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Good pointers on how to organize orientation to online course and how imp it is for successfull learning

Learning materials, tutorials, assessment tools. social networking tools, anything digital that supports learning outcome

Abstract: Over just the past decade, online learning at the K-12 level has grown from a novelty to a movement. Often using the authority and mechanism of state charters, and in league with home schoolers and other allies, private companies and some state entities are now providing full-time online schooling to a rapidly increasing number of students in the U.S. Yet little or no research is available on the outcomes of such full-time virtual schooling. The rapid growth of virtual schooling raises several immediate, critical questions for legislators regarding matters such as cost, funding, and quality. This policy brief offers recommendations in these and other areas, and the accompanying legal brief offers legislative language to implement the recommendations.

Lots of interesting content to explore at FLTMAG. Variety of tags can help teachers find the most relevant content for their needs and interests. Here's one I found interesting: Considerations for accessible content when using the Web: 1. Reevaluating learning outcomes 2. Accessible content 3. Accessible participation and interaction with course concepts 4. Consistency 5. Flexibility

What a simple way to provide for your students. Perhaps those of you teaching at the post secondary level already do this, but at the high school level we do not have office hours because it can't be built into our schedules. However, perhaps a bit of time each day may encourage a strong feedback loop.

I offer a course in my school called Computer Mediated Language Learning. But this article gives a new perspective of what computer assisted can be.

Nice data to back up our use of all of these great online resources-- Thanks for sharing!

Active participation in discussions is a key to success. If you use a flipped classroom, providing useful vocabulary and sentence structures they might want to use to talk about a particular topic also helps the students participate more in discussions.

Discussion on how technology is being used and why we're still struggling to give more control of learning to students. A good read!

"A 2014 paper by researchers at Michigan State University, in East Lansing, provides a tangible example: Teachers and students in the small-scale study were found to be making extensive use of the online word-processing tool Google Docs. The application's power to support collaborative writing and in-depth feedback, however, was not being realized. Teachers were not encouraging group-writing assignments and their feedback focused overwhelmingly on issues such as spelling and grammar, rather than content and organization." This really gets to the heart of the idea of combining education and technology: the technology has to serve the goal and it doesn't sound like the teachers' goals were the same as the stated goals of the assignment. So obviously Google Docs is a fantastic tool, but it has to be utilized appropriately for it to be effective.

I must say I have sat through many workshops in my tenure at my university that included the modification of some practices and even included, to my frustration, the basic structure of a lesson from stating outcomes to assessment. The problem with our particular situation is that usually it is directed to a "one-size-fits-all" use of a given technology that may not apply to many disciplines. I have found them somewhat useful for upper-level courses at times, but the language classes often pose the need for a kind of collaboration and interpersonal technology that isn't presented. Hence my desire to take this course. Another difficulty is the overwhelming number of technological applications presented--I can't tell you how many--and the students really become overwhelmed, since they often have to learn new technologies in almost many courses. Some work and some don't, and since they are the guinea pigs and there are no guarantees that everything will work as planned, and given the astounding changes in tech, the newness never seems to end, neither for the student nor the teacher. So focusing on just 1 or 2 to begin with seems like the only way to deal with it. Finally, I think that, at least in our university, the huge courses found often in the sciences reflect the slowness to adopt meaningful change. Many in these disciplines have simply used the tech to deliver more lectures on topics students must memorize, perhaps adding clickers for comprehension checks. There seems to be a great disconnect between what happens in the classroom and the amazing advances in tech they have made for their hands-on work--labs, collaborative work, etc.

I don't think I can annotate this article because it is a Google book and has access limitations. I have worked with Dr. Christine Appel, one of the authors of the article "Synchronous tandem language learning in a MOOC context: A study on task design and learner performance". My main interest here is: "How can we best design online synchronous tasks to achieve the optimal outcome?". Sometimes we focus too much on the tool and not so much on how we can make the most of it. The article studies real tasks to find the effects task design have in student performance.