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This question was a hot topic at last year's Blended Learning Conference, which featured several faculty presentations about their experiments and experiences with blended learning. In particular, faculty debated the importance of using videos that they created themselves and/or in which they were visible speaking.

In a recent article in the Educause Review, Melanie Hibbert, a media producer at Columbia University's School for Continuing Education and a doctoral candidate at Columbia's Teachers College shares findings from a internal study that the former conducted in order to answer this question. This study combined media analytics -- analysis of the viewing data collected by the school's video-hosting platform -- and follow-up interviews with 10 students. Although the courses analyzed were online, and the students were master's level students, their findings correlate with some of the feedback we've received from undergraduate students in blended liberal arts college courses and from our own internal analysis of viewing data at Bryn Mawr College.

The fourth annual Blended Learning in the Liberal Arts conference is scheduled for Wednesday, May 20-Thursday May 21, 2015, and will be held at Bryn Mawr College. These conferences are intended as a forum for faculty and staff to share resources, techniques, findings, and experiences related to blended learning. Our definition of blended learning is quite broad, encompassing any combination of online and face-to-face instruction with a focus on supporting the close faculty-student interaction and emphasis on lifelong learning that is a hallmark of American liberal arts education.

We are currently seeking proposals for individual presentations, sessions, and workshops. We welcome proposals from any academic discipline, but faculty in the humanities and those who have used blended learning for open-ended and/or authentic assessment are particularly encouraged to apply.

For more information about the conference, the CFP, and to view materials from past conferences, please see our website at http://blendedlearning.blogs.brynmawr.edu/conferences/.

The deadline for proposals is February 15, 2015. Conference registration will open on March 1.

As the college experience becomes increasingly concentrated in students' technological spaces, the vendors of digital tools become more and more prominent parts of that experience. Textbook publishers and course managment system companies vie for market space, both seeking to gain control over the market. More and more, that means vying for increased control over the learning experience.

Between the textbook publishers and the course management providers, no one company has won out as the ultimate provider of every part of the learning experience. But as the two fight it out to provide an immersive experience, they're also taking control away from someone else: faculty.

Part of the immerseive experience, after all, includes creating activities, setting learning objectives, and designing assessments -- areas that are traditionally the domain of faculty. While the deadlock between companies suggests that faculty aren't in any immediate danger of corporations seizing control over their classrooms, some universities are working to partner with their supply companies. Working with publishers and CMS companies can allow faculty to engineer flexible materials. Freedom is important to faculty, and if ceding control to technology companies endangers that, the partnerships will fall flat.

For more information, read the Chronicle of Higher Education article "Textbook Publishers Push to Provide Full Digital-Learning Experience."

Peer response is a tested and respect teaching strategy. By reviewing and critiquing peers' work, students are expected to both help one another advance their projects, but also to gain insight into their own work. Ideally, it fosters reflection and self-awareness. It's less about evaluation and more about adding an extra dimension, and particularly a hands-on dimension, to the learning process. Peer grading, as John Warner of Just Visiting writes, is another story. The idea behind peer grading is, apparently, to reinforce the "right answers" by givving students the time and the incentive to reflect on them. For assessments like multiple choice or, to use Warner's example, spelling tests, peer grading would probably work just fine. But for the kind of work which liberal arts institutions encourage, peer grading does students a disservice. The problem isn't the actual scoring process -- students are probably capable of assigning grades -- but not of providing the kind of high quality feedback that really helps learning. It is the knowledge and experience of the professor which produces effective feedback, and relying on peer grading deprives students of this crucial opportunity to engage in dialogue with professors. Response is really for learning about your own work, which makes peer response useful and valuable. But grading is meant to help the person being graded, and that takes a more practiced hand.

According to Steven Mintz, Executive Director of the University of Texas System's Institute for Transformation Learning, it isn't just education that's changing: it's pedagogy. He recalls Jerome Bruner's work in the early 1960s which found that the standard pedagogy of the era, knowledge transmission, needed to be revised. He suggested "discovery learning," which emphasizes learning through inquiry and team work instead of passive reception. Professor Mintz believes its time for another change: as he wrote in a recent post for Inside Higher Ed, "The time is ripe to move toward Pedagogy 3.0: a pedagogy of collaboration, creativity, and invention which treats students not simply as learners but as creators of knowledge."

Mintz notes that the way undergraduate institutions work, they only really serve one out of three subgroups they should be serving: those struggling without proper preparation and faced with other demands, and potential students who are currently workin adults and full-time caretakers, often go unserved. The Pedagogy of Discovery, according to Professor Mintz, would help address these gaps. Instead of treating college students as passive, it treats them as "knowledge creators whose school work needs to be meaningul and subject to vetting not just by a single professor but a broader audience."

In a series of posts on the Teaching Professor Blog, Dr. Maryellen Weimer took on the challenge of improving college-level multiple choice tests. While multiple choice tests are a convenience for many professors, for instructors of blended and online courses they can be a necessity. The problem is, of course, that many instructors question what multiple choice tests are really testing -- student learning, or student ability to select an answer from a list of choices.

According to Dr. Weimer, not all multiple choice tests are bad tests. The real problem is crafting the right questions. According to the first post in the series, "A number of years ago, a cross-disciplinary faculty cohort reported that a third of their questions measured complex cognitive skills. An analysis showed that only 8.5% of their questions did, with the remaining testing basic comprehension and recall." Improving the quality of the questions, according to Dr. Weimer, can make multiple choice tests efficient and effective. In the second post, she provides some tips for writing good multiple choice questions, including:

During an interview with Online Classroom, professor Rosemary Cleveland and instructional designer Kim Kenward suggested some tips for providing students with feedback in their online courses. Even though their interview was targeted towards completely online courses, there were some key takeaways for instructors teaching both blended, and even completely traditional courses.

One of their tips was to "Consider various formats" for giving feedback. As Cleveland and Kenward pointed out, most students and instructors are familiar with traditional, text-based feedback -- but that doesn't mean that it's the only way. They cited a survey of their own students, in which "70 percent liked having audio feedback because they could hear the instructor's voice, which makes the message more personal."

And it's not just students who like audio feedback: oral feedback is also more efficient for instructors to produce. With the steady advance of course management systems, it also doesn't require a lot of technical expertise to easily give audio feedback. Both Blackboard and Moodle, for example, have audio recording built-in to their grading components.

In a world of crowdsourcing and community-based expertise, it's easy to access reviews on everything from products, to services, to restaurants. As the Chronicle of Higher Education describes it, potential users looking to evaluate education technology now have a site of their own: Software PhD, a newly-created website designed to allow vendors and educators to share, discuss, and frankly opine about educational technology. For new users looking to find and buy products, Software PhD has a rating section where you can compare both company and product ratings to make better-informed purchasing decisions. The ratings are broken up into a (presumably expanding, given the site's relative youth) system of categories, including Catalog & Curriculum Management, Scheduling, and Retention & Advising, among others. While anyone can browse reviews, it takes a registered account to write reviews and to use the forum section. By requiring registration, creator Mark Baker hoped to inspire some transparency: while users are not required to provide their names, they are required to identify their institutions. As a result, all reviewers are "trusted reviewers" in some way. The site boasts less than 400 active users so far, but as it grows so too will its power to provide a comprehensive buying guide.

A recent report from the Babson Survey Research Group and education company Pearson, reviewed by Faculty focus, found that college faculty member's use of social media has continued to increase in the last year. Their results, which are based on an annual survey of 8,000 teaching faculty, looks at both personal and professional use of social media, and found increases in both areas.

On a personal level, faculty's use of social media is on par with the usage level of the general population, reporting in at slightly about 70 percent. Use of social media in professional context has increased almost 11% from last year, up from 44.7 to 55 percent. These gains also reflect an increasingly diverse use of sites and platforms, fulfilling various personal and professional needs.

There is a long history of evidence that cooperative learning has ample benefits. The study reviewed by Faculty Focus adds another piece to the evidence: the study focuses on the amount of time spent on task, a variable which is obviously important but was previously underexplored. Previous research would break students into groups of individuals and collaborative workers, but not necessarily take into account whether or not students were working independently outside of the group setting. This study controlled for that, by rigorously monitoring time spent studying in the classroom and out-of-class.