This study examines the Internet sources higher education students use in their written work and the implications of their choices. It is based on an analysis of over 112 million content matches from more than 28 million student papers submitted to Turnitin between July 2011 and June 2012. Included are recommendations for educators on how to improve student research and citation skills.

Recommended during a NITLE session on encouraging original writing.

Blog post by Tracy Mitrano, NITLE Fellow.

A good discussion of how on professor uses multiple choice quizzing to measure comprehension of the major concepts in the course, instead of just testing for the ability to recall facts.

The MOOC conversation is dominated by examples of digitizing the large lecture hall. This is a deviation from the historical roots of the MOOC, and in this Chronicle article a very different kind of open educational activity is proposed.

A worthwhile interview about the University of Mary Washington program to offer every student and professor their own domain name and a significant amount of control over which web publishing platforms they use. I find the discussions about privacy vs. publicy in a networked society to be the intellectual meat of the piece - the technology issues, while complex, are also just logistics to be solved or worked around.

News article about an online calculus class to be offered this summer by Macalester and St. Olaf.

Fun profile of a Middlebury history professor making extensive use of GIS.

"Over-committed" is a word which frequently comes up when talking about today's students. Perhaps this would be a helpful tool in getting students to think about their schedules.

We had a conversation in a staff meeting recently about "contemplative pedagogy"; this conversation from Xavier University of Louisiana's podcast is a good introduction. The way that contemplation plays into theory formation and the understanding of complex models is particularly interesting.

A worthwhile read as we near course evaluation time. Especially with our online system's new ability for faculty to write their own questions, it might be worthwhile to ask students if the question they answered is the question you meant to ask!

The productive (and appropriate) use of data about student use of online resources is going to be an interesting part of teaching in the future, and a difficult one.

This is a question we need to start asking up-front. When a textbook vendor calls, ask about accessible materials. When you see a documentary, ask if it's closed-captioned. When we think about new technologies, ask about screen readers and other accessibility tools. Better still, ask vendors (and colleagues) what accommodations they'd make to get all students an equivalent educational experience.

One thing I learned as Helpline manager is that the stereotype that today's students are "good with computers" is a gross generalization. Students (and most people) are good at _doing some things_ with computers. If we're asking them to use an unfamiliar system, especially for a complex task, it would be time well spent both to introduce them to the tool and check in on how they used it.

Essay by a professor at Vanderbilt who adapted his face-to-face classes to take advantage of MOOCs on the same subject. He calls this making his course a "wrapper", I've called it "using the MOOC as a textbook." See in particular the last paragraph, regarding the "scholarly-like community with my fellow educators."

The study focuses on the pedagogical implications of the widespread use of the digital format. However, while changes in the teaching-learning dynamic and the teacher-student relationship were at the core of the study, related issues concerning supply, support and infrastructure rapidly became part of its fabric. These topics include the quality of image resources, image functionality, management, deployment and the skills required for optimum use (digital and image "literacies").

"A microlecture is a short recorded audio or video presentation on a single, tightly defined topic." ELI wraps up some of the important points to when considering this approach to a "blended" or "flipped" classroom.

There's a fair amount of interest at Kenyon in moving lecture out of class time. This article addresses the fine points of what you do, then, with the freed-up class time. Includes a bibliography for further reading.

With a 95% response rate in Spring 2012, this may not seem to be a big issue at Kenyon. Still, as we think about course evaluations going forward, we do need to pay attention to the common qualities of people who don't respond.

A listing of conferences with significant focus teaching and learning, from Elon University.