The more that your course is or could be on-line, the easier it will be for absent students. (In an early class, you should learn how many of your students would have access to a computer with internet access while ill.) We can easily show you how to use the internet to post and revise assignments and syllabi; create and share PowerPoint presentations with students; open discussion boards for “cyber discussions” among you and your students; and upload examinations.

Existing resources are set out below and can be located at www.otl.wayne.edu. Please check back periodically, since this resource list will expand as additional resources are created and made available to you.

• A resource titled, “The ABC’s of Online Teaching” can be found on the OTL website. This will be followed by a digital version of one of our most popular workshops titled “Moving Your Course on Line” which will be uploaded to our website within the first week, or so, of this semester.
• For those faculty and GTA’s not familiar with using Blackboard for instruction, tutorials on Blackboard Basics, Blackboard 9 and Advanced Blackboard1: Using the Communication Tools are available. They can be located under the Online Tutorials tab of our website. The tutorials will provide you with ways to do such things as uploading exams and arranging for “cyber discussions” with your students. Please check by soon for online tutorials of Advanced Blackboard 2: Assignments and e-Grading and Advanced Blackboard 3: Creating Online Assessments (Using Respondus).

Please take notice that nearly different Blackboard related workshops are being offered during the month of September, you are encouraged to register for one, or two, online today! Simply do so through the OTL website or by clicking the burgundy Trainings, Seminars and Workshops tab under the faculty tab on Pipeline.

• For the more technologically advanced instructors, an online tutorial for Wimba Live Classroom, which is a live virtual classroom that supports multi-way audio, video, application sharing, polling and content display is available.
• Last, in addition to our student-staffed drop in developmental lab located in room 147 of the P/K Library and the many workshops offered at the OTL, we also offer individual consultations on technology-related inquires and projects and on pedagogy, as well.
  Please feel free to sign up for one of these individual consultations today.
  (And, yes, you can also ask for help if you suddenly find that many of your students are sick, or if you are!)

For more information, please don’t hesitate to contact Kristi Verbeke, Assistant Director at 7-6448 or email af5315@wayne.edu or Shari Robinson-Lynk, Program Coordinator at 7-5605 or email bb4104@wayne.edu.

The article (available as a pdf) was written by Steven A. Meyers, James Bender and Shantha Y. Thomas from Roosevelt University and their colleague Erin K. Hill from the Harvard Medical School. The authors present descriptive data about the nature and correlates of classroom conflict using a national sample of 226 psychology faculty members. They differentiated two different types of conflict, inattentive versus hostile, in the survey. Levels of conflict were not associated with instructors’ demographic traits or characteristics of their courses, but were related to professors’ choice of teaching methods, their demeanor, and how they responded to challenging situations. They also found that those conflict management techniques that address the relationship between faculty and students were most effective in reducing conflict.

Co-author Steven Meyers, Illinois Professor of the Year for 2007-2008, has also discussed some of his own approaches to managing classroom conflict in an earlier article in College Teaching. See: Meyers, S. A. (2003). Strategies to prevent and reduce conflict in college classrooms. College Teaching, 51, 94-98. 

Over 300 librarians participated in the field study phase and interviewed hundreds of faculty members from across the disciplinary spectrum. They contributed records of more than 300 new kinds of scholarly works that are currently in use in a broad range of disciplines. 

Both the study report and a searchable collection of new model resources gathered during the study are now freely available. The report provides a detailed picture of the patterns and trends that have emerged to date. Emergent genres, disciplinary patterns, and peer review practices are all described. The accompanying searchable collection offers 206 examples of new model works along with descriptive information gathered for the study.