Group items tagged

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

On February 1, 2012, Connexions launched its groundbreaking initiative OpenStax College™. OpenStax College is a non-profit organization committed to improving student access to quality learning materials. Our free textbooks are developed and peer reviewed by educators to ensure they are readable, accurate, and meet the scope and sequence requirements of your course. Through our partnerships with companies and foundations committed to reducing costs for students, OpenStax College is working to improve access to higher education for all. OpenStax College is an initiative of Rice University and is made possible through the generous support of several philanthropic foundations.

Connexions® is a registered trademark of Rice University.

it is concrete, born before me with a structure and a real plan

h-ha moments are coming regularly now. The challenge is now enjoyable.

The a

. The first time I implement something I cannot always anticipate all of the issues, but after a run through I can plan for those problems and be proactive in preventing them.

I am thinking about what I feel is working for me as a student and what is not, so I can include or not include those things in my course.

Now my perspective had drastically changed—I am instead asking myself how do I get the students to the information? How will I devise learning activities that will assist them in their search for knowledge and understanding? It is not my responsibility to spoon feed them, but to teach them how to spoon feed themselves.

Giving up control and trusting students to learn. I don’t need to give them the information, just provide the opportunity for them to discover it for themselves, and trust that they will do it. Everyone says this works, I can’t wait to see it happen!

Not only has my expectation for online teaching changed, but I also am trying to apply some of these ideas to my f2f courses.  I want students to take more responsibility for their learning. I want them to learn from each other, and to discover knowledge instead of waiting for it to be fed to them. I want to build more community into my courses, so students feel that they can share and learn from others and take risks in class. I also want students to learn what they are interested in learning, or what they need to learn depending on where they are in their understanding of the content.

half of the requirement for this class.

I was given this gift: show your students the importance of reflection. 

There was absolutely nothing about my course learning activities that was learner-centered, or, one could argue, learning-centered!  I was being extremely teacher-centered in my approach! 

  Because of that, I need to embrace these tools, explore new ideas, and for goodness sake- think about the STUDENT.

the more effort you put into it, the more successful you’ll be.

One thought I had, as I look forward to getting a PhD, is that theories come from practice which means that theories about online learning come from individuals creating courses, teaching courses, and collecting feedback from courses over and over and then after all of that work is finished, turning right around and working at analyzing the data, and attempting to answer research questions.  In order to have credible research, the questions must be relevant, the measures must be valid and thorough, and the analyses of results must be comprehensive. 

Reflective Writing: I have to admit, at the beginning of the course I thought the blogging activities were just busy work.  I viewed the assignments as busy work, and treated my entries as such.  As time ticked on, I started getting into the blogs and realizing that it was my personal space in which I could reflect on my work on my course and my learning throughout the week/module.  So much of life and learning in school is sort of thrown at you, and if you don’t take the time to intentionally deconstruct the events and make sense of them, then you’ll never grow and improve.  I’d rather grow.

If I don’t place intentional emphasis on something (like making it worth a portion of their grade) then I am sending a message that it’s not important. 

Nothing should be an accident or “just because” in the online teaching environment. 

Students don’t want their time wasted.

content via email or online applications they later regretted (29%).

however the research shows that half of managers believe that web collaboration te

ology is now ‘critical’ to the future success of their business.”

Barriers to adoption: Barriers to adoption of social media have shifted from productivity to focus on security, with 53 percent of companies concerned about security threats and 31 percent concerned about data breaches.

While arguments have been made in opposition to online education, there are proponents who are in support of this mode of instruction. They suggest that the lack of face-to-face interaction can be substituted by online discussions in bulletin board systems, online video conferences or on listservs (Blake, 2000). Online education can also promote students' critical thinking skills, deep learning, collaborative learning, and problem-solving skills (Ascough, 2002; Rosie, 2000). Donlevy (2003) asserted that online education may help schools expand curricula offerings with less cost and can help graduates gain important technology skills to improve their marketability. Proponents also argue that online education can encourage non-discriminatory teaching and learning practices since the teachers and students, as well as students and their classmates typically do not meet face-to-face. Palloff and Pratt (1999) have concluded that because students cannot tell the race, gender, physical characteristics of each other and their teachers, online education presents a bias-free teaching and learning environment for instructors and students.

academic dishonesty of online learners (Muirhead, 2000)

several factors that may deter faculty from teaching online.

lack of professional prestige

While many critics have suggested that there is no sure way to hold students accountable for academic dishonesty, Heberling (2002) concluded that while maintaining academic integrity in the online instructional setting may be a challenging, many strategies may be employed to detect and prevent plagiarism, such as reversing an Internet search, tracking back to an original source.

10 keys to quality online learning

Knowledge is constructed, not transmitted. Students can take full responsibility for their own learning. Students are motivated to want to learn. The course provides “mental white space” for reflection. Learning activities appropriately match student learning styles. Experiential, active learning augments the Web site learning environment, Solitary and interpersonal learning activities are interspersed. Inaccurate prior learning is identified and corrected. “Spiral learning” provides for revisiting and expanding prior lessons, The master teacher is able to guide the overall learning process. (p. 6-17)

Alley and Jansak (2001)