The "Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education," originally published in the AAHE Bulletin (Chickering & Gamson, 1987), are a popular framework for evaluating teaching in traditional, face-to-face courses. The principles are based on 50 years of higher education research (Chickering & Reisser, 1993). A faculty inventory (Johnson Foundation, "Faculty," 1989) and an institutional inventory (Johnson Foundation, "Institutional," 1989) based on these principles have helped faculty members and higher-education institutions examine and improve their teaching practices.
Principle 1: Good Practice Encourages Student-Faculty Contact
Lesson for online instruction: Instructors should provide clear guidelines for interaction with students.
Instructors wanted to be accessible to online students but were apprehensive about being overwhelmed with e-mail messages or bulletin board postings. They feared that if they failed to respond quickly, students would feel ignored. To address this, we recommend that student expectations and faculty concerns be mediated by developing guidelines for student-instructor interactions. These guidelines would do the following:
• Establish policies describing the types of communication that should take place over different channels. Examples
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One instructor gave a discussion assignment in which students researched, presented, and defended a current policy issue in the field. The instructor allowed students to research their own issue of interest, instead of assigning particular issues. As instructors give students a voice in selecting their own topics for course projects, they encourage students to express their own diverse points of view. Instructors can provide guidelines to help students select topics relevant to the course while still allowing students to share their unique