I’m always surprised at the common themes that emerge when faculty members talk about teaching.

Goals and challenges transcend disciplinary boundaries, allowing for robust discussions about learning; class design and preparation; assessment; the struggles of students, and other areas of teaching.

In discussions Tuesday at CTE’s Best Practices Institute, faculty members from a dozen disciplines shared aspirations and strategies for improving their classes. Among the speakers was Meagan Patterson, associate professor of psychology, who explained the key elements of backward design and then asked participants to write down goals they hoped to achieve in their classes.

My table included instructors from pharmacy, philosophy, journalism, and health, sports and exercise science. The overlap among the group was remarkable. As I wrote the goals on a whiteboard, nearly everyone in the group nodded in agreement. They, too, had essentially the same goals. Here’s a distilled list:

• Learn basic course concepts (as in science or philosophy)
• Learn basic definitions and moral principles and apply those to specific situations
• Demonstrate a big picture view of a subject
• Apply knowledge to real world problems
• Demonstrate good persuasive writing and an ability to refute opposing positions
• Make connections to other disciplines and ideas
• Demonstrate an ability to synthesize and explain discrete specialty topics learned in a course.

Identification of goals is only the first step of creating or remaking a class. The bigger challenge comes when a faculty members starts to envision ways for students to learn material and to demonstrate their learning.

That’s part of what makes teaching so enjoyable, though, no matter the discipline.

Doug Ward is an associate professor of journalism and a fellow at the Center for Teaching Excellence. You can follow him on Twitter @kuediting.

Whenever I give workshops about teaching with technology, I try to provide a handout of resources.

This is one I distributed after workshops I led at the Best Practices Institute at CTE last week and at the School of Education. It’s a relatively modest list, but it includes sites for visualizing text; for editing images; for creating maps, charts, infographics; and for combining elements into a multimedia mélange.

My goal in creating lists like this is to help instructors think about ways to incorporate multimedia elements and technology into their teaching. I never insist that instructors use specific tools. Rather, I try to show how various resources can enrich assignments, deepen learning, expand skills, and make class time more engaging.

Not all assignments lend themselves to multimedia elements, but I’ve found that multimedia tools inspire creativity in students, and make assignments more interesting and more meaningful.

I’ve listed a few tools below. The rest are available in the accompanying PDF.

You’ll find more tools like this at my site journalismtech.com and at Teaching With Technology, a site that Germaine Halegoua and I manage. (This post appears on that site, as well.) Nearly are all are free. Some may have restrictions, so please read the terms of use on each site.

Multimedia tools

• New Hive (site no longer exists). Provides many options to create a single web page with text, images and video.
• ThingLink. Allows you to upload photos and place icons on them that pop up with text, other photos and video.
• Weavly. For creating mashups from YouTube, SoundCloud and other sources.
• Popcorn Maker. A tool for mixing video, audio and images from the web. From Mozilla.
• Meograph. A site for creating multimedia stories.
• Storify. An easy-to-use tool for creating stories from many types of social media.

Timelines

• Dipity. Create timelines, flipbooks, lists and maps. Easy, effective and free for the basic version. One glitch that I’ve found: The embed codes don’t always work well with WordPress sites.
• TimeGlider.
• TimeToast.

Text visualization and analysis

• Wordle. Insert text and create customizable word clouds.
• Document Cloud. Upload documents to the website, analyze them, highlight them and annotate them. You can also create a slideshow-like form that can be embedded elsewhere.

Chart and graph tools

• Many Eyes. Offers tools for creating maps, charts and diagrams, and for analyzing text (word clouds and tag clouds, for example). It offers many examples of how to turn data into visual information. You can input or upload data.
• Chart Gizmo. A free website that allows registered users to create basic charts and graphs.
• Cacoo. Allows you to create and share diagrams, which can be linked, embedded or saved as .png files. More options available with a paid account.

Maps

• Google Maps Engine Lite.
• Google Fusion Tables. Powerful tools for creating maps, charts and graphs. They aren’t difficult to use, but they will take time to learn.
• Community Walk. Based on Google Maps, with some added features.
• MapFab. A useful editor for Google Maps.

Doug Ward is an associate professor of journalism and a fellow at the Center for Teaching Excellence. You can follow him on Twitter @kuediting.

Teachers and administrators say they want to see more innovation in teaching but blame each other for creating obstacles to experimentation, The Hechinger Report writes.

In the article, Jordan Shapiro says that lack of a “dependable shared language” may contribute to the problem. Education buzzwords abound, but clear definitions of those buzzwords are in shorter supply (see Audrey Watters below). That makes it harder to gauge what administrators want or what teachers are doing, Shapiro says.

Colleges and universities have additional problems when it comes to innovative teaching. In some cases, neither administrators nor instructors see much value in pursuing changes in teaching, making it easy to point a finger at someone else while continuing on the same easy but ultimately directionless path. A lack of recognition of and rewards for innovative and effective teaching further hinders change. And I agree with Shapiro that we need to do a better job of explaining what we mean by innovation and effective teaching.

One way to bring about change is to reach out to faculty and administrators who do value teaching, creating a community that demonstrates ways to improve teaching and learning, and helps others take small but meaningful steps toward change. That approach has worked well at the Center for Teaching Excellence with such efforts as the Best Practices Institute and the C21 Consortium, along with our annual teaching summit and periodic workshops and discussions.

Those and other events have generated new ideas for improving student engagement and student learning, promoting reflective teaching, and spreading the word that change is indeed possible from within.

Predictions for 2015 and beyond

Predictions abound at the beginning of every year. Among the publications, organizations and blogs I follow, here are some of the predictions that stood out:

• More state regulation of higher education. (Forbes)
• Increased support for competency-based education programs. (eCampus News)
• Increased pressure from students for college to be “faster, cheaper and more customizable.” (eCampus News)
• Growth of adaptive, personalized learning, and “just-in-time knowledge.” (University Business)
• Possible plateauing of online education. (e-Literate)
• Continued growth in a bring-your-own-device approach to technology, personalized learning, and the use of tablets in K-12 education. (The Journal)
• More attention on student behavior at college campuses. (NPR)
• More of the same empty buzzwords: MOOCs, cloud, big data, social, disruptive innovation, blended learning, personalized learning, efficiency, game-changers, learning outcomes, blah, blah, blah. (Audrey Watters)

Briefly …

Tuition from students now accounts for more revenue than state financing at public colleges and universities in the United States, USA Today reports (There was a link, but the page no longer exists), citing a report from the Government Accountability Office. … The Chronicle of Higher Education has released A Guide to the Flipped Classroom (There was a link, but the page no longer exists), a downloadable booklet that includes seven articles from the Chronicle, along with a short list of resources. Download requires a name, title and email address.

Doug Ward is an associate professor of journalism and the associate director of  the Center for Teaching Excellence. You can follow him on Twitter @kuediting.