He says 'effect sizes' are much the best way of answering the question 'what has the greatest
influence on student learning'. An effect-size of 1.0 is typically associated with:
* advancing learner's achievement by one year, or improving the rate of learning by 50%,
* a correlation between some variable (e.g., amount of homework) and achievement of
approximately .50.
* average students receiving that treatment exceeding 84% of students not receiving that
treatment.
* A two grade leap in GCSE, e.g. from a C to an A grade.
An effect size of 1.0 is clearly enormous! (It is defined as an increase of one standard deviation)
Multiple Submission Quirk - and Work-Around
We've learned recently that there is a quirk with Crocodoc when there are multiple submissions. When a student submits more than one assignment attempt, you can choose which to grade from SpeedGrader. If you grade an earlier attempt and provide feedback via Crocodoc on the assignment, the student can only view the latest submission, thereby missing any feedback you provide. There is no way for the student to choose which assignment submission to view. As a workaround, you can annotate on Crocodoc and then download the annotated document to attach to your comment. A PDF version of the assignment file (with annotations) can be downloaded by both student and instructor.
Higher education conferences over the past few years have been
full of presentations, papers and panels on the processes
involved in migrating a campus and its people to Google Apps
for Education. While it is useful to hear about marketing
tchotchkes, data validation, and the pros and cons of web clients,
what seems to get ignored is the process that led to the decision
to move to Google Apps in the first place. At North Carolina
State University, where students were already using Google
Apps, the decision to move employees involved almost as much
time, effort and heartache as the technical migration. As the
users saw it, they had a working system, even if that system only
worked because of huge expenditures of time and money both
on the backend server maintenance and the client need to
implement terribly complex workarounds for simple
functionality. The end result: a 94-page white paper and the
realization that it's hard to sell ice to Eskimos1
, even if you
show them that their ice has already melted. This paper and
presentation will discuss the information gathering and needs
assessment done by NC State prior to the decision to move
employees to Google Apps, and the successes and difficulties
involved.
The nuances of Copyright and Creative Commons and the differences between them can be confusing. I recently came across this neat little video that does a good job of explaining Creative Commons and what Creative Commons licenses allow or do not allow people to do with your works. A PDF of the images in the video can be found here.
Dual enrollment is widely seen as a strategy to help advanced high
school students begin college early. More recently, interest is growing
in using dual enrollment as a way to smooth the transition to college
for students traditionally underrepresented in higher education.1 Many
scholars and practitioners are coming to believe that high school
students who have the opportunity to participate in college courses
are more likely to enroll in college and succeed once there.
"Simply upload your PDFs and other documents to create search engine friendly page-turning publications that can be added to your website or sent out on email. Create your own personalised library to store and share your digital magazines and other content. "
This resource page provides a wide selection of downloadable "How do I" Blackboard 8 tutorials, in PDF format. Please check this page frequently for updates as we create and post new tutorials and demos.
If you are a complete novice and have no short-term plan to learn how to code, it may still be worth your time to find out about what it takes to gather data by scraping web sites -- so you know what you're asking for if you end up hiring someone to do the technical work for you.
How to get data from a PDF, for example