Chip is Associate Professor of Instructional Technology at Kent State University where he has taught since 1996. He holds a Ph.D. in Educational Technology from Arizona State University. At Kent he is responsible for teaching, advising, research, and service in Instructional Technology. Chip teaches such courses as Instructional Design and Advanced Instructional Design, Instructional Applications of the Internet, Current Issues in Instructional Technology, and others.

His research interests include using computer-mediated communication to facilitate collaborative learning and problem solving, developing Web-based instruction, usability of instructional Web sites, and others. He also serves as Faculty Associate for the Kent State University Faculty Professional Development Center.

Learning Philosophy

Good learning is active learning. This may be almost a cliché, but if so, it is one that is given lip service as often as it is heeded. Once we have decided to make our teaching and learning efforts active, we still face two major issues. First, we have to make sure that the right people are active. Higher education has been notorious for instructional situations where the most active person in the class is the instructor. At the same time it has often been noted that the best way to learn something is to teach it to someone else, so it comes as no surprise that the instructor tends to learn the most in many classes. For more effective teaching and learning, we need to shift the activities to the learners.

Second, we have to ensure that students are active in the right ways . Activity for activity’s sake is no more educational than the passive reception of information. The activities must further the learning goals that we and our students have set. This means having a clear idea of the goals and matching them with appropriate activities. It means creating activities that demand the learning, the information, and the skills we have in mind. The information and activities that we provide our students can then be delivered via a variety of media and technologies now.

These matters cannot be left to chance. In order to achieve them, we must do several things. First, we need to base our teaching as much as possible on research about both student learning and good teaching practices. Second, we should systematically design and evaluate learning experiences for our students to help us create the best ones possible. Finally, we need to follow up with systematic research to discover or verify such things as the assumptions of our practices, their limits, and their necessary elements.

I cannot stress enough the importance of evaluation in all this, especially evaluation that goes beyond the student questionnaires that most organizations use. Deeper evaluation looks not just at students’ reactions to the teaching but also at the best data we can gather about what they actually learned. The goal of good formative evaluation is to find the problems in educational systems with a view toward fixing them. Often this is difficult to do with standard student evaluations and their use for reappointment, promotion, and tenure. We may have to choose to concentrate on better teaching instead.