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ian august

Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign - 0 views

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    online e-science, send in insects and use microscope online
lkryder

5 Visual Design Strategies that Promote Student Retention - 2 views

  • everal aspects of course design can affect retention; however, one of the most overlooked is visual design. Looks matter. In fact, in e-Learning and the Science of Instruction, Richard Mayer and Ruth Clark have reported an average learning increase of 89% in courses that added relevant visuals to text. With this in mind, consider the five design strategies listed below that can help capture students’ eyes and interest throughout your course.
  • Every visual should serve a specific purpose and align with your objectives.
  • Graphics should act as street signs that compliment content and guide students in the right direction, so keep your graphical layout sleek and minimal.
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  • Make media memorable by ensuring that it clarifies, extends, or reinforces concepts.
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    design ideas for visuals and multimedia
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    design ideas for visuals and multimedia
Irene Watts-Politza

ScienceDirect.com - Computers & Education - Learning presence: Towards a theory of self-efficacy, self-regulation, and the development of a communities of inquiry in online and blended learning environments - 1 views

  • This line of research indicated that the multivariate measure of learning represented by the cognitive presence factor could be predicted by the quality of teaching presence and social presence reported by learners in online courses. The relationship between these constructs is illustrated in Fig. 1 below.
  • Given the electronic, social, and “self-directed” nature of online learning, it seems imperative that we examine learner self- and co-regulation in online environments especially as they relate to desired outcomes such as higher levels of cognitive presence as described in the CoI framework.
    • Irene Watts-Politza
       
      Is this an aspect of assessment that is adequately addressed?
  • We suggest that this constellation of behaviors and traits may be seen as elements of a larger construct “learning presence” (Shea, 2010).
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  • self-efficacy can be viewed as a subjective judgment of one’s level of competence in executing certain behaviors or achieving certain outcomes in the future. Self-efficacy has been identified as the best predictor of college GPA and among the best predictors of college persistence through meta-analytic research (Robbins et al., 2004). Further, commenting on the state of the art in self-regulated learning research Winne suggested that self-regulation is contingent on positive self-efficacy beliefs, arguing that “learners must subscribe to a system of epistemological and motivational beliefs that classifies failure as an occasion to be informed, a condition that is controllable, and a stimulus to spend effort to achieve better” (Winne, 2005). This contrast of failure attribution as trait (e.g., “I’m just not good at math”) versus failure as occasion to be informed (“I can control, adapt, and learn from this”) is a classic view of maladaptive and adaptive self-efficacy beliefs.
  • In the current study we therefore examine the relationship between CoI constructs and elements of self efficacy in order to begin to investigate the larger theme of collaborative online learner regulation and learning presence.
  • Thus, self-efficacy is “concerned not with what one has but with belief in what one can do with whatever resources one can muster” (Bandura, 2007, p. 6).
  • Bandura has noted that slightly elevated efficacy can have a bigger impact on subsequent performance. Overestimating one’s capabilities to produce a behavior and outcome may boost performance and give rise to motivation to persist in face of obstacles and seatback, while the opposite is true for underestimating one’s capabilities, which may suppress productive goals, persistence and effort (Bandura, 2007). Thus there is an important connection between self-efficacy, effort, and subsequent performance.
    • Irene Watts-Politza
       
      This has implications for course attrition rates.
  • Positive psychological and emotional states in the aftermath of successful execution of certain academic behaviors naturally lead to sense of competence and subsequently results in enhanced sense of efficacy.
    • Irene Watts-Politza
       
      This is the "feeling of satsfaction" Lisa Martin referred to in her Module 3 posts on social presence.
  • We suggest here that elements within the CoI framework may serve as mechanisms for supporting self-efficacy. Specifically we conjecture that effective teaching presence and positive social presence should serve as sources of social persuasion and positive affect supportive of self-efficacy.
  • (Bandura, 1997). These and other studies have suggested that self-efficacy has a substantial role in predicting student engagement, motivation and performance ( [Bong, 2004], [Caraway et al., 2003], [Chemers et al., 2001], [Choi, 2005], [Smith et al., 2001] and [Vrugt et al., 2002]).
  • The participants in the study were a random sample of 3165 students from 42 two- and four-year institutions in New York State.
    • Irene Watts-Politza
       
      SLN? See how many things you can learn with one really great data set?
  • Gaining knowledge about the reasons for learning and achievement of online students has attracted a great deal of attention among both researchers and practitioners. Understanding the factors that have an influence on the success of online education has significant implications for designing productive online communities.
  • Reviewing studies that investigated elements of online learner self-regulation
  • This ongoing project to document all instances of teaching, social, and cognitive presence in complete online courses also resulted in identification of learner discourse that did not fit within the model, i.e. could not be reliably coded as indicators of teaching, social, or cognitive presence ( [Shea, 2010] and [Shea et al., 2010]).
  • Additional work on the CoI model (Shea, Vickers, & Hayes, 2010) suggested that past research methods may have resulted in a systematic under representation of the instructional effort involved in online education.
  • These exceptions represent interesting data for refining and enhancing the model as they suggest that learners are attempting to accomplish goals that are not accounted for within the CoI framework.
  • In this paper we examine the Community of Inquiry framework (Garrison, Anderson, & Archer, 2000) suggesting that the model may be enhanced through a fuller articulation of the roles of online learners. We present the results of a study of 3165 students in online and hybrid courses from 42 two- and four-year institutions in which we examine the relationship between learner self-efficacy measures and their ratings of the quality of their learning in virtual environments. We conclude that a positive relationship exists between elements of the CoI framework and between elements of a nascent theoretical construct that we label “learning presence”. We suggest that learning presence represents elements such as self-efficacy as well as other cognitive, behavioral, and motivational constructs supportive of online learner self-regulation.
  • the CoI framework attempts to articulate the social, technological, and pedagogical processes that engender collaborative knowledge construction. It therefore represents an effort to resolve the greatest challenge to the quality of online education
  • Learner discussions also included efforts to divide up tasks, manage time, and set goals in order to successfully complete group projects. As such they appeared to be indicators of online learner self and co-regulation, which can be viewed as the degree to which students in collaborative online educational environments are metacognitively, motivationally, and behaviorally active participants in the learning process (Winters & Azevedo, 2005).
  • the authors concluded that all the studies converged on advantageous outcomes for providing support for “metacognitive” learning strategies including self-reflection, self-explanation, and self-monitoring.
  • successfully orchestrating a dialogue demands fairly sophisticated skills. Conversational contributions need to be simultaneously parsed according to their disciplinary value, their location within the chain of collective argumentation, their relevance to the instructional goals, and their role as indicators of the student’s ongoing understanding. The outcome of this complex appraisal is a sense of the amount and quality of the guidance that specific contributions and the conversation as a whole require to support learning.” (Larreamendy-Joerns & Leinhardt, p. 591)
  • Zhao et al. also concluded that studies in which instructor interaction with students was medium to high resulted in better learning outcomes for online students relative to classroom learners.
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    This article also addresses the relationships between each of the presences and proposes an additional presence- Learner Presence.
efleonhardt

Examining motivation in online distance learning environments: Complex, multifaceted and situation-dependent | Hartnett | The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning - 0 views

  • Poor motivation has been identified as a decisive factor in contributing to the high dropout rates from online courses
  • suggest that online students are more intrinsically motivated across the board than their on-campus counterparts at both undergraduate and postgraduate level.
  • Self-determination theory is a contemporary theory of situated motivation that is built on the fundamental premise of learner autonomy
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  • all humans have an intrinsic need to be self-determining or autonomous
  • as well as to feel competent
  • connected
  • SDT explains extrinsic motivation processes in terms of external regulation as the reasons for undertaking the task lie outside the individual.
  • a perception that what they do will not affect the outcome
  • an attribution of low value to the task being undertaken
  • the tendency to focus only on intrinsic motivation
  • It measures situational intrinsic motivation, extrinsic forms of motivation (external regulation and identified regulation), and amotivation
  • Case study one was situated within a compulsory integrated science and technology course
  • Case study two was positioned within an introductory social studies curriculum course that formed a compulsory component of the same programme.
  • suggests that higher quality, more self-determined types of motivation were only slightly more evident than the traditional type of extrinsic motivation–external regulation (Ryan & Deci, 2000) and amotivatio
  • suggesting that autonomous types of motivation (i.e., identified regulation and intrinsic motivation) were more prevalent.
  • associated with individuals who engage in an activity because the results may have personal value to them or because the activity is regarded as worthwhile.
  • these findings clearly show that motivation can be a complex and multifaceted phenomenon that cannot be fully explained from the perspective of motivation as either a learner characteristic or an effect of learning environment design.
  • practitioners need to be cognisant of the important role they play in influencing learner motivation when designing learning activities.
  • he relevance and value of the task
  • need to be clearly identified and linked to learning objectives to help
  • By offering meaningful choices (i.e., not just option choices) to learners that allow them to pursue topics that are of interest to them, the perceived value of the activity is further enhanced.
  • ongoing communication with learners, where they feel able to discuss issues in an open and honest manner, practitioners are in a better position to accurately monitor and respond to situational factors that could potentially undermine learner motivation.
Mark Prelewicz

Public Schools Begin to Offer Gym Classes Online - New York Times - 0 views

  • The course allows students to meet requirements by exercising how they want, when they want. They are required to work out hard for 30 minutes four times a week and report to their teachers by e-mail. Parents must certify that the students did the workouts.
  • Still, some committed online educators remain unconvinced. Tim Snyder, the executive director of Colorado Online Learning, which offers more than 50 online courses to Colorado schools, included physical education with studio art, marching band and the laboratory sciences as subjects best left to brick-and-mortar schools. "These are still better experienced in a hands-on setting," Dr. Snyder said. But online gym has prospered. That has been possible in part because physical education itself has evolved. Once a highly regimented class centered on team sports and competition, physical education now emphasizes healthy living and personal fitness, topics some see as eminently suited for independent Internet study.
  • Even the course's author, Brenda Corbin, who writes curriculums for the Minneapolis district, was dismissive at first. "I refused to be a part of it," Ms. Corbin said of her initial reaction a year ago, when Ms. Braaten and district administrators approached her about writing the physical education course. "How do you know they're really working out?" Ms. Corbin said she asked. But she later changed her mind. "I was uninformed about what you can do over the computer," she said.
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    PE course mini-evaluation. changing mind-sets
Maria Guadron

Building a better student discussion | e! Science News - 0 views

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    "While discussions can be variable and unpredictable in meeting course goals, having a clear approach and organization can increase the potential for active learnin"
b malczyk

Personality and online presence - 0 views

  • The literature suggests factors such as extraversion, emotional stability and openness to experience are related to uses of social applications on the Internet
  • people who are more emotionally stable will use socialmedia less frequently, was also supported.
  • worrisome individuals tend to use socialmedia more frequently
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  • socialmedia use
  • extraversion was positively related to socialmedia
  • extraversion and socialmedia use was particularly important among the young adult cohort
  • emotional stability turned out to be negatively related to the usage of these online social applications,
  • men with greater degrees of emotional instability were more regular users
  • Results revealed that while extraversion and openness to experiences were positively related to socialmedia use,
  • eing open to new experiences emerged as an important personality predictor of socialmedia use for the more mature segment of the sample.
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    This study looks at facebook utilization and personality traits
Heather Kurto

Making Sense of MOOCs: Musings in a Maze of Myth, Paradox and Possibility | Daniel | Journal of Interactive Media in Education - 0 views

  • The first course carrying the name MOOC was offered in 2008, so this is new phenomenon. Second, the pedagogical style of the early courses, which we shall call cMOOCs, was based on a philosophy of connectivism and networking. This is quite distinct from the xMOOCs now being developed by elite US institutions that follow a more behaviourist approach. Third, the few academic studies of MOOCs are about the earlier offerings because there has been no time for systematic research on the crop of 2012 xMOOCs. Analysis of the latter has to be based on a large volume of press articles and blogs. Fourth, commentary on MOOCs includes thinly disguised promotional material by commercial interests (e.g. Koller, 2012) and articles by practitioners whose perspective is their own MOOC courses.
  • The term MOOC originated in Canada. Dave Cormier and Bryan Alexander coined the acronym to describe an open online course at the University of Manitoba designed by George Siemens and Stephen Downes. The course, Connectivism and Connective Knowledge, was presented to 25 fee-paying students on campus and 2,300 other students from the general public who took the online class free of charge (Wikipedia, 2012a).
  • Can xMOOCs make money?
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  • technology has been about to transform education for a long time
  • In 1841 the 'inventor of the blackboard was ranked among the best contributors to learning and science, if not among the greatest benefactors to mankind'. A century later, in 1940, the motion picture was hailed the most revolutionary instrument introduced into education since the printing press. Television was the educational revolution in 1957. In 1962 it was programmed learning and in 1967 computers. Each was labelled the most important development since Gutenberg's printing press.
  • But first, we agree with Bates (2012) that what MOOCs will not do is address the challenge of expanding higher education in the developing world. It may encourage universities there, both public and private, to develop online learning more deliberately, and OER from MOOC courses may find their way, alongside OER from other sources, into the teaching of local institutions.
  • He notes (Siemens, 2012) that 'MOOCs are really a platform' and that the platforms for the two types of MOOC that we described at the beginning of the paper are substantially different because they serve different purposes. In Siemens' words 'our cMOOC model emphasises creation, creativity, autonomy and social networking learning.
  • teaching methods 'are based on very old and out-dated behaviourist pedagogy, relying primarily on information transmission, computer-marked assignments and peer assessment'.
  • Another myth is that computers personalise learning. Bates (2012) again: 'No, they don't. They allow students alternative routes through material and they allow automated feedback but they do not provide a sense of being treated as an individual.
  • With such support MOOCs provide a great opportunity to develop new pedagogy. In a world of abundant content, courses can draw from a pool of open educational resources (OER) and provide their students with better and more varied teaching than individual instructors could develop by themselves. The University of Michigan (2012) (which made history by using OER from Africa in its medical school) uses OER extensively in its Coursera course Internet History, Technology and Security. UC Berkeley (2012) draws extensively on OER in its course on Quantum Computing.
  • pedagogy is not a familiar word on the xMOOC campuses. It is a myth that professors distinguished by their research output are competent to create online courses without help.
  • This, in turn, will put a focus on teaching and pedagogy to which these institutions are unaccustomed, which will be healthy. At the same time academics all around the world will make judgements about the intellectual quality and rigour of the institutions that have exposed themselves in this way.
  • With such support MOOCs provide a great opportunity to develop new pedagogy. In a world of abundant content, courses can draw from a pool of open educational resources (OER) and provide their students with better and more varied teaching than individual instructors could develop by themselves.
lkryder

Test-Taking Cements Knowledge Better Than Studying, Researchers Say - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • students who read a passage, then took a test asking them to recall what they had read, retained about 50 percent more of the information a week later than students who used two other methods.
  • the illusion that they know material better than they do.
  • “I think that learning is all about retrieving, all about reconstructing our knowledge,” said the lead author, Jeffrey Karpicke, an assistant professor of psychology at Purdue University. “I think that we’re tapping into something fundamental about how the mind works when we talk about retrieval.”
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  • These other methods not only are popular, the researchers reported; they also seem to give students
  • But when they were evaluated a week later, the students in the testing group did much better than the concept mappers. They even did better when they were evaluated not with a short-answer test but with a test requiring them to draw a concept map from memory.
  • The final group took a “retrieval practice” test. Without the passage in front of them, they wrote what they remembered in a free-form essay for 10 minutes. Then they reread the passage and took another retrieval practice test.
  • we are organizing it and creating cues and connections that our brains later recognize.
  • But “when we use our memories by retrieving things, we change our access” to that information, Dr. Bjork said. “What we recall becomes more recallable in the future. In a sense you are practicing what you are going to need to do later.”
  • The Purdue study supports findings of a recent spate of research showing learning benefits from testing, including benefits when students get questions wrong.
  • Howard Gardner, an education professor at Harvard who advocates constructivism — the idea that children should discover their own approach to learning, emphasizing reasoning over memorization — said in an e-mail that the results “throw down the gauntlet to those progressive educators, myself included.” “Educators who embrace seemingly more active approaches, like concept mapping,” he continued, “are challenged to devise outcome measures that can demonstrate the superiority of such constructivist approaches.”
    • lkryder
       
      I am impressed by the constructivist community realizing what a powerful study this is. I think this is an indication of what we will start to see as brain based learning studies increasingly show us what is happening biologically when we learn.
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    This NYTimes article does contain a link to the actual study but you need an account. The excerpts though and the responses by Gardner was very interesting
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    This NYTimes article does contain a link to the actual study but you need an account. The excerpts though and the responses by Gardner was very interesting. I will try to find access to the study in the library database
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    This NYTimes article does contain a link to the actual study but you need an account. The excerpts though and the responses by Gardner was very interesting. I will try to locate the study in the library database
Diane Gusa

Michael Polanyi - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 0 views

  • absolute objectivity (objectivism) is a false ide
  • He rejects the notion that scientific method yields truth mechanically
  • All knowing is personal, and therefore relies upon commitments.
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  • Our intellectual skills are driven by passionate commitments which motivate discovery and validation.
  • Commitments lead innovators to risk their reputation by committing to a hypothesis. He gives the example of Copernicus, who declared, contrary to our experience, that the Earth revolves around the Sun. He claims that Copernicus first arrived at the truth of the Earth's true relation to the Sun not by following a method, but via "the greater intellectual satisfaction he derived from the celestial panorama as seen from the Sun instead of the Earth."[3] What saves this approach from the charge of relativism is his conviction that tacit knowing connects us with objective realities.
  • Knowing more than we can say helps to explain how knowledge can be passed on within a tradition by non-explicit means, via apprenticeship i.e. a pupil improves their skills by observing a master.
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