CFT’s and a Bias for Action

I have been posting about Centers For Teaching (CFT’s) as Centers for Excellence, inspired by my current reading of Tom Peters’ new book The Excellence Dividend: Meeting the Tech Tide with Work that Wows and Jobs that Last.  I discussed Chapters 1-4 here and Chapters 5-8 here.  This post deals with Chapters 9-12, which cover… Read more CFT’s and a Bias for Action

SLOAN Online Conference Day One

The 19th Annual SLOAN Consortium International Conference on Online Learning (did you notice…I said NINETEENTH) kicked off today.  Our keynoter this afternoon brought our attention to the fact that SLOAN has been fostering a conversation about online learning for 19 years.  With the Year of the MOOC last year notwithstanding, online learning was not discovered… Read more SLOAN Online Conference Day One

Final Week of BlendKit2012

Five weeks pass pretty rapidly! … In this final week of BlendKit2012, we focused on quality assurance.  Kelvin Thompson suggested the following questions to ponder: How will you know whether your blended learning course is sound prior to teaching it? How will you know whether your teaching of the course was effective once it has… Read more Final Week of BlendKit2012

What Does Quality Mean in the Classroom?

Last Friday, I facilitated a brown bag lunch session on “World Class Quality in University Coursework.”  If interested in listening to the conversation, I am linking to an Echo360 recording of this session. Government officials, employers, accrediting agencies, university administrators, institutional researchers, faculty, faculty development specialists, and even students all have something to share concerning… Read more What Does Quality Mean in the Classroom?

Some Rules of Thumb

My day job is faculty development at the Center for Teaching Excellence at VCU, but my doctorate is in Education Leadership, and with 22 years in the Navy, graduate hours in management beyond the Ed.D., and a half dozen business courses taught over the years, leadership remains a strong interest area of mine.  So when… Read more Some Rules of Thumb

Excellence in E-Learning

Yesterday, Tom Peters, one of my heroes, listed The 19E’s of Excellence on his business management blog: If Not Excellence, What? If Not Excellence Now, When? The “19 Es” of Excellence: Enthusiasm. (Be an irresistible force of nature!) Energy. (Be fire! Light fires!) Exuberance. (Vibrate—cause earthquakes!) Execution. (Do it! Now! Get it done! Barriers are… Read more Excellence in E-Learning

The Trust Factor

Events this week have had me thinking about “trust” as it applies to our craft. My last post was a bit of a knee jerk reaction to Stephen Downes knee jerk reaction, when he said “I can’t trust anything Sue Waters and Steve Dembo write – and that’s an unhappy state to be in.” What… Read more The Trust Factor

Truth 2.0?

There was a very interesting article by Monica Hesse in the Washington Post this past Sunday entitled “Truth: Can You Handle It?” The article starts with a well-known witty saying attributed to Abraham Lincoln: “How many legs does a dog have, if you call a tail a leg? Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn’t… Read more Truth 2.0?