Posted on May 7 at 9:38 a.m.Suggest removal

FABULOUS!!! I really like the year in A-to-Z format. What a fun way to wrap things up!

On

Posted on April 18 at 8:54 a.m.Suggest removal

As the other commenter points out, there is a long history of this discussion at OU although the authors of the editorial don't seem to be aware of that (which certainly takes away from the value of the editorial). More importantly, I am sad to see the Daily cave in to the idea that grades are real measures of learning. They are not. Grades are measures of performance in a class; I think most students realize that gaming a class to get a good grade does not necessarily mean you will have learned anything at all - nothing, that is, which you will remember a year or even a month or a day after the class is over. You say that the current system does not give students an incentive to perform at their very peak. If students are in school only to get good grades, they are never going to learn at their peak. Real learning comes from internal motivation. When it comes to real learning, grades are a distraction, preventing students from even asking themselves what they are learning because they are instead asking, "Will that be on the exam?" If OU really wanted to help students best represent their achievements to the world, they would adopt a portfolio-based evaluation system so that each student would produce a portfolio of carefully prepared work from each of their classes, something far more substantial than numbers on a transcript.

On

Posted on March 15 at 11:11 a.m.Suggest removal

I can agree with some of your points here, but there is a larger point to be made: the video has the undeniable virtue of having prompted the Daily to write this informative editorial in the first place. So, that confirms the positively galvanizing role that this video has had. I checked the OU Daily's archives and the only mention of Uganda before now is in a brief column that was written in response to another mass media event - Rush Limbaugh's foolish comments about the Lord's Resistance Army last year. The OU Daily, like so many smaller news organizations, is often reactive rather than proactive, understandably. So, this video has provoked a reaction, a negative one - but without the video, I imagine years could have gone by before Uganda got another mention in the pages of the Daily. Meanwhile, for a very reasonable counterpoint to the issues raised here, see Nicholas Kristoff's column from yesterday's New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/15/opi...

On

Posted on February 20 at 10:16 p.m.Suggest removal

I'm always glad to hear good news about OU's graduation rates, but there is still a long way to go. From Kiplinger - http://www.kiplinger.com/slideshow/be... - 10 Top Values in Public Colleges, 2012, reporting 6-year graduation rates:
1. University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill 90%
2. University of Florida 85%
3. University of Virginia 93%
4. College of William and Mary 90%
5. New College of Florida 68%
6. University of Georgia 82%
7. University of California, Berkeley 91%
8. University of Maryland, College Park 82%
9. University of California, Los Angeles 90%
10. University of California, San Diego 86%
It is clearly possible for public universities to have 6-year graduation rates of 80% or even 90%. I hope we will get there someday too.

On

Posted on February 17 at 10:56 a.m.Suggest removal

I'm not sure if it is a typographical error or an error in the reporting itself, but surely the phrase wanted here is "rigor" and not "vigor." I would also argue that it is illogical to assume that fewer As awarded in a class is somehow an indication of a more rigorous learning experience. In order to determine how much students are learning in a class and why, you need something other than grades on which to base that determination.

On

Posted on February 13 at 9:52 p.m.Suggest removal

Thanks for including this topic on the pages of the Daily! I wanted to chime in about a specific need on college campuses: class syllabuses need to be open so that students can see the syllabus BEFORE enrolling in the class. Right now, instructors are supposed to put up their syllabuses inside Desire2Learn, which is great for students already enrolled in the class, of course - but what about students who are trying to find out more about the class before they enroll? Having the syllabus online would be a big help, but it is not easy for OU faculty to publish their syllabuses online. There used to be dedicated webspace that faculty could use at faculty-staff.ou.edu, but OU IT has been threatening to shut that server down, and it is indeed very old and very primitive (it was sent up back in 1999, which is ancient history in the online world). What we need at OU is something like Open Scholar, which is a great open source software project piloted and made freely available by Harvard University. Open Scholar allows university faculty to create an online presence, sharing their syllabuses and other materials with the wider public; see http://openscholar.harvard.edu for more information. Having something like Open Scholar would be a great way for OU faculty to put their syllabuses, and more, online where they would be accessible to all. OU is a public university, and I think we need to do a better job of using the Internet to make more of our teaching activities publicly accessible.

On

Posted on January 31 at 11:34 p.m.Suggest removal

While I am glad to see this important topic appear in the pages of the Daily, I am surprised that the real name of the Oglethorpe University student has been included in the article. In the Huffington Post article about sugar daddies, the women interviewed for the article did not use their real names (QUOTE: "Taylor" is the pseudonym she uses with men she meets online. Neither she nor any of the other women interviewed for this article permitted their real names be used." - http://goo.gl/iIDoZ). Given the negative consequences this woman could face in the future as a result of anyone in the world (literally: anyone) being able to find out that she had seriously considered the possibility of participating in a sugar daddy scheme, it seems to me a wiser course would have been for her to use a pseudonym here, as the women interviewed by the Huffington Post did. Is anything gained by the use of this woman's full name in the article? Just speaking for myself as a reader, I think the article gains nothing by it, just as the Huffington Post article lost none of its impact by the use of pseudonyms. I hope that this woman will not later have reason to regret the fact that she consented to the use of her name here.

On

Posted on December 2 at 1:13 p.m.Suggest removal

Thanks for this editorial! As an instructor, I have found student evaluations to be incredibly helpful in designing (and re-designing) my courses. All feedback from students is valuable! I just wish we had more feedback mechanisms in place. For example, now that the evaluations are online and there is not the enormous expense and inconvenience as there used to be for the paper evaluations, I wish we could have an evaluation window open around Weeks 7-8 of the semester too. By the time we get to the end of the semester, people are tired, overwhelmed, super-busy... and sometimes they might not even remember what the class was like earlier in the semester. I don't know if the administration is considering having an additional evaluation window earlier in the semester now that the online evaluations are firmly in place, but I certainly hope that they will do so.

On

Posted on November 18 at 8:37 a.m.Suggest removal

Although these words - "traffic to the site has been in decline for some time now" - are so vague that it is hard to determine what they mean, I expect the "decline" refers to the dropoff after the huge spike of traffic when Google+ opened to users without invitations in September. There was indeed a huge spike at that time for a couple of days, when all kinds of people from Facebook showed up at Google+ expecting it to be like Facebook. When they found out that Google+ was a place where people were networking in very different ways from Facebook (much more professional networking, not just games and fun), those people left. Hence the dropoff after the spike. Just speaking for myself, I am glad those folks have Facebook and can leave Google+ alone. People who want the things Facebook can do for them should definitely stay there; people who are looking for something different can use Google+ instead. As someone who uses Google+ for professional networking as an educator, it is the most useful online network I have found.

On

Posted on November 17 at 11:57 a.m.Suggest removal

I have to agree with terri about Ozone - it really makes me miss the old enroll.ou.edu system. The only thing I use Ozone for is to issue special permissions for class enrollment, and every single permission requires 19 keystrokes - seriously! I counted! I would guess it takes literally five times as long to do the permissions that way. In the old enroll, I could issue permissions for ten or twenty or thirty students all at once, but in Ozone, I have to do each permission separately, each time entering the semester, my college, my department, every single piece of information for every single permission, over and over. Admittedly, I am not a heavy user of Ozone, but time is at a premium for me, and at least for me Ozone has not been a time-saver. Just the opposite.

On