Ed-Tech list members,
Back on February 21st, Richard Light of Harvard gave a wonderful workshop here, co-hosted by the Faculty Senate and the Office of the Provost. You can now view a recording of it at:
Links to the video will soon appear on our SACS accreditation site: http://www.miami.edu/sacs
Harvard does face-to-face surveys of its students asking them a variety of fascinating questions. For example, they have asked the students what was the one thing they wish someone had told them their first year. They found out that students think the most important thing other students should be told is that it is their job to get to know at least one faculty member each semester. So, during advisement for new students, advisors are taught to ask their advisees what the advisees think their job is at Harvard. They say things like getting good grades or learning or working hard. The advisors tell them that they need to get to know one faculty member each semester. That is their real job. It changes their perspective on education, apparently. Anyway, Harvard only found out about this because they do these face-to-face interviews with their students to assess various aspects of education at Harvard. I encourage you to watch the video and think about what questions we would ask our students if we did this.
(We have also video-taped of all of the Excellence in Teaching presentations this year and will begin processing those, now that I know how to do it. At least I think I know how to do it. Some issues still have me confused. It takes a day to edit the video and create the Windows Media Player and Real Media Player versions. Now it appears I need to make a QuickTime version, since neither of these seem to work well on my Mac Mini. Ah, well.)
Bill Vilberg
Assoc. Dir. of Instructional Advancement
305-284-3944
