Course Editing Team (March 2016)

“The [U.S.] Labor Department keeps detailed and at times delightfully odd records on the skills and tasks required for each job. Some of them are physical: trunk strength, speed of limb movement, the ability to stay upright. Others are more knowledge-based: economics and accounting, physics, programming. Together, they capture the essence of what makes a job distinctive….

Our online courses often include the Student Cafe, which is an ungraded discussion area intended to encourage peer-to-peer interactions, foster or enhance student engagement, and build a learning community. Sounds great, but I wonder sometimes how many students post to the Student Cafe? Do they find it useful? Open Learning students often start a course at…

A recent human service (HUMS) course has a lesson about using critical reflection to uncover and deconstruct assumptions. The lesson explores how language is changing to acknowledge nonbinary-gendered people through pronouns. For example, a writer might choose “they” as a singular pronoun instead of “he” or “she”.  Using “they” as both singular and plural pronouns shouldn’t seem that…