Sustaining pedagogical change via faculty learning community

Pedagogical practices and instructional change of physics faculty

We report on the initial results of a web-based survey of 722 physics faculty in the United States regarding their instructional practices. The survey responses indicate that most faculty report knowing about many physics education research curricula and pedagogies and are interested and motivated to try them in their teaching. However, self-reports of actual classroom practices indicate that t...

Sustaining Collaboration within a Learning Community in Flexible Engineering Education

This paper presents an innovative approach in flexible learning that can facilitate hands-on activities in engineering education. The approach focuses on the mediation role of artifacts within a learning community. The artifacts serve both as a medium and as a product of the collaboration process in the community. We have proposed the eJournal as a mediating artifact, which has been developed t...

Building and sustaining community in asynchronous learning networks

This article applies the concept of classroom community to asynchronous learning networks (ALNs) by taking on the issue of how best to design and implement a course that fosters community among learners who are physically separated from each other. The following factors that can influence sense of community among distant learners are examined: student–instructor ratio, transactional distance, s...

SUSTAINING CHANGE in ORGANIZATIONS

Barriers to Faculty Pedagogical Change: Lack of Training, Time, Incentives, and…Tensions with Professional Identity?

Recent calls for reform, such as Vision and Change: A Call to Action, have described a vision to transform undergraduate biology education and have noted the need for faculty to promote this change toward a more iterative and evidence-based approach to teaching (American Association for the Advancement of Science [AAAS], 2011). A key challenge is convincing many faculty—not just a handful of fa...