Author Archives: Mike Ekoniak

Now that Virginia Tech’s course evaluation system (SPOT) is completely online, I think a really easy change that we should make is to survey students that drop or withdraw from a course.  With the old paper-based system this was probably … Continue reading → Continue reading →

In many countries, attending university is “free” to the student.  Of course, it’s not really free, it’s subsidized by the taxpayers.  In the United States, on the other hand, students typically pay much of their own way.  Of course, this … Continue reading → Continue reading →

In poker, the house rake refers to the flat percentage of the pot that the house skims off the top to make its profit.  At universities, there is an analogous skimming from research grants called “overhead” or “indirect costs” which is generally … Continue reading → Continue reading →

As a follow-up to my previous post on studying Slovak in an intensive program, I thought I’d share an experience that I had: One of the biggest things that stuck out in my mind during my first 10-week intensive Slovak … Continue reading → Continue reading →

One of the things that I always regretted about going to my small private engineering college for undergrad was the fact that I didn’t really have the option of taking language classes.  Even though I was interested in engineering, I … Continue reading → Continue reading →

According to the limited available literature, one of the issues faced by lesbian, gay and bisexual engineering students is that of isolation.  Students feel that they must hide their sexual orientation in order to succeed in the culture of engineering … Continue reading → Continue reading →

In my last post, I discussed how MOOCs are different from other online courses. In this post, I want to discuss how I think I might use a MOOC as one component of a campus-based course.  I think there is … Continue reading → Continue reading →

We mentioned MOOCs in class a few weeks ago and it’s something I’ve given some thought to before, so I wanted to write a little about them here.  A Massive Online Open Course (MOOC) is a type of course that … Continue reading → Continue reading →