Editor's Note

Abstract

Las Vegas was unexpected in many ways. For one thing, the dominant image—“the strip”—doesn't really offer a very honest view of the city. In my residency at UNLV, I found there's much more to Las Vegas, especially at the university. Recent issues have introduced readers to the Transparency Project, led at UNLV by new member of NTLF's Editorial Advisory Board, Mary-Ann Winkelmas. The project seems so important to pressing goals of higher education across the board and seems to be showing such success in meeting those goals, that I asked Mary-Ann to give the FORUM a deeper look into faculty's experience working with its template for redesigning assignments to make them more transparent. With the help of a group at UNLV, she's done that. You'll find that FIELD REPORT within. Surprises often lead to new, fresh learning as well as, dare I say it, fun. I got another such surprise at Vanderbilt, the residency that followed my stay at UNLV. The Center for Teaching's Director Derek Bruff was sharing a joke with me about what a “flipped” class in literature would look like: students would come to class and sit and read the book. I laughed because as a literature major I'd had skeptical feelings about all this “flipping.” We'd always read ahead of time and come to class to discuss; what was the big deal about that? (Rest easy, I've gotten a better understanding of what it's all about since.) I did think the joke was funny, but when I shared it with Haerin Shin, a brilliant young member of Vanderbilt's English Department, I got one of those surprises I'm talking about. “Yes,” she said, “I've done that.” The conversation that followed led to her writing this issue's lead feature on “Flipping the Flipped Classroom.” The length of a lot of literature precludes first reading and discussing in the same hour, but what's possible with a short work exposes the dynamic possibilities of moving the experiences, the stages of learning closer together, something faculty in other areas might want to look for ways to achieve. There's always a “flip” side to everything we do in education: take technology for example. On the one hand it makes “information” available to many more people/students at the same time and they don't have to show up, sit down, and listen to a faculty member to get it. On the other hand, we know that “information” by itself doesn't constitute “knowledge,” and that the processes of teaching and learning draw assistance from a teacher somewhere along the line. (Or at least we like to think so.) What happens when a faculty member finds himself conducting a large, online course assisted by a cadre of graduate assistants who don't have face-to-face meetings with students and perhaps fewer staff meetings with him? In a way online instruction ends up calling for more individualized student attention which in turn requires more teaching experience to know the best kind of responses to give than most graduate assistants have. Mike Rodgers' TECHPED in this issue explores this problem and offers sage counsel. And of course in all formal teaching, there's the problem of grading. Or is it a problem? Perhaps “digital badges” offer an alternative for some aspects of online learning. In this issue's INNOVATION column Heidi Parker of Purdue University explores the application of digital badges to learning the “soft skills” outlined in Bloom's taxonomy of the affective domain. Finally, Marilla Svinicki's AD REM … sorts out some contradictions in basic principles of learning. Should questions be “just right” or “too hot”? Read Marilla's article and find out.