Group items tagged

Devise a logical arrangement for the course content.

Prepare a detailed syllabus. Share the conceptual framework, logic, and organization of your course with students by distributing a syllabus. See "The Course Syllabus."

Stark and others (1990) offer additional sequencing patterns, suggesting that topics may be ordered according to the following: How relationships occur in the real world How students will use the information in social, personal, or career settings How major concepts and relationships are organized in the discipline How students learn How knowledge has been created in the field

List all class meetings.

elect appropriate instructional methods for each class meeting. Instead of asking, What am I going to do in each class session? focus on What are students going to do? (Bligh, 1971). Identify which topics lend themselves to which types of classroom activities, and select one or more activities for each class session: lectures; small group discussions; independent work; simulations, debates, case studies, and role playing; demonstrations; experiential learning activities; instructional technologies; collaborative learning work, and so on. (See other tools for descriptions of these methods.) For each topic, decide how you will prepare the class for instruction (through reviews or previews), present the new concepts (through lectures, demonstrations, discussion), have students apply what they have learned (through discussion, in-class writing activities, collaborative work), and assess whether students can put into practice what they have learned (thro

In this way the teacher presents his or her own expectations for the assigned work but also asks the students their opinion of what they think would constitute quality work

openness and accomplishment

Poor grades exposed male students to the military draft

colleges and universities mandate frequent student evaluations of faculty

These same evaluations play an increasingly important role in tenure and promotion decisions

Factors such as student effort, student persistence, student improvement, and class attendance count in favor of the students who possess these desirable characteristics

faculty member who believes that grades are a vehicle to please students rather than to recognize and reward performance will tend to give higher grades

Similarly a professor less willing to distinguish superior work from good or average work will tend to impart an upward bias to grades

large number of non-traditional students, and a large number of working students all tempt professors to lower their expectations by reducing the number of textbooks

current trend for classroom assessment by external authorities as an attempt to obtain again meaningful feedback on the quality of student performance.

use of just five categories of grades (A-F) has, in the minds of some, contributed to overall grade inflation

meaningful, engaged learning.

authentic tasks.

the intersection of learning and technology,

monitor and document each student's progress.

But at its heart, the university was born to provide a structure to govern the student-teacher relationship.

development of Wikiversity (http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Wikiversity:Main_Page), an initiative from the Wikimedia Foundation

materials are produced by Wikiversity participants, who are, like their counterparts in Wikipedia, motivated volunteers. In addition, the Wikiversity course materials, unlike those made available by MIT, are editable by users

. Instead, students are invited to work together, to engage in discussion, to solve problems, and to otherwise “construct their knowledge.”

Put another way, the role of the teacher in a constructivist setting is like being a “procedural author,” as defined by Janet Murray when discussing virtual reality spaces.9

transformed into a kind of platform where students were invited to explore/create/construct knowledge. Peer production is very much a part of the constructivist classroom setting.

are more theme-parks than sandboxes,” meaning that learning is made as uniform and as controlled as possible (under the name of “standardization” and “outcomes-based” assessments).

In contrast, a sandbox conjures up images of unstructured, unplanned, emergent play that is determined by the players. Imagine a university organized and managed like a sandbox, where teachers and students are invited to play and create in an unstructured environment—or, rather, in an environment structured by their own actions, choices, and decisions.

Concerns would surely be raised about the quality of these credentials, similar to the debates about the quality of the articles in Wikipedia

To what degree will such informal learning and “credentialing by reputation” be legitimated and accepted by society?

emerge from the decisions, the edits, the additions, and the deletions of a number of people, all bound by the rules and protocols of Wikipedia

The wiki-ized university will probably not displace the traditional university but will likely exist alongside it, albeit in direct competition.

Cognitive Strategy Instruction (CSI) is an instructional approach which emphasizes the development of thinking skills and processes as a means to enhance learning. The objective of CSI is to enable all students to become more strategic, self-reliant, flexible, and productive in their learning endeavors (Scheid, 1993). CSI is based on the assumption that there are identifiable cognitive strategies, previously believed to be utilized by only the best and the brightest students, which can be taught to most students (Halpern, 1996). Use of these strategies have been associated with successful learning (Borkowski, Carr, & Pressley, 1987; Garner, 1990).

Metacognition enables students to benefit from instruction (Carr, Kurtz, Schneider, Turner & Borkowski, 1989; Van Zile-Tamsen, 1996) and influences the use and maintenance of cognitive strategies.

Metacognition and Cognitive Strategy Instruction

The study of metacognition has provided educational psychologists with insight about the cognitive processes involved in learning and what differentiates successful students from their less successful peers. It also holds several implications for instructional interventions, such as teaching students how to be more aware of their learning processes and products as well as how to regulate those processes for more effective learning.

Metacognition refers to higher order thinking which involves active control over the cognitive processes engaged in learning. Activities such as planning how to approach a given learning task, monitoring comprehension, and evaluating progress toward the completion of a task are metacognitive in nature. Because metacognition plays a critical role in successful learning, it is important to study metacognitive activity and development to determine how students can be taught to better apply their cognitive resources through metacognitive control.

Does good teaching in the classroom translate to good teaching online? If so, what elements can be translated and which ones can't or shouldn't?

"The shared mantra of the faculty and staff during the development of this document was that "good teaching is good teaching!" An Emerging Set of Guiding Principles... is less about distance education and more about what makes for an effective educational experience, regardless of where or when it is delivered."

Good practice encourages student-faculty contact. Good practice encourages cooperation among students. Good practice encourages active learning. Good practice gives prompt feedback. Good practice emphasizes time on task. Good practice communicates high expectations. Good practice respects diverse talents and ways of learning.

Frequent student-faculty contact in and out of class is the most important factor in student motivation and involvement. Faculty concern helps students get through rough times and keep on working. Knowing a few faculty members well enhances students' intellectual commitment and encourages them to think about their own values and future plans.

At first glance, teaching a class without the ability to see and hear the students in person appears daunting. The enlightened, quizzical, or stony facial expressions, the sighs of distress or gasps of wonder, and even the less-than-subtle raised hands or interjected queries that constitute immediate feedback to a lecture, discussion, or clinical situation are absent. Yet the proponents of online instruction will argue that these obstacles can be overcome, and that the online format has its own advantages. In the online experiences documented in the "Net.Learning" (www.pbs.org/netlearning/home.html) videotape, which our seminar viewed early in the year, Peggy Lant of the California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo presented a striking example that occurred in her class' online discussion of civil war. One student's comments were especially gripping as she had just survived a civil war in her home country. Shy students who have trouble participating in a classroom discussion are said to feel more comfortable in an online setting. The ability to sit and think as one composes a question or comment also can raise the quality of the discussion. Susan Montgomery at the University of Michigan has developed an interactive website that addresses diverse learning styles through the use of multimedia (Montgomery, 1998).

Teachers, trainers, and professors with years of experience in classrooms report that computer networking encourages the high-quality interaction and sharing that is at the heart of education. ...(The) characteristics of online classes... generally result in students' contributing material that is much better than something they would say off the top of their heads in a face-to-face class. There is a converse side, however. Just after the passage above, Harasim cautions (Harasim et al. 1995) On the other hand, unless the teacher facilitates the networking activities skillfully, serious problems may develop. A conference may turn into a monologue of lecture-type material to which very few responses are made. It may become a disorganized mountain of information that is confusing and overwhelming for the participants. It may even break down socially into name calling rather than building a sense of community.

At what cost is this high degree of interaction, the need for which we suspect is student motivation and the professor's (online) attentiveness, achieved? In the previous section it was noted that charismatic professors of large (several hundred student) classes might indeed reach and motivate the students in the back row by intangible displays of attentiveness. Online, attentiveness must be tangible, and may involve more effort than in a face-to-face setting. These considerations imply an inherent limitation of online class size; size is determined by the amount of effort required to form a "community of learners."

Small class sizes and the linear dependence of effort on student numbers are indicative of the high level of interaction needed for high quality online teaching

The best way to maintain the connection [between online education and the values of traditional education] is through ensuring that distance learning is 'delivered' not just by CD ROMs, but by living teachers, fully qualified and interested in doing so online ... [P]repackaged material will be seen to replace not the teacher as a mentor and guide but the lecture and the textbook. Interaction with the professor will continue to be the centerpiece of education, no matter what the medium.

and Ronald Owston, who points out (Owston, 1997) "...we cannot simply ask 'Do students learn better with the Web as compared to traditional classroom instruction?' We have to realize that no medium, in and of itself, will likely improve learning in a significant way when it is used to deliver instruction. Nor is it realistic to expect the Web, when used as a tool, to develop in students any unique skills."

Facilitating Online Courses: A Checklist for Action The key concept in network teaching is to facilitate collaborative learning, not to deliver a course in a fixed and rigid, one-way format. Do not lecture. Be clear about expectations of the participants. Be flexible and patient. Be responsive. Do not overload. Monitor and prompt for participation. For assignments, set up small groups and assign tasks to them. Be a process facilitator. Write weaving comments every week or two... Organize the interaction. Set rules and standards for good netiquette (network etiquette)... Establish clear norms for participation and procedures for grading... Assign individuals or small groups to play the role of teacher and of moderator for portions of the course. Close and purge moribund conferences in stages... Adopt a flexible approach toward curriculum integration on global networks.

Plus switching itself takes a toll: As you're switching, says Meyer, you're not concentrating on either task. And you need a mental warm-up to resume the suspended task.

igital media play an important role in the social development of the 800 young people she and her team interviewed. T

"The entire culture is starting to look like what you see in attention deficit disorder, where there's a difficulty in focusing and distractibility,"

working short times on many different things at one time."

In particular, people with divided attention may not deeply integrate new information and may have trouble applying it later as a resul

e could lose qualities like empathy that are probably stimulated by face-to-face interaction."

For a while, I never thought I would get here!

open source movement

Digital StudyHall (DSH)

We now need a new approach to learning—one characterized by a demand-pull rather than the traditional supply-push mode of building up an inventory of knowledge in students’ heads. Demand-pull learning shifts the focus to enabling participation in flows of action, where the focus is both on “learning to be” through enculturation into a practice as well as on collateral learning.

open participatory learning ecosystems

“I think, therefore I am,” and from the assumption that knowledge is something that is transferred to the student via various pedagogical strategies, the social view of learning says, “We participate, therefore we are

provided students with opportunities to observe and then to emulate how experts function

seeking the knowledge when it is needed in order to carry out a particular situated task.

all student writing was done on public blogs

In addition to supporting lecture-style teaching, Terra Incognita includes the capability for small groups of students who want to work together to easily “break off” from the central classroom before rejoining the entire class. Instructors can “visit” or send messages to any of the breakout groups and can summon them to rejoin the larger group.

CyberOne Classroom in Second Life

I think that in order to achieve a sense of community between your students you have to give them diverse and frequent opportunities for interaction between them and with you, it is not about knowing each other and working in groups in some activity, you have to interact a lot with all your classmates to build a community and feel that you belong to the class. So you have to design diverse activities and spaces for interaction, sharing and communication between students and with you. Also, you have to teach and guide the students in how to interact, how to contribute, how to add knowledge to the conversation, how to give their classmates feedback, how to reinforce their opinions, how to support them, how to answer their questions, how to evaluate them, how to question them, how to agree or refute them, how to make a comfortable climate for learning and a lot of other things related to create a sense of teaching presence and a sense of belonging to the group.

sometimes we think the only way of engaging students is entertaining them. That is not true,

Australian internet expert, Matthew Allen from Curtin University vigorously disagrees."We have to get over the myth that mobile phones have eaten the brains of our children and talk productively about using new communications tools."There is an untapped reservoir of interest and enthusiasm, and if you can find the right tasks [that] empower students, it's like reaching a [teaching] tipping point," Allen says.

The future role of formal education may be to help us navigate through this information in a really useful way