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Following an evaluation process that encompassed almost two years, Michigan Tech selected the Canvas Learning Management System,from Instructure, Inc. It was the clear choice of faculty and student testers, and is very intuitive and easy to use.

A pilot of the Canvas Learning Platform involving Western faculty, students and support staff, provided  strong support for a recommendation that Western transition from Blackboard to Canvas. A summary of  the results of the pilot study as well as options and timelines for the transition are presented in this  report. ATUS will continue to evaluate transition options and present those recommendations by March  30, 2013

How to get faculty excited about professional development

Bloom -> Wiley and Mott -> Mike C

A sticky idea is understood, it's remembered, and it changes something. Sticky ideas of all kinds-ranging from the "kidney thieves" urban legend to JFK's "Man on the Moon" speech-have six traits in common. If you make use of these traits in your communication, you'll make your ideas stickier. (You don't need all 6 to have a sticky idea, but it's fair to say the more, the better!)

LMS Implementation: Tentative Migration Plan

Guiding Faculty Through (Inevitable) Technological Change Fred Zinn - OIT Academic Computing, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Contributions from many including: Bryan Alexander Howard Rheingold is book, and accompanying website, is a resource for selforganizing self-learners. With YouTube, Wikipedia, search engines, free chatrooms, blogs, wikis, and video communication, today's  have power never dreamed-of before. What does any group of self-learners need to know in order to self-organize learning about any topic? e Peeragogy Handbook is a volunteercreated and maintained resource for bootstrapping peer learning. 

There are several widely-accepted rubrics (Quality Matters, the ION one in Illinois, etc.), but in my opinion, they focus on course design, not on teaching the course. When I was at Black Hawk College, we created a Best Practices for Exemplary Online Teaching set of standards based on the Chickering and Gamson's "7 Principles of Good Practice for Undergraduate Education" meta-analysis. Individual best practices for online teaching were pulled from the literature and listed as possibilities under each of the 7 principles, and an 8th was added with some of the course design elements not already mentioned in the first 7. In other words, we created a local document that could assist faculty in doing self-assessment, peer evaluations of each other's courses, and potentially institutional review of online courses. However, our instrument was not used for institutional assessment because it was not approved as part of the faculty [union] contract. It is important for a document like this to be shared with the faculty ahead of time so that they know how their courses are going to be evaluated. I also think it is helpful to have several people evaluate various aspects of online courses, such as someone who is an expert in online education who can evaluate the learning experiences and course design elements of the course, someone from the faculty member's department who can evaluate the quality and accuracy of the course content, as well as the administrator whose job it is to evaluate teaching. If the institution uses a type of rubric or assessment document when evaluating face-to-face teaching, it needs to be vetted by online experts to determine if it emphasizes appropriate, comparable variables in the online environment. For example, if activities to promote student engagement is on that form...what does that look like online? Not all administrators or faculty who have not taught online would know what to look for as indicators of student engagement.

Welcome to the inaugural issue of the AAEEBL ePortfolio Review (AePR)! Designed to provide space for emerging thinking about ePortfolio research and practice, as well as a publication opportunity for those working in and with ePortfolio, the AePR focuses on timely, important topics written by leaders in the field. The articles may focus on a current controversy in our community that perhaps cannot be quickly or expeditiously addressed through a careful research process or on specific topics of interest to the wider ePortfolio community (for instance, assessment, high impact practices, etc.). As such, we welcome articles that are initial reports on research, case studies of ePortfolio practices and pedagogies, and think-pieces that move the field forward. We want to ensure that the AePR is relevant to you and your work with ePortfolios so we also welcome ideas for future issue themes and topics - let us know if you have ideas!

US DOE Office of Educational Tech report on analytics: what is needed and how to get there.

Bowling Green State University findings on Canvas pilot including Strengths and Future Enhancements. Organized in a way that could be useful to KSC in the early stages = good talking points

Standard tell-and-practice instruction is important because it delivers the explanations and solutions invented by experts, and students need opportunities to hear and practice these ideas.  To gain this benefit without undermining transfer, the current studies suggest expositions  should happen after students have explored novel-to-them deep structures. 

 An 87-page animated PowerPoint isn't going to render well on an iPhone even if converted to a PDF. However a 5 minute YouTube video would be great. But most faculty do not want to re-make their course materials into something new and modern. and they certainly don't want to publish their stuff on YouTube. So students are left having to access traditional formatted course materials with their modern devices. It is clunky. And they don't like it. But that it not an LMS issue at all.

The Consortium for School Networking has posted a web 2.0 and mobile acceptable use policy (AUP) guide (PDF download). Though brief, the resource outlines AUP policy formation and, most significantly, lists relevant laws for a couple dozen U.S. states. The guide also links to sample policies and additional resources.

Quality MattersRubric Standards 2011 - 2013 edition QM is the best IMHO

Balabolka is a Text-To-Speech (TTS) program. All computer voices installed on your system are available to Balabolka. The on-screen text can be saved as a WAV, MP3, MP4, OGG or WMA file. The program can read the clipboard content, view the text from AZW, CHM, DjVu, DOC, EPUB, FB2, HTML, LIT, MOBI, ODT, PRC, PDF and RTF files, customize font and background colour, control reading from the system tray or by the global hotkeys.