I have a student appealing a grade in my Fall 2013 geography course. The course is 100% online. All homework is submitted via the university learning management system (LMS). The LMS reports no grades for the student for any assigned work, though time-date stamps exist to indicate the assignments were at least accessed. The student…
MOOC. To some, the acronym is a dirty word, like “larvae,” or “spider,” or “A-Rod.” People spit the word out like they are trying to remove a stray hair from their mouth. I can understand their distaste for MOOCs. Change is hard. Massively open online courses are a natural evolutionary stage in the use of…
I’m sharing my recent ‘Student Evaluation of Instruction” with the world. My intent is to highlight a couple of examples of the problems associated with using ‘student evaluations’ in course evaluation. I have copied these comments verbatim from the form I received in the mail last week. The evaluation document also includes a color-coded chart indicating…
My teaching career began in the fall of 1997 when a faculty member experienced a heartache about a week before the semester began. During the intervening years between then and today, my peers, colleagues, and even those in business & industry, have noticed a tremendous decline in people’s ability to write. Recently, I spent many…
At times, I think my Announcements for my classes take on the tone of a blog post. My online students do not have the luxury of the 5-10 minutes I spend each class period harping on attitude, perseverance, discipline, and poor defense and shot-blocking in mid-major NCAA basketball conferences. I have to make up for…
One of my favorite weather resource web sites is Unisys Weather (weather.unisys.com). I’ll explain why. First, below is a current weather map for North America. If you examine the color bar at the bottom, you’ll notice a color gradient from black (-100dBZ) to light blue (250dBZ). The color is based on the energy returned to…
If you haven’t read Viktor Frankl’s “Man’s Search for Meaning,” you should. Even if you are a woman, thoughts shared by Frankl in “Man’s Search for Meaning” will still apply. If you have never heard of Viktor Frankl, it’s OK. I hadn’t heard of him, either. Viktor Frankl was an Austrian Jew, a Ph.D neuroscientist,…
I can’t stand cheating, academic dishonesty, and plagiarism. People who spend more time trying to figure out how to subvert an exam, cheat, plagiarize, or pay someone else to do their homework. Fail. Simply fail on your own merit. Contemplate what led to your failing grade and change your behavior. Not everyone can, should, or…
I was an early adopter of the online learning course delivery model. Many aspects of online learning course delivery I had to swallow and get over, such as sharing my lecture notes. Lecture notes were my babies and represented hours of time spent in research. Not everything one reads in a textbook is representative of…
In 2004 I began teaching my World Geography course online . That is to say, my course was fully 100% online. Many students expect faculty to use Blackboard at both institutions where I teach. Students expect to find at least a syllabus. Many students expect to find some semblance of notes, as well. From the…
Constant Geography 