that I changed some of the people, some of the time, and in the process did not make too many others crazy.

In “What the Best College Teachers Do” Ken Bains sums up a lot of research as basically telling us neither high standards nor supportive nurturing make much difference on their own. Together, however, they are a powerful and life changing pedagogical strategy. I see this everywhere in my research: test more often, but make each lower stakes; provide more feedback, but be both supportive and critical; challenge students without putting them down. How then, can I balance the need both to push and support change, but without pushing students away. Few of them actually want change.

I am also not sure what success looks like yet. Like great art, a great course disturbs its audience. But if it is too disturbing, the audience may withdraw (figuratively or even literally). If it is too affirming, it is just entertainment; fun, but with no real impact. So while not an excuse for low student endorsement, we need to look at our courses evaluation both for signs that students were engaged, but also that they were disturbed. It may be too early to tell what is working, but I can’t wait 20 years.

At the end of August, President Obama outlined new proposals to make college more affordable and to develop a new rating system before the fall of 2015 that will appear in the existing College Scorecard. With the start of the semester, you might have missed the details, but the plan is essential reading—note that congress does not have to approve: this will happen. I applaud the effort. Students and parents need better ways to think about the cost/benefit of college, but if these new metrics become a singular way to judge the value of college, the conversation will be far too narrow. We will, however, only have ourselves to blame.

Despite our collective and constant pleas for prospective students to think more about fit than rankings, the US News rankings continue their stranglehold on how the public, and even many of us, think about higher education. We are not going to dissuade politicians or parents to give up looking for ways measure and rank something that is so important and expensive. The real question, and the place we should put our energy, is in creating better measures for what we do.

We have a choice. We can either develop our own measures of the learning that happens on our campuses, or prepare for the White House and others to measure less meaningful things. We need to do this quickly. Note that financial aid may eventually be tied to how we do in the new ratings: “In the upcoming reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, the president will seek legislation allocating financial aid based on these college ratings by 2018, once the ratings system is well established. Students can continue to choose whichever college they want, but taxpayer dollars will be steered toward high-performing colleges that provide the best value.” Ouch!

Let’s be fair. The objectives and the general thrust on outcomes are good. Parents and students easily confuse prestige with quality and college costs too much. It is hard to argue with the political pressure for a “a new ratings system to help students compare the value offered by colleges and encourage colleges to improve.” The US News rankings rely too heavily on input measures, and if we are going to be judged, it should not be on the students we attract, but on what we do for the students we have. The U.S. Department of Education says “These ratings will compare colleges with similar missions and identify colleges that do the most to help students from disadvantaged backgrounds as well as colleges that are improving their performance.” Faculty often say to me, “just bring us better students,” but surely the real measure of success is how different colleges improve the lives of similar students. But whatever we think, there will be a new ranking system soon.

Most of what are currently being considered as outcome indicators, are quantitative, but secondary measures like graduation rates or graduate earnings.  Walter M. Kimbrough has correctly pointed out that these need to be modified with a “degree of difficulty” measure (as in judging diving).   The National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment and others  have developed other measures, but we need to do better. We must start measuring the change we hope to produce.

Prestige, better pay, better job opportunities and fun in fraternities are often seen as benefits of college. Indeed, networking and alumni connections are a valuable part of the college experience, but if we sell jobs or salaries as the only or even primary outcome measure, then we all become network facilitators.

We need instead to talk about how thinking and more complex mental models are the real engines of future success, a robust democracy and a better life. We will then, need to focus our attention on getting serious about measuring this. Are we actually changing our students and improving their ability to think?  Would they develop as quickly if we het left them alone or they got a job?  The answers may make us nervous, but we can’t improve without data.

If anyone from the White House is listening—we CAN measure learning! Please give us a chance to suggest, create and develop some better measures.

Today we launched a new teaching award in my school that will provide more support and aid for faculty groups or individuals to redesign a course or course sequence.  Technology may have increased the availability of knowledge, but it has only made critical thinking, analysis and the development of our students more important.  Technology makes course design more important than ever before, but it also creates new opportunities for rethinking the sequence of learning events.

Most of us have become very good at course delivery, but few of us have had training in course design. We could get by when course design meant selecting some content and a textbook, but it is more complicated now. According to the most recent student poll in the Almanac of Higher Education, students want instructors to make more us of course management systems, integrated use of laptops during class, online collaboration tools (like Google docs) and free online course content (like the Khan Academy).   If that sounds like a lot of work, it is, but improved course design is key to making our institutions better. This proposal is designed to help faculty find the time both to gain expertise and to develop better courses.

Since innovation and risk need to be encouraged, student course evaluations from the first two semesters of the new course will not be included in our merit or tenure decisions. You will note that some other “robust measure of success” will be required (also know as assessment), so hopefully this will encourage innovation in courses design and better assessment practices.   I am also offering up to $10,000 in financial support (including teaching relief) per proposal, but I can think of other incentives (fewer preparations, staff or TA support, perhaps) that might work where other funding is not available. I offer the entire set of guidelines below to any dean, provost or CTL director who wants to borrow the idea. (This is a model. Not an actual call for proposals outside of Meadows School faculty.)

WHO?  Any FT or regular faculty member may submit a proposal. Some priority will be given to groups where more than one person delivers the same course or departments who envision larger projects (like the redesign of an entire sequence.)

WHAT? A typical proposal might include teaching relief or summer stipend plus support (new technology, a visiting consultant, internal support, conference travel, or books).  I will be available directly to support these projects as needed. I highly recommend including this online course on course design as part of the process (and budget) http://www.deefinkandassociates.com/index.php/onlinecourse/.

 To encourage innovation and risk, student course evaluations from the first two semesters of the new course will NOT be included in merit or tenure decisions. They will be available only to the involved faculty.  Part of the project, however, should be to create a more robust measure of success. How will we know if the new design is working? Faculty will have wide latitude here, but examples might include higher retention in the program, better performance in a subsequent class, better performance in year-end juries, higher scores on a rubric, or something entirely different, but there must be some form of assessment.

WHEN?

HOW?  Read Dee Fink’s (2004) short (and free) self-directed guide for designing courses for significant learning. 

Proposals should be brief and identify

(1) the course or sequence, the number of students and the need (What is the problem? How could students be better served?)

(2) which faculty will be involved

(3) the course learning objectives

(4) what a redesign might look like (very generally, what is the idea?)

(5) a budget and what support will be needed

(6) a schedule for when this will happen

(7) what assessment measure might be used to gage success (this is not binding!) and

(8) chair approval (this can come as a separate evaluation of all departmental projects)

RULES

A. You may propose a redesign of any regularly offered courses, but there will be some priority given to entry-level, high enrollment, or frequently offered courses. These grants are not intended only to support technology or technology-driven courses, although new uses of technology are also encouraged.

B. Involved faculty must agree to continue offering the course at least three more times. New pedagogies will take practice. You can tinker with the delivery, but unless it is a disaster, we will encourage sticking with it until we know if it is the design or the delivery.

C. The department must view this as a course of continuing importance in the curriculum and agree that all faculty who teach this course over the next three years will maintain a consistent use of these learning outcomes and this course design.  (Again, if something is not working, the redesign can continue to be improved, but there needs to be a consistency of intent.)

Our understanding of intelligence, learning, the brain has exploded in the last 30 years. We’ve discovered multiple types of intelligence, neural plasticity and realized that you can teach an old dog new tricks. One of the most important discoveries is that Dewey was right: metacognition or “thinking about your thinking” can improve learning and students with math anxiety who write about it before the exam, perform better than those who just take the exam  (Ramirez & Beilock, 2011). Two different studies, one led by Marsha C. Lovett, (2013) and the other by Mary-Ann Winkelmes (2013), demonstrate how metacognition and reflection can be used to improve study habits, exam performance, and  ultimately, new, easy and fast techniques to creating more critical thinkers.

From Socrates “self-examination” to William James’ “introspective observation” and Jean Piaget’s “directed thought” self-regulation is the foundation of critical thinking (Silver, 2013). In How We Think (1910), John Dewey describes it as “Active, persistent and careful consideration of any belief or supposed form of knowledge in light of the grounds that support it, and the further considerations to which it tends.” (p. 6) For Dewey, our job is to find problems and “forked-road situations.” The critical thinker will be able “to maintain the state of doubt and to carry on systematic and protracted inquiry.” (p. 13). This “tolerance for ambiguity” is highly desired by employers and the ability to hold two opposing ideas at once without making up your mind would make an excellent graduation requirement.

Self-regulation, however, begins with self-awareness, noticing and active-monitoring. Mary-Ann Winkelmes (2013) and The Illinois Initiative on Transparency in Learning and Teaching have demonstrated that
(1) discussing the rational of assignments,
(2) connecting “how people learn” data with activities and
(3) debriefing grades, tests and assignments in class,
significantly improve student learning, increase retention and are especially beneficial to under-represented groups, transfer students and non-traditional students. YES! Read that again!! Simply being more transparent in class (F2F!) about why we assign what we do and connecting it to stated learning goals is especially beneficial to students with less family experience of college.  (Their website, http://www.teachingandlearning.illinois.edu/transparency.html provides much more detail about exactly which techniques were most important in which disciplines and inwhich types of classes.)

At the same time, Marsha C. Lovett, (2013), and her colleagues at Carnegie Mellon have demonstrated that exam wrappers, provide a quick and easy way to improve student learning, connect learning and thinking habits across disciplines. Exam wrappers are a very short survey (online or a single sheet of paper) given to students with assignment or exam feedback. You can find their excellent examples of their math and science wrappers at www.learningwrappers.org

I like to call these “cognitive wrappers” since the research point I like to remember is that we help students become critical thinkers most, by helping them learn to self-regulate. Ultimately, only the students themselves can decide to adopt a more complex mental model, but we have to provide the situations that generate “optimal conflict” (again Piaget, but also James Mark Baldwin, Heinz Werner and Lawrence Kohlberg) in what Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey (2009) summarize as:

• “The persistent experience of some frustration, dilemma, life puzzle, quandary, or personal problem that is…
• Perfectly designed to cause us to feel the limits of our current way of knowing…
• In some sphere of our living that we care about, with…
• Sufficient supports so that we are neither overwhelmed by the conflict nor able to escape or diffuse it.” (p. 54)

I find it significant that the neurologists, developmental psychologists, the organizational business gurus, residential life professionals, therapists and educational theorists have all come to the same conclusion. Kegan and Lahey are writing about organizational change, but their formulation seems remarkably like Dee Fink’s version of how we craft significant learning experiences or William Perry writing about Harvard students in 1970.  It is not enough just to care, or just to have high standards, or even just to provide provocative situations for students. Pedagogy and learning design are essential if we want to move students to more advanced models of thought.

Note that metacognition is a complex set of skills including self-awareness (knowing your strengths and weaknesses), understanding learning goals, planning an approach to learning, monitoring, evaluating performance, reflecting and adjusting. Metacognition (like critical thinking) is often discipline specific and is best learned with subject content: generic study skills courses have not proven effective. Repeated exposure to transparently announced and labeled critical thinking in different contexts, however, greatly helps students to create more transferrable thinking skills.

So cognitive wrappers provide an easy way to get your students thinking about how they learn and how they might self-regulate more. I think we might extend this idea in two ways. First, I work in an art school, and preparation for lessons, rehearsals, performances and classes, is just as important and requires just as much self-regulation as preparation for exams. Why not use wrappers for some of these very different activities? Second, while not an explicit part of the Carnegie Mellow exam wrappers, some of their examples provide a rationale for the assignment, and are given to students at the beginning. Here is a model for a four-part wrapper:

Rationale: This is only to help you improve.
Reflection: How did you prepare for this exam?
Comparison: What kinds of mistakes did you make?
Adjustment: How will you prepare differently next time?

Wrappers work best when they are discipline specific, but used simultaneously in different contexts in different classes. How is studying for an art history exam different than practicing for a lesson or doing calculus homework? Students need both to understand that (a) self-regulation is a part of improving each of these activities and (b) the adjustments will be different for each type of learning.

Writing, for example, is activity that really consists of multiple types of work and preparation. So the wrapper for a paper might ask:     What % of your preparation time was spent on each of these activities?

1. Reading ___
2. Reading and taking notes ___
3. Re-reading ___
4. Finding online content ___
5. Thinking ___
6. Brainstorming or Conceptualizing ___
7. Sharing Ideas with others ___
8. Preparing ___
9. Researching ___
10. Drafting ___
11. Editing ___

While the wrapper for a problem set or science might ask: What % of your preparation time was spent on each of these activities?

1. Reading textbook section(s) for the first time ___
2. Re-reading textbook section(s) ___
3. Reading/studying other materials ___
4. Re-reading and taking notes ___
5. Finding online content ___
6. Solving problems for practice ___
7. Reviewing homework solutions ___
8. Reviewing your own notes ___
9. Reviewing concepts and ideas ___
10. Memorizing formulas ___

The wrapper for a performance class might include: What % of your preparation time was spent on each of these activities?

1. Listening to performances ___
2. Finding new repertoire ___
3. Brainstorming or Conceptualizing ___
4. Experimenting ___
5. Sharing Ideas with others ___
6. Practicing technique ___
7. Working on new material ___
8. Analyzing posture ___
9. Working on problems ___
10. Playing through pieces ___
11. Resting ___
12. Memorizing ___
13. Playing for fun ___

Wrappers should be brief, easy, flexible and specific to both the discipline and the specific task at hand. The idea is to help students understand that they need to understand their strengths and weakness, assess their own performance, identify strategies that work for them and make adjustment. This self-regulation is important for its own sake, as a performance enhancer, but also as a key element of critical thinking. Yoga for the mind.

There is a single general template with lots of types of questions for you to personalize at https://teachingnaked.com/handouts/

• Dewey, J. (1910), How We Think, Boston: Heath.
• Lovett, M. C. (2013), “Make exams worth more than grades: Using exam wrappers to promote metacognition” in Using reflection and metacognition to improve student learning, Kaplan, M, Silver, N, Lavaque-Manty, D., Meizlish, D., ed. San Francisco: Sterling, VA: Stylus. www.learningwrappers.org
• Kegan, R., Lahey, L. L. (2009) Immunity to Change: How to Overcome it and unlock the potential in yourself and your organization 9Harvard Business Review Press)
• Ramirez, G. & Beilock, L. (2011). “Writing about testing worries boosts exam performances in the classroom. Science, 331 (6014), 211-213.
• Silver, N. (2013) “Reflective pedagogies and the metacognitive turn in college teaching. In Using reflection and metacognition to improve student learning, Kaplan, M, Silver, N, Lavaque-Manty, D., Meizlish, D., ed. San Francisco: Sterling, VA: Stylus.
• Winkelmes, M (2013), “Transparency in teaching: Faculty share data and improve students’ learning” Liberal Education 99/2 (Spring 2013), 48-55. See also Illinois Initiative on Transparency in Learning and Teaching, for http://go.illinois.edu/transparentmethods

OK, you still want to see students F2F–faculty interactions after all are consistently cited as the most important learning opportunity in college. (Keep in mind, students rarely see class time as high quality faculty interaction!)  But, the world has changed and there are now many more opportunities for student interaction outside of the classroom.

First, remember, your office is a SCARY place.  You are old. You have degrees many students have never even heard of and you have stacks of these funny old book things. Many students would never consider going to your office hours: it would mean they are failing or trying to suck up.  I advise the Hispanic fraternity on my campus and when we were constructing an academic plan that included study hours and the like, I suggested including ONE visit to office hours. SHOCK!!  Oh no, we couldn’t. Wouldn’t that be a hardship on our professors? Good students don’t do that, etc.  It is actually traumatic for many students. Read Rebecca Cox, College Fear Factor (Harvard Univ Press) if you really want to know what college feels like to many students today.

Second, the barrier to communication is much lower on chat, email or Facebook.  And it may actually be more important for your students to get smaller and more timely interaction than telling you their life story over coffee.  In any case, the prerequisite for F2F interaction is now often social media. (If you really want to know how things have changed, ask students about dating or how they find romantic partners. Yes, there is now an app for that:  Tinder.  fathers of daughters, I’d skip the next part: in other words, if they would rather have casual sex with someone they have only met online rather than a person they meet in a bar, how are you going to get them to come to your office hours as a first step?)

So consider creating an E-communication Policy for your syllabus.

1. Establish how you will communicate   How to contact you is vastly more important to most students than your office hours!

• The best way to contact me is: ________________ (email, FB, Google+, LinkedIn)
•  I will respond to e-mail (or FB chat, messages etc.) within _____ hours,
•           except on ___ or between ________ (9pm and 9am etc.)
•   I also accept/do not accept chat/Skype/Facebook/LinkedIn friend requests.

2. Create a schedule for yourself

• When is the best time or the best day of the week to announce new assignments?
• When are students most likely to need your help?

3. Be clear and consistent about what information is in which channel

• Example: use email for announcements but Facebook for questions.
•  Do not mix the personal and the professional.

4. Limit the forms of communication.

•    Don’t do everything.
•    Limit duplication (but DO archive all email in your LMS!)
•    Ask students for feedback
•    Stick to your plan; do not randomly change your mode of communication

EXAMPLES:
1. Communication with Me:
Email: prof@XU.edu (I will answer email within 24 hours, usually sooner.)
Facebook: I will respond to questions on the Fb Group page within 24 hours.  Everyone can see the questions and the answers. If someone else has the answer, don’t wait for me.
Physical Office Hours: Mon-Wed 2-3 (just after class in the atrium lounge.)
Chat: I will be in the Google hangout on Tuesday from 7-8. If you see me on Fb or Skype, you can chat with me there too.
Phone: 111 My Office
Appointment: If you want to see me live outside of office hours, email me.

2. Communication:
I am very responsive, but not always at my computer.
Email: prof@XU.edu (I will answer email within 4 hours between 1pm and 5pm, MWF.)
Facebook: This class has a private Fb Group where I will post articles, video and questions. You should check it 3x a week.  I will be there and respond as needed (within a few hours) most MWF afternoons.
Chat: You can also ask me private individual questions when I am on Fb. I will announce virtual office hours when I will do chat and Skype as needed.
Physical Office Hours: If you want to see me live outside of class, email me.
Phone: 111 My Cell: use for texts between 7-9pm most evenings and I will respond.

More examples at teachingnaked.com or in Teaching Naked.

The first day of class is a terrific opportunity to motivate students, demonstrate why your subject matters, create a greater sense of wonder, and surprise students with how your class might change how they look at the world. All of us want class time for what really matters, so here is a way to reclaim your first day.

Do NOT hand out a syllabus. Instead post the syllabus on your course website, in your LMS or in an email you will send later in the day. If you simply must distribute hard copies, then leave by the door at the END of class. Students are shopping the first week, so if you hand them a syllabus, they will immediately look for how much work you are demanding. You don’t have to encourage this behavior. Don’t distract them on the first day.

We are constantly telling students that this is not high school, and that in college they will be required to manage more for themselves, and then we spend the first day of class making sure we read the syllabus to them.

Instead, try an online SYLLABUS QUIZ that is due before the next class. You can do this online in your LMS. You could even use a polling system like Socrative. The important part is that you point them to what really matters in your syllabus: What are the learning outcomes? What will studying for this class be like? What will some of the benefits be? They will figure out for themselves when the papers are due and how many tests there are. (Ok, you might direct them to the late policy in your quiz.)

The benefits of this strategy are many:

1. You free up the first class period for MUCH more important work. Play a game. Do something dramatic. Inspire them with a great example. Just have fun.

2. You will get them in the habit of checking their campus email. You don’t care if they have 6 other emails. But if you tell them this email will be used all semester long for important information –like links to the syllabus and tests—they will make sure they read it. If you don’t abuse this with 12 emails a day—AND you do not make announcements in class– they will read what you send.

3. You also model that class time is valuable and that class is worth attending. That person who skipped the first day, and asked his roommate to pick up an extra syllabus, will find out that class was inspiring, interesting and insightful, and that there were no notes, but the experience was important. Make your class into a gourmet meal instead of fast food: you don’t want the description to be equal or even better than the experience.

4. Students will get feedback right away. All of our research tells us that students need more low stakes assessment and more feedback. They need both nurturing/engaged professors and high standards. It has to be both. One alone does not work nearly as well. Show them immediately both that you care and that they will learn. Have fun and be passionate on the first day and then make sure the first test is hard enough that they have to think. Before the next class it is gone and you and the class more on.

5. It is fast and easy.  Learn how to write better multiple choice questions (that will be graded automatically in your LMS, here (workshop C) or in Teaching Naked.

So start class with only one announcement: “You will get a link to the syllabus and a syllabus quiz immediately after class. The quiz is due before the next class. I will stay after class if you have questions.” Then do what you always wish you had time to do.

You will never get this chance again.

Just in time for your fall prep, Garin Horner and Michelle Hiscock have produced an amazing and searchable list of FREE online technology for the classroom.  All of the basics plus loads for the expert: everyone will find something new and useful here.

Here are a few highlights:

bubbl.us A free mind map and brainstorming tool

http://www.capzles.com  All your media, your life, your stories together like never before: combine documents, photos, video, blogs and music to create rich multimedia experiences.

http://fetchvideo.com Download any video to your hard drive with a simple copy and paste.

 http://www.forvo.com/ the world’s largest pronunciation dictionary, all the words in all languages pronounced by native speakers.

http://www.overstream.net Add subtitles to any video.

http://rubistar.4teachers.org A free rubric tool.

http://www.slideshare.net  One of the world’s most poplar site is really a depository of slide presentations, pots, pdfs, documents and videos.   Free for you to use and alter, no wonder.

You get the idea.  It is a great one-stop shop for your educational technology.

Not on their list, but here is a great new content site: CrashCourse. http://www.youtube.com/user/crashcourse 

These are short (10-15 min) summaries of popular topics in history, chemistry and literature. They are clever, hilarious and beautifully produced at a fast pace that is guaranteed to entertain college students. Many have over 1,000,000 hits, so already very popular.  Just news to me.

Free Rice: Start by playing a few rounds of Free Rice, a free quiz site that donates 10 grains of rice to the World Food Program  for each correct answer.  Your students will love both aspects.  Browse famous paintings, human anatomy,  languages and more.

For Historians, if you have still not spent any time with Reacting to the Past, prepare to have your life altered:  Look also at Reading Like a Historian,  a website with 87 topics (so far) using documents from the Library of Congress.

Your Website: If you don’t have a website, you need one. Yes, the website is rapidly replacing the resume as the first impression (and it should include your CV.)

The easiest is to use are about.me  or Weebly, but there are loads of options. You can get information about  options in this NYT article: Building Your Own Web Site, Free

Social Media: Facebook is another way to do this too.  But think of Facebook as three tools in one and figure out which you want to you.

1. You can create a Facebook Profile (this is a personal space where you collect friends; many professors will not accept friend requests from students).

2. But you probably need a Facebook Page (which is a professional site that people can only “like” not friend.)

3. And then there are Facebook Groups, which students can “join”, but there is no friending or liking involved.  So a Facebook group for your course can be quite separate from you other Fb activities if you want.

I strongly recommend that you try ONE new way to communicate with your students this fall.  Do not establish multiple new channels of communication.  If you are new, I suggest you try either Twitter or a Facebook Group.   Twitter is more hip, and will probably give you more new things you can do, but it is a more radical change to your thinking. It will take you longer to start to understand how this can help your students.

A Facebook Group is more like a discussion page in an LMS.  The key is that you really dedicate a little consistent time to this- you do not need to be on all day long, but you need to be on EVERY DAY for just a little time.

Audio: If you need to manipulate sound files easily Audacity  is a great editor for sound files  and Soundation offers multi-track recording in a free app.

Prezi: If you do not yet have a stash of ppt presentations, OR, you are committed–really committed–to making your ppt presentations into better learning tools (which means a LOT less content) then Prezi might be for you. It makes me a little seasick, but done well, you can have all of your content available to students ( no more emailing ppt!) and present material in a more connected way.