Confusors - Separated by a Common Language

Meaning 1

Meaning2

Meaning 3

A visible activity (e.g., studying, listening to lectures, working on a project)

What's happening invisibly  in the person's brain during that process (meaning1) e.g., a misconception being confronted and being replaced by a different conception

The outcome of that process (meaning 2) e.g., mastery of a skill or body of knowledge. To avoid confusion, you may want to refer to meaning 3 as a 'learning outcome' or 'what the person has learned' instead of  'learning.'

Synonym for education, but typically used for relatively brief or contained kinds of teaching and learning. This definition is most common in the wider world.

A form of education that emphasizes a) everyone should learn the same thing, b) acquisition of knowledge or skills without any emphasis on engendering wisdom or perspective. This definition is more common in universities.

One-way communication (oral, images) from an expert to a large number of novices. Can occur in a classroom, by video, by audio, etc.

Anything  a faculty member does with students in a classroom

Any intentional activity that, directly or indirectly, helps someone else learn (example of indirect teaching: assigning a student to write a paper on a topic of personal interest, even if no further assistance or feedback is given)

Any intentional activity that directly helps someone else learn (e.g., coaching; writing a textbook)

An activity that occurs, by definition, only when the expert and the novice are in the same room. So any form of distance learning, no matter how effective, is not teaching.

Teacher, students, materials and what happens among them. Each term, each "course' is unique because (at the very least) the students change. This definition is held inconsistently -- many people would agree with it, yet almost no "course evaluations" include assessments of the contributions of the students.

The materials used for instruction. This definition is implied by the question, "Who owns the course?" which is a question about control of  intellectual property, not about slavery.

Teacher and the materials the teacher uses (but not the  students) - implied when someone says, "I'm teaching the same course again this year."

Nontraditional scheduling. Total time spent in the course remains the same as in typical classes. However, students are expected to spend more time on ‘homework’ (out of classroom) including online work. Fewer hours are spent in face-to-face meetings in classrooms. Most common motives: give students more time to do the work online; reduce the demand for classroom space; decrease scheduling conflicts that slow student progress to a degree.

Use of various technologies for complementary communicative/interactive purposes including classrooms, textbooks, and online tools such as course management systems, e-mail, and the web.

A learning process can be defined as "active" if the learner is required to continually make decisions. For example, learning processes that involve assignments of writing, discussion, solving a problem, group work, or creating something are active learning processes.  Lectures are usually characterized as passive because the learner is not required by the situation to think critically or even to listen. 

A learning process can be defined as active if a learner is continually making decisions, whether or not the process forces the learner to do so. For example, a lecture can support active learning if the listener is continually (perhaps silently) questioning and interpreting the message - "why was that said?" "what are the implications of what was just said?" "do I believe what was just said?"

Students  conversing online with faculty and other students ('interactive instruction')

Students using software that is designed for educational purposes and which responds differently depending on what the student writes or does, e.g., tutorials, online quiz, simulations

A discussion using concepts and their association to explain a phenomenon.

A lecture that is abstract and does not present information related to the student's personal experiences.

A lecture discussing concepts unrelated to any wider contexts, personal or theoretical.

Intentional collection of information about a process in order to improve it or make a decision about it.

Intentional collection of quantitative information (whether that's appropriate or not)

Intentional collection of information by someone else in order to judge and perhaps penalize you.

Measurement of what students have learned or what students can do

Intentional collection of qualitative information (e.g., students writing essays, interviews)

Intentional collection of information by you in order to advance your own agenda

Any information used as part of an intentional inquiry. The results of an interview are data, for example. Photographs originally taken for another purpose but used in an evaluation are data.

Quantitative information - numbers. If the results aren't numbers, then they aren't data..

An institution has a culture of assessment if it's widely accepted that formal inquiry (studies; formative evaluation) is a valuable, typical way to improve practice and if such inquiries are in fact common, influential and beneficial at that institution.

Label for an effort by assessment enthusiasts to make assessment the most important activity at the institution, at the expense of all other activities and all other values.

Intentional, formal inquiry by faculty members with their own students as subjects, designed to help them improve their own courses and, if the inquiry turns out to be  exceptionally successful, help their colleagues improve their own courses as well.   It is this last clause that distinguishes SOTL from course research. Unlike educational research, SOTL inquiry is not typically in search of generalizable findings. Any faculty member with a little additional training can engage in SOTL, no matter what the discipline of the faculty member.

 Other definitions are like the one to the left but vary in detail. For example some people insist that, to meet the definition of SOTL, an inquiry needs to be framed in terms of what other faculty members have found in their own inquiries. Some say that the activity needs to be exposed to the critique of colleagues, but need not a chance of being helpful to colleagues' teaching or inquiries,, in order to be considered SOTL.

Any kind of innovative work done by faculty that is heard about by colleagues and benefits them. (In our view this is an incorrect definition of SOTL).

Net costs of an activity (e.g., costs of a distance learning program)

Gross costs. (We've heard of a department that, when asked to cut costs, fired an adjunct who happened to be responsible for a good chunk of the department's revenue..)

Note: Some arguments include assertions such as "You can't run a program of that type with that small a budget" or "if they're getting that big a budget, they must be wasting some of it." Both assertions assume that any type of program has a 'normal' cost. Research says the opposite. See "Bowen's Law."

Any educational program that helps students learn even though they rarely or never see their instructors face-to-face

(ditto) but only if the barrier facing students is physical distance (as opposed to schedule)

(ditto) but done in a way that is inevitably inferior (less interactive, fewer resources for students, less faculty attention, larger course sizes)

(ditto) but only if the students use two-way video

(ditto) but only if students use the Web

A large contiguous physical space where an institution has many buildings, where faculty have offices, where there are classrooms, etc

Institution

When meaning 1 and 2 are combined, the implication is that all the important resources of the institutions are on the campus: (just) resident faculty, (just) the books in the library, etc.

When compared with distance learning, 'campus learning' is assumed to be highly variable, including possibility of large or small classes, passive or active students. If distance learning outcomes are found to be the same as campus outcomes, this might mean that both are bad, both are mediocre, or that both are great.

When compared with distance learning (see above), 'campus learning' is assumed to be ideal (all small classes, rich discussion, labs, etc.). If distance learning outcomes are found to be the same as campus outcomes, then distance learning must be very good.

Any tool, resource, facility etc. that's used for some purpose, along with what's known about how to use that tool, resource or facility to achieve that purpose

Computers and computer-related devices

Any tool, resource, or facility that is, for the person involved, unfamiliar, risky and/or expensive enough that the person is continually conscious of it. For many people word processors and cars are not technologies because they can easily use them without continually being aware of them.

Use of "technology" (q.v.) in a physical classroom

Any use of technology associated with a course, even when used in a dorm room, library, or workplace to do homework for that course

Any use of technology in a course, ranging from PowerPoint slides to a course that has been totally redesigned, with new goals, new content, and new ways for students to study.

An approach to education that relies mainly on materials and one-way transmission of explanations from experts to learners. "Delivery" implies that clear explanations result in effective learning.  Goes with the assumption that education can usually occur completely effectively if the learner reads, hears, or watches instructional messages.

Any way that students learn.

Any way that students learn if they're off-campus

The course does not begin and end with the usual semester start and end dates. (Editor's note: this definition is unusual in my experience, but I've heard it in more than one place. I'm tempted to discourage the use of 'asynchronous' for this purpose. Is there another term for courses that where students begin and end at the same time, but not on the calendar common to most other courses at that institution?

"The set of skills needed to find, retrieve, analyze, and use information. Information literacy is more closely tied to course-integrated instruction but it extends far beyond coordination between the reference librarian and the individual faculty member." (ACRL)

Teaching students how the basics ('literacy') of how to use the library as well as how to use specialized online and other digital resources available from the library. Unrelated to the rest of the curriculum unless the faculty member invites someone from the library to provide a quick briefing or online tips.

Name of an organizational unit that is part of The TLT Group

Flashlight Online, a web-based, multi-institution survey system and library developed by the Flashlight Program in collaboration with Washington State University.

An approach to developing evaluations, assessments, and other inquiries that has been developed in part by the Flashlight Program (e.g., a "Flashlight study")

In any 'dangerous discussion,' it's important to learn what others mean when they say "we" (as in "we decided that ..." or "they (as in "they won't let us ..."). 

In discussions of technology development projects, time can be a confusor.  When a developer mentions a capability of a technology under development (e.g., this system can do "x"), you need to clarify whether the capability already exists and is reliable, whether it exists only in a test form, or whether the developer expects the capability to become available real soon.

Jose' Icaza of ITESM in Mexico points out that "always" can be a confusor when two people agree (or disagree) about something that students 'always' do: all students? all the time without exception? or might one person mean that 50% of students do this 50% of the time?