Helping Students with APA Style

Tech and Tips Tuesday

Helping Students with APA Style

Give credit where credit is due.  

http://www.apastyle.org/manual/index.aspx

Proper attribution of sources is an important and essential element to any research paper and academic work. As collegiate instructors, we have the responsibility to train students in this skill every time a research assignment is submitted. Often learners become confused with this system due to varying past experiences and requirements. Maybe they used MLA in their last course, or maybe plagiarism has never been clearly explained in a way they could understand.

As part of my Course Set-Up file, I include a sample APA paper in the course materials of each class, as well as a PowerPoint outlining the steps to proper paper creation. I’m sure you have tools that you use, as well, and would love to hear about them in the comments below. 

Today, for our purposes, I will provide you with three online resources that may help you and your students. You can provide these as links, use them for quiz assignments, review them during class time, or embed portions within your course site.  

Basics of APA Style Slide Presentation, http://flash1r.apa.org/apastyle/basics/

The Citation Machine, http://www.citationmachine.net/apa/cite-a-book

The Purdue Online Writing Lab (OWL), https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/section/2/10/

 

Each of these tools provides a comprehensive guide to creating citations for proper source attribution in APA style. 

If you need a refresher for yourself, the APA website provides a quick online course for teachers. Or, if you use a style other than APA, like MLA for instance, the Purdue OWL website and the Citation Machine both cover the requirements for those, as well. 

Living by best practices for yourself and modeling them for your students is one of the best ways to teach. 

Please let us know if you have other favorite online resources, lend your voice to our survey, and join me tomorrow for Historic Hump-Day.

See you then, 

Melynda

@Melynda_Conner

#TCBHigherEd

Make a Commitment to Excellence!

Make-It Monday

Committing to Excellence – Where is your pride?

Be a yardstick of quality. -- Steve Jobs

For this Make-It Monday, I encourage you to make your own personal commitment to excellence, to present yourself as a professional educator who puts forth work worthy of your standing every day in every class during every semester.

Evidently, as a professoriate, some of us have become lax in our practices, especially in regards to the materials we present to students at the start of the semester. This matter was brought to my attention by students themselves, as they have pointed out poor practices that reflect negatively on us all (adjunct or tenured), our institutions, and on the value of higher education in general. 

Of all the negatives I have heard from students in the past about instructors giving away full credit, not answering emailed questions, not actively participating in discussions, I was honestly dismayed by this statement within an email I received from a student last week:

“Also, I'm glad that you are making adjustments to the course to reflect this current semester. Too many times during my career have I gone into a class that had 2 year old due dates and the instructor just telling you 'oh don't worry about it, just turn it in this weekend'.” – Senior Communication Student in a state-wide online degree program with instructors from six participating public universities

So this weekend, I brought my concern up in conversation with my son who is a sophomore at one of these state universities. He confirmed that even in his short time as a college student he has encountered this same problem, instructors who do not take the time to update their syllabi for the current semester. This is not acceptable! 

As a collegiate instructor, you are paid to do a job that requires, at the very least, for you to be prepared, and in turn to prepare your students, for the learning experience to come. If your syllabi and course materials are out of date, contain errors, or are not even your own, SHAME ON YOU! You would not accept this level of work from students, so why on Earth are you asking them to accept it from you? They are paying YOU. 

Now, to department chairs and administrators in supervisory roles, if you are accepting these poor practices from your instructors, what does this say about your programs, your college, and the worth of the education you are providing? Where is your pride? Where are your standards? Who controls your quality assurance processes? Are you even paying attention to the product your institution is putting forth?

Frankly, if we as a profession continue to support and perpetuate such lax practices, we deserve to be corporatized, as self-regulation clearly is not working. 

No matter what your status in higher education, no matter what your pay, if you commit to perform the job of teaching, do it to the best of your abilities or bow out. If you are a supervisor, hold those under your care to a standard of excellence, or find another job. Too many people need employment and will work to do the job well, to have mediocre teachers and administrators who half-way do their jobs representing our universities and our profession. 

I implore you to make your personal commitment to professional excellence today! Show pride in your work and in your chosen avocation. Banish excuses, laziness, and unprofessionalism. Clean up your materials and your act!

Join me tomorrow for Tech and Tips Tuesday as we begin our weekly exploration of the scholarly practices of proper attribution of sources, fair use, and copyright. Please lend your voice to our 3-minute survey, if you have not already.

See you then,

Melynda

@Melynda_Conner

#TCBHigherEd

Weekly Wrap-Up

Weekly Wrap-Up

My Friday Photo -- A clear winter day here at home.

In this third week of 2015, our focus has been on maintaining academic rigor and standards within online and blended courses. Following the value of the month, Purity, we have explored improving clarity in communicating expectations to students, and followed the path to determining expected  standards for online adjuncts. 

This week has been especially interesting as President Obama decided to follow in Tennessee Governor Haslam’s footsteps, promising two years of free college for everyone, making the role of the adjunct educator and clarity of the expectations of the position even more important. 

Tips & Resources of the Week

1. Create firm and clear instructor policies for excellent classroom management.

Faculty Focus Special Report: 11 Strategies for Managing Online Courses

2. Design rubrics for each assignment in which learning outcomes are assessed by student performance, such as essays, research papers, presentations, videos, etc.

The Five Best Free Rubric-Making Tools for Teachers

3. Use best practices in developing, designing, and delivering each of your courses, following the standards provided by the institution for which you teach the course.

Six Things That Make College Teachers Successful

4. Attend every professional development opportunity afforded to you.

Professional Faculty Development: The Necessary Fourth Leg

Favorite Quote of the Week

Professional development is the conscience of the professional academic. It makes teachers aware of what they do, asks them why, and challenges them to continually do it better. – Alan Altany

Favorite Tweet of the Week

Tell the world why your PhD research is important. Enter the #ShareMyThesis competition and win a MacBook http://t.co/1fw3DbnSVh #highered
— Melynda Conner (@Melynda_Conner) January 19, 2015

Pins of the Week

My Pinterest Board, Teacher Tech and eLearning

Thanks for joining me for another great week of information gathering and processing. As we finish out the month, please lend your voice to our January survey, and join me on Monday as we begin our discussion on academic integrity, primary sources, proper attribution, and fair use. 

See you then, 

Melynda

@Melynda_Conner

#TCBHigherEd 

The Week’s References

Altany, A. (2012). Professional faculty development: The necessary fourth leg. Faculty Focus. Retrieved from http://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/faculty-development/professional-faculty-development-the-necessary-fourth-leg/

Clement, M. (2014). Six things that make college teachers successful. Faculty Focus. Retrieved from http://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/faculty-development/six-things-make-college-teachers-successful/

Faculty Focus. (n.d.) Special report: 11 Strategies for managing online courses. Magna Publications: Madison. Retrieved from http://www.facultyfocus.com/wp-content/uploads/images/report-11-strategies-for-managing-online-courses1.pdf

McKeachie, W. J. (1991). What theories underlie the practice of faculty development? To Improve the Academy, Paper 219. Retrieved from http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/podimproveacad/219

Meyer, K. & Murrell, V. (2014). A national study of theories and their importance for faculty development for online teaching. Online Journal of Distance Learning Administration, 17(2). Retrieved from http://www.westga.edu/~distance/ojdla/summer172/Meyer_Murrell172.html

 

Mundy, M., Kupczynski, L., Ellis, J. D., & Salgado, R. L. (2012). Setting the standard for faculty professional development in higher education. Journal of Academic and Business Ethics, 5, 1-9. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/1011485641?accountid=458

The Non-Existence of Faculty Development Theory

Theoretical Thursday

The Non-Existence of Faculty Development Theory

One who dares to teach, must never cease to learn. – John Cotton Dana

Graphic courtesy MyCuteGraphics.com

In my recent study of Student Development Theory, I was surprised to discover that Faculty Development Theory does not truly exist.

According to McKeachie (1991), when faculty development emerged as a role of the university in the 1960’s, the theoretical approaches used to support practices at the time were behaviorism, the sensitivity training movement, and the eclectic application of principles of learning and individual differences. Later, student learning became the focus with wide acceptance of Kolb’s Theory of Learning Styles. Yet, even 24 years ago, McKeachie realized the need for a more devoted focus to elements of teaching, saying “Our new theories will need to deal with helping faculty members develop strategies for training students to be more active, mindful learners and thinkers” (p. 6). 

So where is this body of research today? Where have the collegiate educational scholars addressed this need since?

In recognition of this lack within research, this past summer, Katrina Meyer and Vickie Murrell surveyed professionals within the business of faculty development, asking what theories informed their practices. Two theories emerged as predominant, Adult Learning Theory and Transformative Learning Theory. However, the researchers did find that theory was not truly a basis of faculty development practice as a general rule. Therefore, Meyer and Murrell (2014) put forth that, “If faculty development providers and evaluators wish to establish their practices on more solid theoretical footing, more research that is based on theory (or seeks to establish new theory as is possible in qualitative research) is required” (para. 15).

Alan Altany in his June 2012 Faculty Focus article Professional Faculty Development: The Necessary Fourth Leg, provides 11 important reasons ongoing faculty development is crucial to the profession. My favorite reason he lists is #10: “Professional development is the conscience of the professional academic. It makes teachers aware of what they do, asks them why, and challenges them to continually do it better.” Without reflective practices, updated skills, and encouragement to improve, faculty have no real motivation to stay current in their teaching methods or curricular materials. 

What will certainly be of help to us as faculty is the extensive compilation of best practices by Mundy, Kupczynski, Ellis, and Salgado (2012) in the article, Setting the Standard for Faculty Professional Development in Higher Education. This is the most comprehensive list of professional standards I have found in my Faculty Development research. I encourage you to review them, as many are content-area specific and most all have been created within the past decade with technology applications in mind.  The authors recognized the lack of consistent collegiate standards, saying:

“Knowing these “best practices” are missing from many of our university and college classrooms, we have a moral and ethical responsibility as educators to teach in a manner that provides the best learning environment and provide the best learning opportunities for every student we teach. This can best be accomplished by developing a comprehensive professional development series that is easily accessible to all university professors, high school teachers with dual credit courses, as well as undergraduate and graduate teacher education students” (Mundy, Kupczynski, Ellis, & Salgado, 2012, p. 7).

So, this is my goal as a future Higher Education Administrator: to create this easily-accessible, comprehensive professional development series. Do you know of anyone already working on this? Please share!

Add your voice to our January Survey, and join me tomorrow for our Weekly Wrap-Up on maintaining academic rigor and standards!

See you then,

Melynda

@Melynda_Conner

#TCBHigherEd

References:

Altany, A. (2012). Professional faculty development: The necessary fourth leg. Faculty Focus. Retrieved from http://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/faculty-development/professional-faculty-development-the-necessary-fourth-leg/

McKeachie, W. J. (1991). What theories underlie the practice of faculty development? To Improve the Academy, Paper 219. Retrieved from http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/podimproveacad/219

Meyer, K. & Murrell, V. (2014). A national study of theories and their importance for faculty development for online teaching. Online Journal of Distance Learning Administration, 17(2). Retrieved from http://www.westga.edu/~distance/ojdla/summer172/Meyer_Murrell172.html

 

Mundy, M., Kupczynski, L., Ellis, J. D., & Salgado, R. L. (2012). Setting the standard for faculty professional development in higher education. Journal of Academic and Business Ethics, 5, 1-9. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/1011485641?accountid=458