Week 5- Blendkit conclusion

The one bit that hit me this week was the comments on how the biggest impact on quality of courses is good faculty training programs, much of it based on peer-mentoring and evaluation.  For those of us at Small Liberal Arts Colleges, we don't have that (yet).   We're in the process of building up a group of faculty fellows who will be required to mentor the next batch, but in terms of peer-mentoring we're currently lacking.  We have a couple of faculty who have done a lot in terms of flipping so we have some experience as well as a small bit of knowledge within IT on best practices, but we're having to bootstrap most of it.  The materials within Blendkit are mostly designed for partly-online course that we won't be running, and we've had limited success in terms of detailed evaluation plans with faculty beyond the always mostly useless student evals.

The faculty fellows will help to some degree, but they are few and the various departments are many.  The classes proposed by faculty in Spanish, Education, Middle-East/Islamic Studies and Chemistry, for example, span a huge range of techniques, course types and learning styles.    I just hope we'll be able to figure out a way to measure how well their various ideas worked out...