AMEE 2014

This poster of our team will be presented at AMEE' 2014. 
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Roberto Z. Esteves ( rze.meduem@uol.com.br )
Educação Médica Blog

Edgar Morin

Entrevista Edgar Morin: é preciso educar os educadores

Fonte: O Globo

"Ensinamos apenas o aluno a ser um indivíduo adaptado à sociedade, mas ele também precisa se adaptar aos fatos e a si mesmo." - Edgar Morin Edgar Morin, sociólogo e filósofo francês, retorna ao Brasil para conferência magna no evento Educação 360, que acontece no Rio de Janeiro, nos dias 05 e 06 de setembro, e conta com outros convidados como Pierre Lévy e Shukla Bose. Em entrevista ao O Globo, Morin critica o modelo ocidental de ensino e diz que o professor tem uma missão social, por isso, segundo ele, “é preciso educar os educadores”. Leia abaixo: O Globo: Na sua opinião, como seria o modelo ideal de educação?   Edgar Morin: A figura do professor é determinante para a consolidação de um modelo “ideal” de educação. Através da Internet, os alunos podem ter acesso a todo o tipo de conhecimento sem a presença de um professor. Então eu pergunto, o que faz necessária a presença de um professor? Ele deve ser o regente da orquestra, observar o fluxo desses conhecimentos e elucidar as dúvidas dos alunos. Por exemplo, quando um professor passa uma lição a um aluno, que vai buscar uma resposta na Internet, ele deve posteriormente corrigir os erros cometidos, criticar o conteúdo pesquisado. É preciso desenvolver o senso crítico dos alunos. O papel do professor precisa passar por uma transformação, já que a criança não aprende apenas com os amigos, a família, a escola. Outro ponto importante: é necessário criar meios de transmissão do conhecimento a serviço da curiosidade dos alunos. O modelo de educação, sobretudo, não pode ignorar a curiosidade das crianças. O Globo: Quais são os maiores problemas do modelo de ensino atual?   Edgar Morin: O modelo de ensino que foi instituído nos países ocidentais é aquele que separa os conhecimentos artificialmente através das disciplinas. E não é o que vemos na natureza. No caso de animais e vegetais, vamos notar que todos os conhecimentos são interligados. E a escola não ensina o que é o conhecimento, ele é apenas transmitido pelos educadores, o que é um reducionismo. O conhecimento complexo evita o erro, que é cometido, por exemplo, quando um aluno escolhe mal a sua carreira. Por isso eu digo que a educação precisa fornecer subsídios ao ser humano, que precisa lutar contra o erro e a ilusão. O Globo: O senhor pode explicar melhor esse conceito de conhecimento?   Edgar Morin: Vamos pensar em um conhecimento mais simples, a nossa percepção visual. Eu vejo as pessoas que estão comigo, essa visão é uma percepção da realidade, que é uma tradução de todos os estímulos que chegam à nossa retina. Por que essa visão é uma fotografia? As pessoas que estão longe são pequenas, e vice-versa. E essa visão é reconstruída de forma a reconhecermos essa alteração da realidade, já que todas as pessoas apresentam um tamanho similar. Todo conhecimento é uma tradução, que é seguido de uma reconstrução, e ambos os processos oferecem o risco do erro. Existe outro ponto vital que não é abordado pelo ensino: a compreensão humana. O grande problema da humanidade é que todos nós somos idênticos e diferentes, e precisamos lidar com essas duas ideias que não são compatíveis. A crise no ensino surge por conta da ausência dessas matérias que são importantes ao viver. Ensinamos apenas o aluno a ser um indivíduo adaptado à sociedade, mas ele também precisa se adaptar aos fatos e a si mesmo. O Globo: O que é a transdisciplinaridade, que defende a unidade do conhecimento?   Edgar Morin: As disciplinas fechadas impedem a compreensão dos problemas do mundo. A transdisciplinaridade, na minha opinião, é o que possibilita, através das disciplinas, a transmissão de uma visão de mundo mais complexa. O meu livro “O homem e a morte” é tipicamente transdisciplinar, pois busco entender as diferentes reações humanas diante da morte através dos conhecimentos da pré-história, da psicologia, da religião. Eu precisei fazer uma viagem por todas as doenças sociais e humanas, e recorri aos saberes de áreas do conhecimento, como psicanálise e biologia. O Globo: Como a associação entre a razão e a afetividade pode ser aplicada no sistema educacional?   Edgar Morin: É preciso estabelecer um jogo dialético entre razão e emoção. Descobriu-se que a razão pura não existe. Um matemático precisa ter paixão pela matemática. Não podemos abandonar a razão, o sentimento deve ser submetido a um controle racional. O economista, muitas vezes, só trabalha através do cálculo, que é um complemento cego ao sentimento humano. Ao não levar em consideração as emoções dos seres humanos, um economista opera apenas cálculos cegos. Essa postura explica em boa parte a crise econômica que a Europa está vivendo atualmente. O Globo: A literatura e as artes deveriam ocupar mais espaço no currículo das escolas? Por quê?   Edgar Morin: Para se conhecer o ser humano, é preciso estudar áreas do conhecimento como as ciências sociais, a biologia, a psicologia. Mas a literatura e as artes também são um meio de conhecimento. Os romances retratam o indivíduo na sociedade, seja por meio de Balzac ou Dostoiévski, e transmitem conhecimentos sobre sentimentos, paixões e contradições humanas. A poesia é também importante, nos ajuda a reconhecer e a viver a qualidade poética da vida. As grandes obras de arte, como a música de Beethoven, desenvolvem em nós um sentimento vital, que é a emoção estética, que nos possibilita reconhecer a beleza, a bondade e a harmonia. Literatura e artes não podem ser tratadas no currículo escolar como conhecimento secundário. O Globo: Qual a sua opinião sobre o sistema brasileiro de ensino?   Edgar Morin: O Brasil é um país extremamente aberto a minhas ideias pedagógicas. Mas, a revolução do seu sistema educacional vai passar pela reforma na formação dos seus educadores. É preciso educar os educadores. Os professores precisam sair de suas disciplinas para dialogar com outros campos de conhecimento. E essa evolução ainda não aconteceu. O professor possui uma missão social, e tanto a opinião pública como o cidadão precisam ter a consciência dessa missão. [ Leia esta entrevista no site do O Globo ] Assista a Morin no Fronteiras.com, inscreva-se em nosso canal do YouTube e acompanhe os novos vídeos. Edgar Morin - Os limites do conhecimento na globalização | No vídeo exclusivo, Morin reflete sobre seus interesses enquanto filósofo e sociólogo: os limites do conhecimento e da razão, bem como a relação entre a poesia e a racionalidade. Ainda, questiona a possibilidade da mudança de pensamento em um mundo globalizado e acelerado. É possível sairmos de uma visão fechada em formas particulares para o pensamento complexo, capaz de ver os problemas em sua integralidade?

Teaching

I Used to Be a Good Teacher

Alice Umber*

    Original image: Norman Rockwell's "Happy Birthday, Miss Jones."

 

I spent five years on the tenure track. Now I’m an adjunct, and the move has affected my teaching in ways I didn’t anticipate. I’m not the teacher I once was, largely thanks to the lack of support I receive as an adjunct. Sadly, my students suffer the loss.

I was an excellent teacher on the tenure track, and my evaluations—both from students and colleagues—consistently said so. When I began the job, I had a heavy 4/4 undergraduate teaching load and little classroom experience. But thanks, in part, to my departmental colleagues, who generously gave me their time, advice, and encouragement and shared ideas and materials with me, I quickly improved. In those early years, the countless conversations I had with them about pedagogy, students, and classroom content inspired and helped me to hone my teaching skills. Meanwhile, I dedicated myself to revising old courses and developing new ones. I guest-lectured in my colleagues’ classes and later co-taught with them too.

I also got university support—in the form of course buyouts, seminar funding, professional-development workshops, service-learning resources, etc.—that allowed me to take my teaching to the next level. I designed community service-learning courses and collaborative research seminars. I took students to conferences to present their original research. I helped run internship fairs for students and mentored them throughout their required senior practicum. I got to know them and the university well, and was therefore able to mentor themin their studies and help them navigate campus life. I served as the department’s undergraduate advisor and gladly supervised students’ honors theses, wrote them recommendation letters, and helped them complete graduate-school applications.

I did all this with the backing of my department, which was invested in building my teaching skills. And I did it through hard work—spurred by the enticement of tenure and paid for partly in a lopsided work-life balance.

In hindsight, I probably did too much: I willingly let teaching eat up my time, and when I tried to dedicate more time for research, I couldn’t seem to find a path that would also allow me to have a home life. I searched for successful academic mothers, and what I saw were models I couldn’t imitate. I convinced myself that I didn’t really have the drive for the tenure track, even at this somewhat small-time state university. Teaching was all I really wanted to do and I thought I could focus on it in a different kind of position. So I quit before going up for tenure.

I had other reasons for walking away: worry and stress from campus politics; financial anxiety from the high cost of living and my low assistant-professor salary, made worse by the fact that my husband hadn’t secured permanent work locally and by my family’s dislike for the region where we were living. I relinquished a tenure-track job so that my family could move back to the city my husband and I still considered home, and so he could take a job there. (Yes, I know. Volumes could be said about that choice, including its gendered nature. Suffice it to say that thanks to the economic downturn, I soon realized what a dumb mistake I’d made. And lest I forget, my father—himself a Ph.D. who worked his entire career for the same national lab—kept reminding me that I’d “thrown away my career.”)

After we moved, I had a second child and then started teaching as an adjunct at an institution similar to the one I left. I’ve now been an adjunct for almost as long as I was an assistant professor, and feel like I’ve been regressing, slowly negating the strides I’d made on the tenure track. The experience students have in my courses is a weak approximation of what I once provided. That pains me, as teaching is important to me, even more so now that I’ve lost the other assets of my tenure-track job (prestige, career advancement, stability, and a pension), and the pride I derive from my mission as an educator is all that’s left.

I’m not suggesting that adjuncts are poorer teachers than tenure-track professors (except in the fiscal sense), only that the very limited institutional support so many of us receive undermines our teaching; at least it has mine. No matter how dedicated I am to my teaching or how hard I work, I simply can’t do for students as an adjunct what I could when I was an integral part of a department and a university.

For starters, I teach in a vacuum. While I’m assigned classes and (sometimes) given course outlines or sample syllabi, after that initial exchange of information, I teach my courses in almost total isolation. In my previous job, one of the first things I learned was how the sequence of required courses in the major fit together to create a foundation, continuity, and a discipline-specific education for our majors. That I ever possessed such knowledge now seems like such a luxury to me.

These days I focus on the courses I teach without any sense of how they relate to the overall curriculum, the hoped-for outcomes for majors, or the sequence of skills or knowledge being developed. The unfortunate side effect of this is that I’m less aware of any prior training and experience students might bring to my classes. And the less I know about them, the less able I’m able to tailor my classes to their needs.

I likewise know little about the goals of the department, and, frankly, I miss having a shared vision of departmental mission (or at least an open debate about it). In my current position, I decide how to portray my discipline in my courses. But I don’t know how that portrayal jibes with other courses in the department, or whether there’s any overlap. When I was on the tenure track, such disciplinary questions were regularly addressed in departmental meetings or planning retreats, and in conversations with colleagues down the hall.

My office is far removed from the rest of the department, and, as I share it with three other instructors, I spend no time there beyond designated office hours. The remoteness leaves me few, if any, opportunities to exchange information about students with my colleagues. That’s a shame, as knowing students and sharing that knowledge made me a better mentor in my previous job.

While I once used my involvement with the broader university community to help first-generation students successfully navigate the university, I now have only general advice to give, as I don’t know the players or the campus, and I’m not around much. I’ve tried, of course, to familiarize myself with this university on my own, but, from my place on the fringes of daily campus life, and sans any formal or informal support, it’s easier said than done.

What’s more, there’s scant support for offering professional development opportunities to adjuncts. Programs that once helped me create service-learning courses and interdepartmental research seminars, and learn new technologies aren’t as readily available to me now that I’m off the tenure track. While I understand why the university wouldn’t want to expend resources to enhance the skills of “temporary” employees, isn’t it troubling that so much teaching is done by workers who have so few opportunities to perfect their pedagogical skills?

Of course, the university doesn’t actually bar adjuncts from taking part in some of the professional-development opportunities on campus, but we must pursue these on our own uncompensated time. (To which I say: What time? If you’re teaching numerous courses just to make ends meet, these opportunities might as well be prohibited.) I try to take advantage of them when I can. But my sub-prof status sometimes makes me feel unwelcome at these events.

Here’s a case in point: Shortly after starting here, I received an email invitation to attend an instructional-technology presentation in the department about an important software update. I opted to go and while waiting for the presentation to begin, I was asked by a professor, who had interviewed me when I was hired, which department I taught for. I was taken aback by the question, as everyone in the room was from my department, and he was one of the few people in the room I had met. There was, I suddenly realized, no expectation that adjuncts would take advantage of this type of resource, so my presence was a surprise. These days, I understand why: Now that I usually teach a full load of four courses for the department, I have little time for such sessions.

Yet I’m still expected to learn new skills. So I’ve adopted a do-it-yourself approach. For example, in recent years the department asked me to teach courses online. When I was first offered these courses, no one seemed bothered in the least that I hadn’t taught online before. While my chair kindly suggested I talk with someone in the instructional-technology center, that was the extent of the departmental support I received. So over the winter break I met with the center’s helpful online-course-design maven, who showed me the ropes. I started teaching online two short weeks later. I’ve taught online every quarter since then, and am slowly improving, but it requires a whole new pedagogical approach and a lot of trial and error. I even took it upon myself to sign up for a MOOC about online teaching, but it imploded in the first week under the burden of high enrollment. (It’s probably a bad omen when a MOOC about online teaching crumbles under its own weight.)

I worry that my online teaching kind of sucks, but my department doesn’t seem concerned. Perhaps I should take that as a sign of its confidence in me, but I fear that it’s an indication that my chair doesn’t have time to worry much about the job I’m doing. I recently shared with her my concern about the quality of my online classes, only to have her encourage me to make less of an effort. “You don’t have to read all their writing,” she told me. “Sometimes you know before the final who is going to get an A or a B.”

The sad thing is, I really miss the conversations I used to have with colleagues about teaching -- the shared ideas and collaborative problem-solving. I miss, too, the expectation that I should be a skilled teacher who is regularly evaluated and who works to improve. I worry that I’m slipping into stasis, that I’ll find myself making less and less effort to up my teaching game, as there’s no long-term benefit to adding to my already overburdened schedule, and zero opportunity for professional advancement. 

I doubt most students know which of their professors are adjuncts or even what an “adjunct” is, but my status as one surely affects their experience. Instructor well-being and student-learning outcomes are linked, as labor activists say. But, as my experience shows, it’s not just a slogan. Poor labor conditions affect the product of that labor, and I’m a poorer teacher partly because I’m poorer. Without recognition, backing, career prospects, or job stability, I’m less than I could be if I were better supported. Even if I had an indomitable spirit and deep pockets, my teaching would be diminished by my detachment from the department, the university, and the students. I think students should be bothered by the fact that I am a one-off. I think students deserve the teacher I was and not the teacher I’ve become. 

* Alice Umber is the pseudonym of an adjunct professor of human development at a university in California.

 

See more at: 
https://chroniclevitae.com/news/668-i-used-to-be-a-good-teacher#sthash.BLM91GzJ.dpuf

Focus groups

How to Use Google Hangouts as an Online Focus Group Platform

by Ivana Taylor

All of my marketing life, I’ve dreamed of doing focus groups more often.  But those corporate style focus groups were always over the budget and out of reach.  I’ve always wondered how much more successful some of my campaigns or product launches would have been had I been able to interact with out target customers face-to-face.

Google Hangouts as an Online Focus Group Tool

Have you ever considered using Google Hangouts as an online focus group tool?  I’m going to assume that you hadn’t.  So here is my quick guide to running an online focus group on Google Hangouts.

1. Start with Google Hangouts on Air:  You’re going to need to have a Google+ profile in order to run a Google Hangout on Air.
2. Schedule your Hangout on Air — you’ll want to make it “private or unlisted” here is how

Start an unlisted Hangout On Air

• Go to Hangouts On Air
• Click Start a Hangout On Air.
• Fill in the name and description for your broadcast.
• Choose to start Now or Later.
• In the “Audience” box, delete Public.
• Then type the names of the people or circles you want to invite to the Hangout On Air or click Add more people to browse from the list of names.
• Click Share. This will automatically share the link with only the people you chose to invite to the event.

Once you create an unlisted Hangout On Air, you can’t change the event’s sharing setting to public later and vice versa. But you can share the Hangout On Air with more people by clicking Invite more from the event page or directly sharing the event’s or video’s URL.

3. You can also get a transcript from your hangout: To get a transcript from your hangout, all you need to do is go to your unlisted You Tube video of your hangout and click on the transcript icon.

How to start using Hangouts as your focus group tool

Now that I’ve shown you how to mechanically use Hangouts as your online focus group tool, I’m going to show you how to put this strategy into place for your market research needs.

Recruiting participants using circles

To use Hangouts as a focus group tool, you will want to start working on creating your circles and following the audience that you intend to invite to your online focus group.  Be sure to start months in advance because there is a limit as to how many people you can add to your circles and any extreme high-volume additions of people to circles will “jinx” your profile and limit how many people you can easily invite to participate in your hangouts.

Create an Hangout Event and Invite your Participants

Your next step is to create an event for your Hangout.  You’ll want to schedule it at a future date and time and then you can invite your circles and/or specific individuals.  Like most events only about 20% of the people who say they will attend your live Hangout will actually show up.  If it’s a private Hangout, you will want to make sure that you have solid candidates who will be your “guests”.

How to start the Hangout on Air

About 30 minutes before your Hangout on Air, you can click over to your event page and click on “start” to enter the hangout space. That’s called the “greenroom”.  It’s a great idea to get into the room early and to start adding your guests to the room.

The facilitator of the session will be the facilitator of the hangout on air.  The clients (who would normally be in the room behind the two-way mirror) can be invited to the Hangout without being part of the 9 person panel.

When you are ready to start the hangout, simply click on “start broadcast” and the hangout will go live and will start being recorded.

From this point on, you are in standard focus group facilitator mode, and can run the Hangout like you would any other session.

Once the Hangout is complete, you can stop the broadcast and the recording will stop.  When the session recording stops, everyone will still be on the panel.  No one will drop off of the hangout until they close the application or they hang up.

Why consider Hangouts as an online focus group option

1.  It’s FREE.  Sorry, but I just have to list this first.  I’ve spoken with people who have used far more expensive tools with similar features.
2. It’s easy to use and doesn’t require a download:  Since the platform is on Google, there is no need to download anything.  All you need is an internet connection.
3. It has a broad geographic reach to a diverse audience.  343 million people use Google+.  Granted, it’s not the 1.2 billion that Facebook has, but it’s still substantial.
4. 9+1 people panel:  Google Hangouts allows a total of 10 people in the panel.  So that is the facilitator plus 9 panel participants.  That’s practically a full size focus group

If you’ve been thinking about doing focus groups, but putting the whole thing off because of cost – don’t.  Of course, nothing can come close to the read deal, but Google Hangouts on Air can give you 80% of the focus group value for almost no cost at all.

 

About Ivana Taylor

Ivana Taylor is the publisher of DIYMNarketers.com a resource for entrepreneurs who want do LESS marketing and make MORE money. In 2010 she ranked #21 out of 30,000 influential people on the Internet. She is the book editor for Small Business Trends, a contributing author to AMEX Open Forum and has appeared on MSNBC.

Technology for Education

Nearly 75 Percent of Faculty Incorporated Technology into their Teaching in the Past Year

By: Mary Bart

When it comes to technology in the classroom, phrases like “faculty resistance” and the importance of getting “faculty buy-in” are tossed around with great frequency. But is that perception still valid? Are all instructors so set in their ways, skeptical of anything new, and fearful of deviating from what they’ve done that it’s nearly impossible to get them to try something new?

Hardly. Just look at the results of the Faculty Focus reader survey conducted earlier this year. A full 73.67 percent of readers who took the survey said they incorporated technology into their class during the past year. It was the third most popular activity, exceeded only by an impressive 85.81 percent who attended a professional development workshop or conference and 83.92 percent who used a rubric. 

During the past year, have you engaged in the following:

	Yes	No	N/A
Incorporated a new technology into your course	73.67%	20.58%	5.76%
Taught a capstone course	23.88%	61.38%	14.75%
Taught a service learning course	24.02%	62.92%	13.06%
Used a rubric	83.92%	11.38%	4.71%
Attended a professional development workshop or conference	85.81%	12.71%	1.47%
Taught a course you’ve never taught before	50.91%	42.28%	6.81%
Taught a flipped course	27.18%	62.71%	10.11%
Participated in a faculty mentoring program	40.80%	52.39%	6.81%

That was one of the key findings from the annual survey, which was distributed to Faculty Focus readers this spring seeking their feedback on everything from their biggest day-to-day challenges to the types of articles they’re most interested in reading. And, like last year, we asked if their job was more difficult than it was five years ago. Of those who responded, 48.38% said “more difficult.” This was a slight, but statistically insignificant, dip from 50% in 2013. More than a third (35.54%) said “about the same,” 9.53 said “less difficult,” and for 6.55% the question didn’t apply. 

For those who find their job more challenging, the reasons are varied, but largely unchanged from the previous year. Many readers commented that today’s students seem less prepared and less motivated for the rigors of college, are more likely to argue about assignments and grades, and often have unrealistic expectations for how quickly faculty should respond to emails. Some mentioned larger classes or a heavier course load, while for others it’s keeping up with technology (often without proper training on how to use it), or a move to an online or blended classroom that’s adding extra hours to their work day. Additional committee work and administrative responsibilities also were mentioned frequently, as were budget cuts that have reduced the availability of resources and support. 

Readers’ explanations for why their job is more challenging were reiterated in their rating of the biggest day-to-day challenges. For the third year in a row, unmotivated and unprepared students were identified as the biggest day-to-day challenges. Readers rated as “very problematic” students who are not prepared for the rigors of college (29.44%) and students who come to class unprepared (26.77%). They rated as “moderately problematic” student motivation (33.98%) 

What are some of your biggest day-to-day challenges? Please rate these issues.

	Not a Problem	Slightly Problematic	Moderately Problematic	Very Problematic
Students who are not prepared for the rigors of college	8.44%	26.77%	35.35%	29.44%
Students who come to class unprepared	6.64%	27.42%	39.18%	26.77%
Student motivation	12.87%	35.86%	33.98%	17.28%
Institutional budget cuts	20.42%	28.42%	26.09%	25.07%
Technology distractions	18.80%	35.50%	31.45%	14.24%
Demands outside of teaching (e.g. committee work, research, publishing demands)	24.62%	29.76%	26.36%	19.26%
Keeping up with technology	27.30%	38.60%	25.56%	8.54%
Increased class size	48.23%	24.01%	17.64%	10.12%
Lack of collegiality in the workplace	44.76%	31.44%	15.65%	8.15%
Student incivility	54.08%	31.73%	11.86%	2.33%

As a follow-up to this question, readers were given the option to share some of the other challenges they face on a regular basis. Here are just some of the comments we received: 

• Large variation of basic skill levels within classroom.
• Keeping up with the advancements in science and what our students are expected to know.
• Students seem split: Some are very prepared, some lack basic skills. This results in tensions in a bi-level group.
• Handling change at the rate that it’s coming now—surviving, adapting, evolving, doing it all again—while maintaining vital relationships with colleagues.
• As an adjunct, the biggest problem is lack of job stability/security, and lack of access to tech smart rooms. We are simply not first in line for resources that should be available.
• Discipline in the classroom, something I did not expect on the college level.
• Lack of time to implement new technology and learn it.
• Teacher burn-out; student cheating or plagiarism; rapport between instructors and students; administrators obsessed with enrollment; faculty evaluations.
• Providing timely, meaningful feedback.
• Lack of student motivation in required courses.
• Course redesign without devotion of enough time to see what is working; the drive to change without sufficient data to warrant the change
• Constantly upping the requirements for tenure
• I have a contract teaching position, and I have no clear path to promotion, much less job security. We contract hires do not have an advocate / mentor manager in the administration.
• Lack of college readiness is definitely the biggest issue — specifically in terms of critical thinking ability.
• Keeping up with grading in general. Also, wanting to correct writing—paragraph and sentence structure, grammar, word choice— while dealing with content issues.
• Grading load. I teach almost all Core classes (freshmen), and the grading load is intensified by students’ lack of basic skills in reading comprehension, writing, and research.
• Institution’s focus on publication and research, which takes time away from class preparation.
• Students who feel entitled and expect grades of A for poor work.
• Lack of professional development opportunities at institution.
• Faculty stubbornness / resistance to change.
• Too many demands on my time; no way to deal with them all.
• Lack of communication and sharing within our department.

Survey demographics

The annual Faculty Focus survey was conducted in March and April of this year with 1,628 readers completing the online survey. Approximately 65 percent identified themselves as professor/instructor. The largest percentage (29.36%) working at four-year public institutions, followed by four-year private institutions (26.5%), and two-year public institutions (24.06%). In terms of how long they have worked in higher education, it ranged from fewer than five years (18.37%), six to 10 years (21.74%), 11-15 years (17.57%), 16-20 years (13.64%) and more than 20 years (28.69%). 

For the third year in a row, the number of readers who teach, manage or support at least one online and blended course went largely unchanged—63.86 percent in 2014 compared to 64 percent in 2013 and 62 percent in 2012. The number stood at 55 percent percent in 2011. 

Another question that delivers consistent responses each year asked readers to rate article topics. Learner-centered teaching, teaching with technology, assignment strategies, course design, and facilitating discussion continue to gather the highest interest and will remain at the heart of what we do here at Faculty Focus.

 

Thank you for your feedback

Our 2014 survey marks the fourth year we’ve conducted a reader survey and each survey brings new insight into our readers’ challenges, needs, and interests. We would like to thank everyone who took the time to share their thoughts. The feedback has helped to confirm suspicions, challenge assumptions, and offer valuable perspective to the work we do. 

See more at: http://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/teaching-and-learning/faculty-incorporating-technology-into-teaching/?ET=facultyfocus:e75:267813a:&st=email#sthash.iynuinES.dpuf