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How Authentic Learning is Transforming Higher Education

A balanced commentary on the pros of the 'instructivist' xMOOC - useful for introductory level learning - and, as argued here, where most current xMOOCs live, and the constructivist cMOOC - ideal for more higher order social learning

Critical Thinking in Asynchronous Discussion

My review of this article Realigning HIgher Education for the 21st Century Learner through Multi-Access Learning. http://azbtechtrails.blogspot.com/2013/09/multi-access-learning-framework.html

Nackerud & Scalette "This chapter discusses the use of blogs in higher education, including how students and instructors use blogs, the value of blogs in this setting, and privacy and security implications. The chapter also features an examination of the University of Minnesota's UThink blogging system."

Garrison et al Critical Inquiry in a Text-Based Environment: Computer Conferencing in Higher Education

This paper reported using the practical inquiry model as discourse guide to facilitate students' critical thinking in online discussion. It was found that almost all the postings of the students who had no knowledge of the inquiry model fell into exploration phase except three postings in triggering events phase and two in integration phase. In comparison, the postings of the students who used the model as the guide included more instances of integration than the postings of those who did not know about the model. No instance in resolution phase was found. The findings indicated that providing students inquiry model raised their awareness of critical thinking and helped them intentionally engage in reflection and higher-order thinking when responding online.

"Critical thinking is an expected learning outcome of higher education along with mastery of a studied discipline. Yet several studies including one outlined in Academically Adrift, suggests that a significant percentage of students are graduating after four years of college with little intellectual growth; critical thinking gains barely budging from the 'before' to 'after' assessment."

Personalized Web Learning: In this paper, educational and technical challenges for applying learning pathways in Massive(ly) Open Online Courses in higher education are outlined. We argue that quality issues and didactical concerns may be overcome by (1) reverting to small Open Educational Resources that are (2) adaptively joined into concise courses by considering (3) predefined learning pathways with proper semantic annotations and (4) the observation of learner behaviour. Such a merger does not only require conceptual work and corresponding support tools, but also a new meta data format and an engine which interprets the semantic annotations as well as the measures of learner's actions. These factors are then turned into didactically meaningful recommendations for the next learning steps, thereby creating a personalized learning pathway for each learner. The EU FP7 project INTUITEL is introduced, which has already contributed to the conceptual work and is currently developing the software to achieve these tasks

""Most learning needs today are becoming too complex to be addressed 'in our heads,'" Mr. Siemens wrote in a 2008 blog post. "We need to rely on a network of people (and, increasingly, technology) to store, access, and retrieve knowledge and motivate its use. The network becomes the learning.""

socratic

Wiloson, 2002