Ask anyone if they feel stealing is wrong.  Unless there are special circumstances such as stealing food for survival, the answer usually is a resounding yes.  People understand that this is wrong because of one reason - they were taught a moral value from both their parents and their educators.  This teaching of moral values has been a topic of controversy in education for years, with good reason.  The debate has always shifted around it is the parents' responsibility, what morals to teach,…

Teaching is one of the most intense occupations one can participate in. We as teachers are faced with myriad tasks that include grading papers, responding to student inquiries, and managing our courses. It is complicated enough to manage a single course; four or five becomes an increasingly difficult endeavor. However, our passion for teaching allows us the ability work through these difficult processes. While traditional classrooms are difficult to manage, the online milieu exacerbates this…

Recently, I was reading an article on AZ Central.com  (see link below) that described how Chandler School District  (In AZ) was changing its teaching model. Rather than the normal mode of instruction where students come to class on a daily basis to receive lectures and then go home to practice, this school district has decided to flip the script.

Instead of students coming to school to sit through lectures or other types of direct instruction teachers make video and audio learning modules that…

Employers and parents are always looking for ways to promote accountability. What about students? When individuals, in any capacity, have a sense of ownership and responsibility, the result is intrinsic motivation, a higher sense of ethics and esteem. Sometimes it is easiest to examine a concept through its antithesis. When ownership is lacking, there tends to be:

• Blame
• Lack of incentive
• Pettiness
• Lack of integrity
• Extrinsic motivation

How can we foster a sense of ownership for our…

The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do (Crawley, 1994).  Thomas Jefferson

In February of this year, I published for your review responses to the inquiry among OFTF of what are the five skills most essential to the task of OFTF service.    To follow, I have inquired of the following:

• What are the five primary things you are looking for in student writing in the discussion forum?
• What are the five primary things you are looking for in student…

For online faculty, the desire to encourage students and help them succeed is a powerful motivator, especially in the introductory courses when the students are first developing their footing in the online setting. At what point, though, can an online faculty cross the line from being encouraging to detrimental?

When a student first begins an online program, he/she can quickly become overwhelmed with the amount of self-discipline needed. Unlike in a ground course, the student cannot count on…

When We Need Help

A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.
~ Henry Brooks Adams ~

Online education requires and demands every instructor and professor to move beyond a facilitator statue. One way we are able to do this is to recognize when we need to seek assistance for ourselves to help our students.

What steps to do we take when we have exhausted all we know how to do for our students who obviously need our support and assistance?  I posed this question to…

Quality classroom facilitation requires faculty members to fulfill the course requirements (perspiration) and to give students those immeasurable components of life that go beyond course requirements (inspiration). These requirements demand a servant's heart. Recognizing that everything we have and everything we are is the result of God's grace and those who unselfishly sowed their lives into our lives make us better persons. Thus, to whom much is given, much is required. What others gave to…

The first time you teach a course in the online environment it is pretty exciting.  You feel like you are on the cutting edge of technology.  You imagine your students reading every post that you write and using your feedback to reach great heights. 

However, once you have taught the same course a few times, you must admit that your excitement starts to wane.  You realize that a lot of the great critical thinking questions that you post are unanswered by students and that sometimes a student's…