Horatio Caine: You know what they say: You lie down with the Devil, you wake up in Hell.

Hard words from a hard-yet-sophisticated man. But wait. There’s more:

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Horatio Caine: The problem with manipulation is that people can turn on you.

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For parties interested in criminal justice at its most flamboyantly effective, Detective Horatio Caine has more than a thing or two to demonstrate about investigation. Horatio (David Caruso) offers a weekly spree of lines that cut to the heart of working in homicide.

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Horation Caine: Alright, be on the lookout for an Eastern European male with bad teeth who may have access to an ape.”

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And then, of course, there are the sunglasses. The most important CSI lessong that Horatio Caine imparts to us each week can be summed up thusly: Always punctuate your best philosophical zingers by donning your sunglasses. If you don’t own sunglasses, move to Miami and buy some. Trust us on this. Actually, don’t trust us—trust Detective Horatio:

“The estimated national average grant would increase by $121 under the budget proposal, bringing the total to $3,357. Under current estimates, the proposal could increase the number of Pell Grant recipients by 260,000.

To ensure that Pell Grants keep current with the economic times, the budget would tie the grant total to inflation. Education experts see this as a correction for the decades-long devaluation of the Pell Grant, which once covered more than two-thirds of the yearly cost of a public college education but now covers 35 percent.”

260,000 is a lot of new grants, and the inflation-tie is a good and necessary change. Of course, the cost of college tuition is rising at a rate that dwarfs national inflation … but even doing something modest to address the problem of grand devaluation is a direct acknowledgement that there is a problem, so that’s progress.

“…The president expressed confidence in his plan for the country’s future in his first major education speech before the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce on March 10.

‘The future belongs to the nation that best educates its citizens,’ Obama said. ‘We have everything we need to be that nation…and yet, despite resources that are unmatched anywhere in the world, we have let our grades slip, our schools crumble, our teacher quality fall short and other nations outpace us.’”

It’s a good start. Let’s see what happens in Congress’s budget approval process.

UPDATE: Things are taking shape quickly: “The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA), commonly referred to as the economic stimulus bill, provides approximately $100 billion for education across the United States, including early learning, K-12, and post-secondary education.”

For highlights of the national priorities identified in the ARRA, and for a state-by-state breakdown of the funds and their intended uses, see Higher Education Stimulus | College & University Grants and Funds.

But it’s going to take a few months; that’s the bad news.

Meantime, we’ll lightly post fun stuff and items of interest here, but most of our work will be behind the scenes.

Thanks for reading. To the future!

If twentieth-century marketing had a problem with supply, the twenty-first is having a problem with demand. Every day new, online colleges are being established and with so much information being constantly streamed at your students, it can be difficult for them to find the classes that are right for them. Every instructor should invest in helping his or her school correctly market their classes to potential students. Correct branding of your class not only attracts interest and increases enrollments, it helps to accurately describe the course and set your students’ expectations.

In part one of this series I talked a little bit about how to create a catchy title. This isn’t just crash salesmanship, it is an aid to students to help locate the classes that interest them. The highest and best use of the title is nothing more than to motivate the students to read the course description.

This provides you with an excellent opportunity to set the tone of the weeks ahead as well as perhaps create some excitement. Just like with the course title, you want to pack a lot of information into a small space. Course descriptions generally run between 50 and 100 words but don’t let the length constriction push you into writing a summary that has the tone of a conclusion. Write a description with the tone of an introduction.

Listen to the text of radio and television advertisements. They don’t read off the entire back panel of the product box or list every ingredient. They just give you the highlights.

Ask yourself, what am I teaching? Write down a short description while being as short and specific as you can. Read it again. Do you find yourself writing “we will learn about…” or “this class will cover…?”

The Power is in the Verbs
Look at the behavioral verbs in Bloom’s Taxonomy. Here is a link where some are listed.

They’re specific and measurable. When correctly written into an objective, they are often a binary yes/no. Either you did the thing or you didn’t. Write your class description the same way. Verbs like “discuss” and “cover” are vague and don’t tell your students how they can succeed. Remember, online classes can be quite expensive for the average student. You want to assure them right off that your classes are valuable and worth the investment. Behavioral verbs tell them what they as students will be doing, not what you as and instructor have already done.

Also use verbs to depict the movement of your class. Are you building on the foundations of basic architecture? Are you going to sweep across the plains of northern Asia with Ghengis Khan? Only a small percentage of learners are really satisfied sitting in place and reading a book or facing a computer. Tell them how their mind’s will be moving, plunging and climbing.

Again, this isn’t just flash. If you’re excited about your subject area (and you always should be) then share that excitement with potential students. A good description supplies the students with these pieces of information:

·    the beginning and the end of the content
·    the goal(s) the class will be exerting itself toward (i.e. mastery of a skill, improvement of a positive, reduction of a negative, inspiration to take an action, the steps to perform a task, etc)
·    what questions the class will answer
·    what specific skills will be utilized (e.g. critical thinking, time management, diagnosis of an issue, etc)
·    who might be interested in it (students of education, law, psychology, etc). If your class has the potential to cross the lines of department and major to attract more students, do it!
·    the tone of its ethical orientation. Does your class seek to reduce the impact of global warming, drive individual ambition through computer programming or empower community leaders? From eco-friendly dish soap to organic champagne, every experience and product has an associate value.

Be specific and accountable. There is a lot of talk about these ideas and then we pussy-foot around their application. Get rid of blah-talk like “…provide an opportunity to…” and “students will try to…” To quote Master Yoda,

Do not try; do or do not. There is no try. There is only do.

Once you have this description written up, edited, re-edited and polished, attach it to the top of your syllabus to keep yourself focused and on track. Ask your department to include the description on your course evaluations and ask your students to comment on how effective it was in inspiring them to sign up for your course.

Now that you have a name and short description for your class, we’ll start thinking of more ways to bring your brand into focus and then implement this attractive, new identity.

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There is tons to read in college, truckloads of textbooks.  Much of it so dry and coma-inspiring that its hard to get through.  I’m not a lazy reader, one of my greatest pleasures in life is reading.  But its easy to get overwhelmed with so many un-read chapters before you.

In grade school there was a brief trend to teach speed reading, one of the few lessons of value I got from public school.  I have always loved to read and would find any excuse to read rather than do chores or my homework, so practice came naturally to me.

While I performed relatively poorly through high school (primarily due to my anarchist attitude), I found that later in college I had one distinct advantage over my peers: I was a fast reader.

The sheer volume of volumes that college tried to bury us in threatened to drown many a co-ed swimmer.  College students are assigned a sea of pages to read and “know”.  I was as absurdly negligent as the average student about big-time procrastination: waiting until the last minute to actually “do” the reading.

But, you know, once I got around to it, I read faster than they did and seemed to remember more.  (This of course is a severe case of “do as I say, not as I did”, but procrastination is deeply entrenched in the college world and unlikely to be un-rooted by me here).  Here are a few tips to enhance your reading speed and increase how much you remember. You will have made some progress, and a little bit better is better than none, as we like to say at my house.

Skip the boring parts.Really, I mean it.  Focus on the sections that seem to be most relevant and the words that you need.  Its okay to skip the fillers and go for the keywords.  Let your eyes “drift” over a line of print with instructions from your brain to stop and give you a second to digest the parts that matter.  You will know ahead of time what sorts of words you need to pay attention to, depending what topic you are studying.  If you are in the habit of nodding off over your books you are probably reading every word and trying to memorize it as you go.  Knock it off!  No, sleeping with your head on your text book will not allow you to learn through magical osmosis!

Interact with your book. This will help keep you alert and avoid that trance-like state where the eyes keep moving but the brain no-comprende.  Keep a pen in hand and notebook near and jot down any little notes as you go.  Just one-word phrases or dates is fine.  If you look over these notes later, that could be good.  But even if you don’t look at them again, somehow it seems that by running a bit of that info that you soaked up through your eyes, past your brain and down your fingers and pen and onto the page, you’ve made it a bit more permanent in your memory.

Skim it. Skimming gets a bad rap.  Before you begin, check the Table of Contents, headings and titles to give you an idea of where your most needed information lies and zoom in on that.  You’ve gone through the relevant text already, focusing on key words and concepts, perhaps stopping here and there to read more deeply, and taken a few notes.  The morning of your test, spend even five minutes very quickly reading it again, and you will have much better re-call.

What if attending lecture felt like surfing the web … what if, when you got curious about something and you wanted to understand more about it, you could listen to a lecture and learn exactly what you wanted, just like you know how to hop online and find a used computer to buy or send your vegetarian friend a recipe for White Castle casserole or watch a preview for the new Wolverine movie?

That would be new. Rather, it is new, and it’s here now:

Academic Earth is a “user-friendly platform for educational video that [lets anyone] freely access instruction from scholars and guest lecturers at leading academic universities,” reports Leena Rao on washingtonpost.com. Rao notes that Academic Earth “offers 60 full courses and 2,395 total lectures (almost 1300 hours of video) from Yale, MIT, Harvard, Stanford, UC Berkeley, and Princeton” and that lectures can be “browsed by subject, university, or instructor … editors have compiled lectures from different speakers into Playlists such as Understanding the Financial Crisis and First Day Of Freshman Year.”

Now this is a game-changer. This isn’t about having access to lectures limited to a particular area of study or a certain professor. This is you or me overhearing a conversation about black holes and remembering that we’ve wanted for a long time to understand even very basically what people are talking about when they talk about black holes. So head over to Academic Earth, and, not a moment later, we’re sitting in a lecture called Introduction to Astrophysics given by Dr. Charles Bailyn at Yale. For free. I repeat: YALE; for FREE.

Or maybe you’re feeling not so much like a space geek, just now. Perhaps you’d rather luxuriate in the romantic language of love—not because you’re mushy, but because you like to read and you’re a curious person and you want to understand how things got to be as they are. Click on over to John Rogers’ lecture Poetry and Marriage:

Academic Earth is in its infancy—it’s only going to get better. Part of being user-friendly is how they let users grade any given lecture, so you know what others have thought of it going in. As the site develops, and as schools grow wider and smarter about raising their profile by providing access to quality online content for free, what we can experience and learn online will continue to grow. And the learning experience will become increasingly close to our fingertips—in all, a neat development for your own ongoing edification, and especially as an assistant in your own online education experience.

The traditional, hour-long lecture that’s so familiar to on-the-ground undergraduates has little place in an online learning environment. However, shorter, tightly focused lecturettes can help engage learners and add some multimedia punch to your classes. You don’t need a fancy sound-studio or even a DJ friend with an editing board to get started. In fact, jumping ahead to the fancy “bells-and-whistles” can distract you from the design fundamentals of the audio lecture.

Listen First
First, go online and listen to a few audio-lectures yourself so you can get a feel of what works for you. You can find a selection of free audio books, lectures and articles in several places on the Internet. For instance, here and here.

Find Your Voice
Remember that these are professional produced, commercial resources that are mainly intended to be for sale to a broad audience. You’ll want to personalize your recordings to infuse your classes with the essence of you. Think about how many celebrity voices you can identify in an animated film or how you can recognize a friend who is trying to disguise their voice on the phone. Your voice is part your class identity.

By adding the element of your individual voice to your mini-lectures, you help to reduce the feelings of isolation on-line students can experience with an unknown, unseen and unheard instructor. You become perceived as friendlier, more approachable and reinforce that mysterious bond between teacher and student.

Less Really Is More
Notice that I keep calling them mini-lectures or lecturettes. This is an important point to remember as you begin to outline the content for each audio-presentation. The healthy adult brain has an attention span of nine or ten minutes. That is, you do something at the outset to gain student’s attention, and you have no more than ten minutes before you have to change direction to get that attention anew. In the online setting, and given the way mainstream media tends to produce programming in seven-to-ten-minute blocks (with commercial breaks in between), it’s a good rule of thumb to make your mini-lectures no longer than ten minutes.

Vary the Content, Repeat the Format
Build each mini-lecture around a single idea and resist the urge to cut a longer lecture into ten minute increments arbitrarily. While the content of each lecture should accrete around a unique idea, keep the structure familiar.

1.    Open with a short summary of what is contained in the mini-lecture. “Tell ‘em what you’re gonna tell ‘em.”

2.    Have the main body of your lecture follow the same structure you expect to see in student papers. I find it helpful to write out an outline to keep myself on track. I prefer not to use a formal speech or script as this can make the tone sound too scripted and dull. Keep the tone lively and fresh. If you misspeak, don’t edit it out. Just correct yourself as you would in an actual classroom. These peccadilloes of speech remind your class that there is a real person available to them for questions and interaction.

3.    Include spots where you discuss and answer anticipated questions. Actually ask these questions aloud. For instance, “At this point, many people find themselves wondering, ‘why did Hannibal choose elephants?’ Well, most scholars believe that…” Model the behavior of formulating questions.

4.    Request interaction by telling your listeners to react in the class forum or logon to a scheduled chat. For instance, “When you finish this audio-lecture, logon to the class forum and post at least one question that you have regarding this material. Also, theorize answers for least two of your classmate’s questions…” Always include this listen-then-act requirement.

5.    Finally summarize the content of the lesson: “Tell ‘em what you told ‘em.” When using a single medium like sound, it is important to repeat the information. In an audio environment, your information may be competing with conflicting stimulus so this repetition is important.

The Mechanics
Most computers have a built in microphone these days or you can purchase a plug-in microphone quite cheaply at any electronics store. Find a quiet place and do a few practice recordings. Listen for the basics of clarity and volume. Don’t worry too much extraneous noises as long as they don’t overpower the mini-lecture. You can learn more about creating audio files by doing a quick online search and finidng resources like this one.

You may want to provide your mini-lectures in multiple file formats. Again, an online search, will easily locate conversion programs like this one, though there are many others.

Making It Portable
Today’s students are highly mobile and the tendency is to take their media with them. The near ubiquity of MP3 players and iPods mean that many of your students will be listening to your mini-lectures on-the-go. Take advantage of this portability by making your mini-lectures a “podcast.” A podcast is like a radio program only it is designed to be downloaded to a portable player. There are many online resources that can lead you step-by-step through this process.

For starters, check here, here, and here.

Short, focused mini-lectures help you establish your presence in the online class as a real, approachable instructor while also engaging the often overlooked audio opportunity of online learning. Once you have the hang of making audio-files, think about giving your students the option of posting audio-presentations as well. It’s a fun and engaging way to add multi-media to your virtual class.

In the real world, people use any and probably all available references and tools to complete a given task. Yet for some reason, on-ground education has traditionally relied upon memorization and “closed-book” testing. This can create confusion, both for the instructor and the students, when moving to an online model.

Teachers may find themselves wondering: how can I ensure that students are keeping up with the reading, engaging the material, and not cheating? The short answer is, unfortunately, you can’t. Not, at least, if you’re using the teacher-as-test-giver model that dominates American classrooms. Without in-person proctoring, there is really no way to guarantee that remote students are not using resources other than their own memory. Yes, you can check for plagiarism but, especially with lower taxonomy testing, your learners can and will use all the materials at their disposal: textbooks, the Internet and each other.

So, when you’re in the online classroom environment, is there a point to multiple choice or short answer quizzes? I think there is. For starters, you can present the quizzes to students not as a way to check-up on them, but as a way for them to self-assess where they are in the progression of mastering the course objectives. If you design these short quizzes with the idea that they are “open book” you’ll find that you begin to frame your questions around the most important concepts in a text. The quiz questions become part of the learning. If you really want your students to define a given type of mortgage or list the components of a certain alloy or whatever else, don’t worry about how they get there, only that they do.

Some students will skim material that others will read closely. Some will use the index to target only specific passages while still others will ask a classmate. In the professional workplace, these are all valid and acceptable ways of achieving the objectives of even the most complex tasks.

For higher level projects where students must analyze, synthesize and apply their learning, always ask your students about their real-world goals. For instance, in a recent Professional & Technical Writing Class, my goals were for the students to:

· Learn research skills
· Create a focused thesis
· Persuade a reader
· Apply a professional format to a body of writing
· Achieve college-level benchmarks in syntax, grammar, proofreading etc.

First, I created a multiple-choice and fill-in-the-blank quiz that asked simple questions like “what are the parts of a grant application?” and “what are three resources where you can find available grants?” etc.

These quizzes were not a measure of where the class was succeeding or failing. They just pointed to useful resources. The class almost immediately became student-driven. Instead of my measuring a minimum absorption of material, the learners began sharing useful resources between themselves.

By transposing these goals from an academic amputated-from-reality context to the students’ personal and professional lives, the question Am I ever going to use this in real life? was immediately answered. The learners not only revised their work but asked their classmates for additional rounds of revision. Their theses were not regurgitations of an instructor assigned question but passionate, focused statements of belief. Students actually asked for additional grammar exercises. The projects were personalized and the students were engaged. The question of “cheating” became moot.

Now, whether or not you should assign points to low-level quizzes is debatable. Points help some students feel a sense of progress and security, but they can also distract from the idea that these mini-tests are little more than study aids.

If nothing else, assigning simple quizzes frequently in your online courses gives your students a reason to logon to the class website and gives you a tool to draw their attention to various readings and resources. However, banish the idea that they are really a “test” in the sense that cheating is possible. In online classes, quizzes should be thought of as one integrated part of the learning process. Design quizzes as strength-building exercises to be used toward a goal, not the goal itself.

The paper distribution viagra business moves at a lightning pace. There is no solace for wimps or quitters in the cutthroat world of paper supply. And no one understands this more readily than Dwight, our man of the day.

Dwight Schrute: I have been Michael’s number two guy for about 5 years. And we make a great team. We’re like one of those classic famous teams. He’s like Mozart and I’m like … Mozart’s friend. No. I’m like Butch Cassidy and Michael is like … Mozart…

…You try and hurt Mozart, you’re gonna get a bullet in your head, courtesy of Butch Cassidy.

The lesson: In the broader business world, you have to get your boss’s back. People always talk about how their boss is a pain in the butt, or how their manager doesn’t know how to manage. In the World According to Dwight, things are different:

Dwight Schrute: Security in this office park is a joke. Last year I came to work with my spud-gun in a duffle bag. I sat at my desk all day with a rifle that shoots potatoes at 60 pounds per square inch. Can you imagine if I was deranged?

Dwight Schrute: The Japanese camp guards of World War Two always chose one man to kill whenever a batch of new prisoners arrived. I always wondered how they chose the man who was to die. I think I would have been good at choosing that person.

Question: does that attitude make Dwight Schrute a cutthroat person? Well, technically it makes him the cutthroat-decider person; but there’s not a lot of evidence he’d appreciate the distinction.

Dwight Schrute: In the wild, there is no health care. In the wild, health care is, Ow, I hurt my leg. I can’t run. A lion eats me. I’m dead. Well, I’m not dead. I’m the lion. You’re dead.

Scary? Yes. But, from a professional perspective, please don’t read too much into this. It’s not as if, in Dwight Schrute’s refined business-salesman mind, the workplace is always the wild savannah. Not always, oh no…

…Sometimes it’s the wild prairie:

Dwight Schrute: Women are like wolves. If you want a wolf, you have to trap it. Snare it. Then to keep it happy, you have to tame it. Feed it, care for it. Lovingly. The way an animal deserves. And my animal deserves a lot of loving.

Well, Dwight, “good luck with that,” as they say in the business. But perhaps he does have the preternatural strength needed to give his animal and/or Angela the lovin’ she deserves. As the man himself says,

Dwight Schrute: When my mother was pregnant with me, they did an ultrasound and found she was having twins. When they did another ultrasound a few weeks later, they discovered, that I had resorbed the other fetus. Do I regret this? No, I believe his tissue has made me stronger. I now have the strength of a grown man and a little baby.

Are you ready to use Dwight Schrute and the baby he absorbed in the womb as your Business role model? We hope so.