Retention

Yes, the "r" word in higher education. Someone always seems to be expressing concern about it; whether students will succeed; whether students will come back and keep enrolling for more courses (and paying more tuition). Sometimes, we talk in the lingo of ATD, Achieving the Dream.
Well, to address retention, you've got to think of some of the factors involved:
a) proportion of courses taught by full-time versus adjunct instructors. Sure there are some great adjunct instructors and some poor full-time faculty, but the odds are not good for a lot of active-learning techniques being used by adjunct faculty
b) skill sets of the students (in terms of, for example, reading ability, writing skills, study skills, time management ability, etc). Some of that can be addressed, but only by a careful outlay of resources.
c) institutional facilities. When libraries and testing centers are not available to students on some evenings or on weekends, then that will put further barriers to students coming back for more classes.
d) course availabilities
e) institutional psychology. Look have you ever tried to brave your way through the Novaconnect/MyNova student information system. It is so un-user friendly, that it has got to frustrate students. We can't even give students a student ID; we have got to give them an EMPLID.
There were two more points, but I can't remember them now.

Blackboard and the Compartmentalization of Knowledge

Well, here is another thought that occurred to me about why Blackboard is a step-backwards on the web. I was working on some background notes for an assignment, and I asked one of my colleagues if she had any relevant information on the topic in her literature course. Turns out that she had great informative notes, but the problem was that the information is buried within her Blackboard course, and there is no easy way for me to link to that material from my course or send my students to view it in her BB course. So, the interdisciplinary sharing of knowledge and the breaking down of classroom walls, which was so lauded with the onset of the internet, is no longer there. We are now back inside walls, this time Blackboard's walls. Almost all of our course development now focuses on putting course content within the secure framework of BB instead of on the open web.

Hey, We're Getting a New Blackboard

Joy, of joys. We have been told that we are updating from Blackboard 8 to Blackboard 9. This, of course, means that the whole system must go down, and when it comes back up, everything will be new and different. Just can't wait to see what tricks the BB folks will play on us this time, and what new features will be available!

Is Teaching with Blackboard Teaching?

Been wondering about that. I have a lot of colleagues who spend considerable amount of time in the classroom, working with students, developing new assignments and activities, personalizing their instruction. But then they teach online with Blackboard. They create reading assignments from a textbook, set up some multiple-choice exams that are automatically graded by Blackboard, maybe have students look through some textbook-publisher-provided Powerpoints, and, oh, yes, have students post to one another on an online forum. Is that college-level instruction?

Digital Humanities Project

Well, we have gotten off the ground something called the Loudoun Digital Humanities Project. Right now it is largely just a single website, but we hope to use this as an organizing focus for a series of workshops and also digital projects for the faculty at the Loudoun campus. The "problem" is going to be trying to interest/involve faculty in collaborating. I am not sure that too many faculty are ever really involved in collaborative projects, even though they pay lip service to that idea.

Enrollments Continue to go Up, Up, Up

Since fall 2007, enrollments on campus in HIS 101 have gone from 312 to 440. At the same time, enrollments in the online section of HIS 101 have gone from 134 to 344. Guess what, no new full-time instructors were hired to help cover that increase. If we are funded at, say, 27 students per class in history, and a full-time instructor teaches 5 classes, then that works out to 135 students per full-time instructor.

Adjuncts

Well, as I was putting together resources for my adjuncts, I discovered that I am basically coordinating the teaching of sixteen instructors between our campus and online western and world civ sequences. That, of course, means that on our campus, adjuncts are responsible for probably between eighty and ninety percent of the students being taught.