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Elected Committee on Teaching “The Doctors Are In” Sessions

2009 Convention • Boston, MA

Evaluations Topics

Diversity Topics

Students in Crisis Topics

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Tips from the AEJMC Teaching Committee

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Helping your students beyond the classroom

One of our freshman majors came into my office recently with a distressed look on her face. She came to us with a strong high school grade point average but was struggling in her classes here.

When I looked at her spring 2009 schedule, it wasn’t hard to figure out what was going on. Four of her five classes were taught almost entirely online. She felt overwhelmed, isolated, and incapable of meeting deadlines, especially in the self-paced classes.

Her situation is increasingly common as colleges and universities turn to online classes to serve more students in an era of shrinking education budgets. The 2008 Sloan Survey of Online Learning tracked a 12 percent annual increase in online enrollment. Nationwide, about 3.94 million college students were enrolled in at least one online course in fall 2007.

At many institutions, instruction in large introductory courses has been shifted from lecture hall to laptop. Freshmen, straight from fairly structured learning environments, are the ones most affected.

This trend affects all college educators, whether or not we teach online. As online enrollment grows, so have the number of resources designed to help us teach in this environment. While many university Web pages are devoted to this topic, a few good sites for teaching tips are:

• http://www.onlineteachingtips.org
From Dallas Baptist University.

• http://www.ion.illinois.edu/resources/
From the Illinois Online Network.

• http://www.ctdlc.org/faculty/TeachingTips/index.html
From the Connecticut Distance Learning Consortium.

• http://tlc.eku.edu/tips/online_teaching/
From Eastern Kentucky University.

Even for those of us not teaching online, we must keep in mind that we may be the only faculty member many freshmen see every other day. Our students are keeping track of multiple deadlines that don’t correspond to standard course scheduling blocks. They often turn to us for help with other classes because we are a familiar face.

Last year for the first time, my department offered three small, topic-driven freshman learning community courses with the hidden agenda of giving freshmen an hour a week to interact with a faculty member in a small group. While my community explored media and politics, I spent much of the time talking about time management, selecting courses, managing stress, learning in large lectures and how to succeed in online courses.

This is the inaugural Teaching Corner column. Members of the AEJMC Teaching Committee will explore a teaching topic in each issue of interest to journalism educators. We’d love to have you share your tips related to our column topics. We hope to gather your thoughts and ideas and put together a page on each topic on the Teaching Committee section on the AEJMC Web site.

If you have strategies or resources you’d like to share for teaching in an online environment, please send them to jdgreer@ua.edu. I’d also love to hear from those who work with students on time management, academic success strategies and the like as related to online survival skills.

Finally, we’d love to hear your ideas for future column topics. One of the things AEJMC members said they’d like to see more of in the newsletter is teaching tips. We on the Teaching Committee want to make this space useful to those passionate about teaching. Send ideas to Diana Rios, committee chair, at diana.rios@uconn.edu, or to Jennifer Greer at the address above.

By Jennifer Greer,
University of Alabama,
AEJMC Teaching Committee

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Tips from the AEJMC Teaching Committee

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Honing your teaching skills using the 2009 convention teaching committee sponsored sessions

(Article courtesy of AEJMC News, July 2009 issue)

At my first few AEJMC conventions, I presented my papers and then went to every research panel I could, trying to get ahead on my scholarly agenda. I made the mistake of overlooking the wide variety of panels and workshops that could help me hone my teaching skills.

As you flip through your convention program, check out the outstanding teaching sessions sponsored by AEJMC’s division and interest groups. Sheri Broyles, a member of the AEJMC elected Standing Committee on Teaching, is compiling a list of teaching-oriented activities to help you find these gems. That list will be available for pick-up near the registration desk at the convention.

The AEJMC Teaching Committee also is sponsoring three sessions in Boston designed to bring out the best in all journalism and mass communication educators. All sessions are open and no pre-registration is required.

A roundtable session, “So many projects, so little time: Faculty concerns over balancing teaching, research, service and life,” set for Friday 8:15 to 9:45 a.m. Administrators and veteran faculty members will discuss the stress of earning tenure, work-life challenges for a parent, and how to say no while not alienating your colleagues or chair. The session will start with brief remarks by each panelist. Participants at the interactive session will then have their anonymous questions answered by the panel members.

An interactive small-group discussion session, “The doctors are in,” set for Thursday from 1:30 to 3 p.m. This teaching consultation session, now in its third year, is billed as “where speed dating meets group therapy, all in the name of better teaching.” At the session, participants choose one of five tables, each with its own topic, and participate in a small group discussion, sharing ideas and tips with a moderator. Every 20 minutes the chimes will sound and participants can move to another area. Tables will discuss teaching diversity, using online teaching tools, student evaluations, the Fulbright program, and preparing a teaching portfolio.

A panel presentation highlighting the winners of our “Best Practices in Teaching Diversity” competition, set for Wednesday from 11:45 a.m. to 1:15 p.m. The top six entries of the 30 we received in the 2009 Best Practices competition will present their ideas, which range from short activities for any class to full course designs on diversity-related topics. Winning entries include: “Civic engagement, new media and journalism: A template for the organic incorporation of diversity into a new journalism curriculum” by Joel Beeson, West Virginia; “Professor for a day,” by Lisa E. Baker Webster, Radford; and “Voices of Utah” by Kimberley Mangun, Utah.

In addition to these open sessions, the Teaching Committee will train incoming teaching chairs for the divisions and interest groups on Saturday from 8:15 to 9:45 a.m. If you are in line to be elected a teaching chair, please plan to stay in Boston through Saturday morning for this session.

By Jennifer Greer,
University of Alabama
AEJMC Teaching Committee

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Tips from the AEJMC Teaching Committee

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How to turn an Intellectual Property “incident” into a teaching moment

(Article courtesy of AEJMC News, September 2009 issue)

After more than 25 years of full-time teaching, I thought I had seen it all. But after the last meeting of the Visual Communication course I team taught this spring, a student emailed my colleague and me to thank us for the great panel discussion that day. A panel of professionals had answered students’ questions and freely shared valuable insights about their on-the-job experiences.

It wasn’t the “Thank you” that got my attention. It was the fact that the student had digitally recorded the panel discussion in its entirety. Apparently, the recording turned out so well that the student wanted to make it available to the rest of the class.

I had visions of lectures showing up on YouTube without us ever knowing about it. I’ve been known as an early adopter of technology for teaching. But I was not comfortable with this possibility. I saw this as an opportunity for a teaching moment and responded to the student’s request as follows:

While we encourage active participation and appreciate the proper use of technology in class, we do not appreciate that you recorded the panel discussion without letting us know ahead of time. It was unethical for you to do this. Our syllabus clearly states that you need prior permission from the people involved before you start recording. To refresh your memory, here is the part of the syllabus that addresses that:

INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY PROTECTION
Lectures given in this course are the property of the instructors and Kennesaw State University. Class lectures may not be recorded in any form without prior permission from the instructors and any guest lecturers that may speak to this class. Recordings, including class notes, may not be used for commercial purposes.

I can’t speak for my fellow panelists, but I would not have hesitated to give you permission to record our discussion and to share it with your fellow students from this class. But now, it is after the fact.

Since this is an educational environment, however, we are giving you a second chance. If you can get written permission from [the panelists], you may proceed with sharing your recording with your fellow students.”

Within a few hours, the student responded with an apology. Apparently, he decided to record the panel at the last minute as a test of his new digital recorder and didn’t expect the recording to turn out so well. He thought it would have been a shame for this panel discussion to go unheard for those who were unable to attend class. He admitted that he learned a valuable lesson from this experience and thanked us for giving him a second chance.

So, here are a few lessons we can learn from this experience:

1. Have an “Intellectual Property Protection” statement in your syllabus and discuss it with your students at the beginning of the semester. Feel free to adopt and adapt the one provided above, but make sure to include any specific guidelines from your own institution. While each institution usually has policies regarding intellectual property, you may not find one that specifically addresses lectures.

2. Add your name, date and copyright (©) to every slide of your PowerPoint presentation. Do the same for any handouts you author. This helps protect your intellectual property, and it allows students to properly cite you in their papers. In order to assure the best legal defense, one professor I know sends hard copies of his lectures and handouts to himself via snail mail and never opens the postmarked envelope.

3. While we might feel honored to see some of our best lectures show up on YouTube, some of our worst might end up there, too. In either case, it is not the kind of distance-learning we intend. I recommend monitoring “shared resources” by Googling your name and/or your lecture titles and check YouTube.com on a regular basis. You may not need to take legal action, but, at least, you will know what students notice about your lectures. At best, you can turn “incidents” into teaching moments.

By Birgit Wassmuth,
Kennesaw State University,
AEJMC Teaching Committee

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Tips from the AEJMC Teaching Committee

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Follow the Syllabus

(Article courtesy of AEJMC News, November 2010 issue)

“My syllabus says ‘no late papers,’ but one student turned in a paper one minute late and another turned one in five minutes late.  What should I do?” “I have a student with health issues who says her other professors help her work around the school’s attendance policy.  Should I give the student a pass?” In both cases the answers are simple—follow the syllabus.  And both cases illustrate how a good syllabus can be used as a teaching tool and to set the tone for the course.

Sometimes we as instructors think of the syllabus as nothing more than an addendum and yet, it is perhaps the most important document we’ll distribute to our students all semester. As a contract between the instructor and the student, the more specific a syllabus is the better. It lets students know what’s expected of them and what the consequences are for failing to meet those expectations. In classes with multiple sections, a common syllabus goes a long way towards ensuring equity in terms of workload and minimizes the likelihood students will “shop” for the section that has fewer assignments than the others.  A syllabus needs to be set at the very start of the semester, but the course schedule—what’s going to be covered when—needs to be flexible so the instructor can adjust what he or she is teaching to take advantage of opportunities that may pop up over the course of the semester and to the pace at which different groups of students learn.

Each semester my colleagues and I review dozens of syllabi and over time have developed, with some help from our university’s center for teaching and learning excellence, a checklist of what a solid syllabus should include. Many of the items on the list are responses to thorny questions/issues/problems that arose because a syllabus was unclear or silent on a key point.  At the top of a good syllabus is contact information for the instructor(s) and graduate assistants, office hours and whether appointments are preferred, required or unnecessary. The next section should address course prerequisites and what is expected of students at the start of the class in terms of prior knowledge of the subject.

Course goals give the instructor the opportunity to tell students what they will get from the course and what they can expect to learn.  Skills classes might include a list of the kinds of things students will know and will know how to do at the semester’s end. Text and materials, recommended readings and resources cover not only books, but also items like portable hard drives, headphones and three-ring binders. Policies on academic integrity, diversity, classroom etiquette, attendance, deadlines and the penalties for failing to meet them and whether make up work is permitted should all be spelled out in as much detail as possible. Doing so makes it easy for the instructor to address questions like those mentioned at the top of this column.

Aside from these policies, perhaps the most critical part of the syllabus is the assignments section. Here is where clarity really counts. Specifying in the syllabus the number, type and most important, weight of assignments and the scale for final course grades not only saves time later, but also drastically reduces the number of student complaints and questions about how much an assignment is worth.  The best syllabi also include the grading criteria that will be used for each assignment.

Indicating whether extra credit is available and if so how much extra credit a student can earn and what s/he needs to do to earn it will cut down on end of the semester pleas from students who are not doing as well as they would like. While writing a good syllabus that includes all of the elements outlined above takes time and careful thought, the investment is more than worth the savings in instructor headaches and student angst.

For more information visit:
http://clte.asu.edu/resources/delicious/syllabus%20checklist.pdf
http://www1.umn.edu/ohr/teachlearn/tutorials/syllabus/basic/index.html
http://clte.asu.edu/resources/delicious/syllabus%20checklist.pdf

By Marianne Barrett
Arizona State University
AEJMC Teaching Committee

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