Culture Check: Course Work Extensions Posted on January 30, 2014 by A+ Brooke Lester, CuratorIt is the end of January, and I am beginning to hear around me the muffled groans of faculty colleagues as the Fall 2013 “extensions” roll in. I don’t know whether they are called “extensions” everywhere, but we all know what we’re talking about, right? This is when a student is granted permission to complete some of their course requirements during the weeks or months after the course is over. At my institution, the student contracts with the instructor and the registrar, agreeing on what work remains, and what grade will result if the work is not done. But even if we all know what “extensions” are, that does not mean that everyone agrees on how to administer them, or that every school has the same perspective on them. How is the practice of granting extensions assessed in the “ecosystem” of your institution? What is your own thinking on extensions…?
Intensive Courses—Requirements and Design Posted on January 23, 2014 by Ryan TormaA number of seminaries, such as Luther Seminary and Bethel Seminary, are developing intensive courses, which bring students on-campus for face-to-face learning for one to two weeks at a time. Instead of 3 hours per week for fifteen weeks, an intensive course might meet up-to 8 hours per day over the course of 5 days. Designing and teaching courses in this format presents a number of significant challenges….
Bodies, Place, and Role-Playing…Oh My. Posted on January 14, 2014 by Timothy SnyderIf there is one thing that really gets theologians and scholars of religions going, its a good text. Many of us spend much of our scholarly lives immersed in them, whether it be biblical texts of the voluminous writings of the historians and systematic theologians. Practices of reading and writing are so ubiquitous in theological and religious studies that scholars must often speak in “textual” language, even when such language meets its limitations. . . .
Why Don’t You Just Tell Me What Grade You Want? Posted on January 13, 2014 by A+ Brooke Lester, CuratorWant an “A”? Okay. Shake on it. In “contract grading,” the student and instructor agree at the outset what grade the student is going for, and what is needed to earn that grade. Of course, this could describe the point of many syllabi. What distinguishes “contract grading” (at least the examples I have seen) is that the student decides which assignments she will do and which assignments she won’t do. Also, in most examples I have seen, the work is assessed on a “satisfactory/unsatisfactory” basis. I have been looking closely at “contract grading,” and am planning to implement some version of it for my 2014–15 courses…
Resisting Disembodiment – Distributed Learning is Not Distance Education Posted on December 27, 2013 by Ryan TormaWhen I first started working in online seminary education, my boss explained to me, ‘We don’t do distance education, we do distributed learning.’ Working with her and many other wise leaders, I came to understand what they meant. Distance education implies a learned center from which education radiates out. Online learning technologies allow education to be delivered to people who are distant from that center, but they are distant nonetheless. Distributed learning is something different….