Many observers find it baffling that faculty in higher education have been slow to adopt open educational resources (OER). The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, a private foundation that makes grants to expand access to learning materials, defines OER as: Teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been…

This article briefly outlines the current major search engines' approach to teachers' web searching. The aim of this article is to make Web searching easier for teachers when searching for relevant online teaching materials, in general, and UK teacher practitioners at primary, secondary and post-compulsory levels, in particular. Therefore, major…

LCTL educators are beginning to participate in the Open Education movement by developing and sharing their own pedagogical materials referred to as open educational resources (OERs). This new generation of collaborative LCTL materials will invariably challenge longstanding hegemonies in the fields of foreign language education and educational…

Motivating college students is challenging. Professors must be energetic, enthusiastic, and current in their field. Typically, once a college student selects a major, the motivation to be successful within that discipline is more intrinsic based on interest associated with the major. However, undecided majors who are enrolled in baccalaureate…

Although not everyone needs textbooks, they still actively serve four audiences within the discipline. The four audiences that benefit from textbooks are students, instructors, the textbook sales force, and the textbook authors themselves. With a growing number of online classes where students have less and less, or even no, face time with their…

This webinar explored how the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) provide an instructional framework to support professional growth and inform teacher evaluation systems for science instruction. This Q&A addressed the questions participants had for Dr. Wilson and Jody Bintz following the webinar. The webinar recording and PowerPoint…

Evidence collected on the effectiveness of four educational technologies is briefly reviewed. The authors conclude that there is reasonable evidence that computer-assisted instruction can have at least a modest effect on improving learning and probably more when its instructional approaches are properly matched to instructional objectives, that…

This article presents an interview with Dr. Muriel Harris who is considered as one of the most influential figures in writing center research and practice for over three decades. She is currently Professor Emerita of English at Purdue University. She founded The Purdue Writing Center which she directed from 1976 until 2003. She also founded…

Pedometers are great equalizers. They are wonderful for students who don't have the speed of other students, but can still keep up by taking as many steps as other students while improving their fitness level. In this article, teachers describe how they are using pedometers creatively in classes to impact the level of physical activity.

Language is a superb invention for the simple reason that it allows us to communicate with each other and thereby broaden our world. But language teaching and acquisition is by no mean simple. Being in a position which enables me to teach students about the preciousness of learning a new language, I have come to question how to go about this…

In this article, the author, a lecturer in Temple University's intellectual-heritage program, explains why colleges are teaching undergraduates the wrong Freud. Though the book "Civilization and Its Discontents" (1930), which most professors use, is Freud's most consistent and most convincing attempt to apply psychoanalytic theory to society as a…

Each year one of the biggest debates in higher education seems to be: Is this the year that electronic textbooks take off? E-reader devices are getting better. The inventory of digital content is expanding. Business models are emerging to support the needs of students, faculty members, and publishers. People are getting more comfortable with new…

Despite reductions in the importance, time committed to, and status of anatomical education in modern medical curricula, anatomical knowledge remains a cornerstone of medicine and related professions. Anatomists are therefore presented with the challenge of delivering required levels of core anatomical knowledge in a reduced time-frame and with…

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union the Ministry of Education of the Kyrgyz Republic has included a few social science disciplines in the list of the Educational State Standards, though the content of these subjects and teaching methodologies are still weak. One of the problems, which I constantly face in Kyrgyzstan when developing a new…

This essay regards the licensing of digital content in universities. The author states that the academic community has overwhelmingly adopted course-management software systems such as Blackboard to distribute electronic course materials to students. She argues that such use presents a significant problem: the absence of any institutional…