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Why not replace a staid writing exercise with a medium that gives the writer the immediacy of an audience, a feeling of relevancy, instant feedback from classmates or readers, and a practical connection to contemporary communications? Pointedly, why punish with a paper when a blog is, relatively, fun?

Why College Students Leave the Engineering Track http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/20/why-students-leave-the-engineering-track/ Actually another study of science students asked the students why they were transferring or dropping out of science majors, and the number one reason cited was poor teaching: http://www.science20.com/news_releases/6_researchers_take_science_education "when college students abandon science as a major, 90 percent of them do so because of what they perceive as poor teaching; and, among those who remain in the sciences, 74 percent lament the poor quality of teaching" via http://edtechdev.wordpress.com/2009/08/31/50-examples-of-the-need-to-improve-college-teaching/

The ECP submission form and the extensive ECP rubric provide an outstanding frame of reference for reflecting on and reviewing online course elements.  Through the years I've served as a director in the program, I have spoken with many individual faculty members as well as many members of design and development teams. Many have used the ECP rubric in a number of creative ways - helping to raise awareness on what is needed for quality online learning strategies and guiding course evaluations.  In fact, the ECP rubric identifies seventeen important elements needed for effective online learning and provides details on the criteria that would deem each category exemplary.  The ECP submission form requires careful thought and reflection about course design, interaction and collaboration, assessment, and learner support as well as a narrative describing the best practices demonstrated in the course for each category. 

They "don't want to ask librarians or tutors in the study center or stuff like that," she says. "It's more the informal networks that they're using."

most of those systems do not yet allow instructors to deeply tailor the material to meet their course needs. And highly-interactive systems are often too complex for pioneering professors to adopt and sustain on their own.

The first, Booktype, is free and open-source. Once the platform is installed on a Web server, teams of authors can work together in their browsers to write sections of books and chat with each other in real time about revisions. Entire chapters can be imported and moved around by dragging and dropping. The finished product can be published in minutes on e-readers and tablets, or exported for on-demand printing. Booktype also comes with community features that let authors create profiles, join groups, and track books through editing.

Alarmed by the tendency of engineering programs to hemorrhage undergraduates, at a time when the White House has called for an additional million degrees in science, technology, engineering and math fields-known as STEM-education researchers here at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science proposed ways to improve the numbers. At a symposium on engineering education, one group outlined a broad revamping of curriculum, while another proposed more modest changes to pedagogy.

Academic staff generally perceive students to be more digitally capable than is really the case. A JISC study of 3,500 learners found that while the so-called Google generation have high expectations of digital technology, for example that it will be robust, flexible, responsive to their personal needs, and available anywhere, many learners do not have a clear understanding of how courses could or should use technology to support their learning.

Then something odd happened: The students, all in their mid- to late 20s, became self-conscious about carrying iPads. They refused to use them in public. They felt elitist. In their eyes, the iPad represented snobbery, a technological tool that no one needed and whose utility was far from apparent. Used to a graduate student frugality, they didn't want to be seen as profligate.

I'm finding in current iTunes U courses and collections, each collection tends to have a lot of apps and items embedded that cost money (even if a free alternative exists or is already installed.)

iTunes U has, up 'til now, been just that: files to download. Although most of the content is lecture podcasts (in video or audio form), there have also been course documents and slideshows as well.

Promethean opened on the London Stock Exchange in March 2010 trading at 198 pence ($3.12) and is now trading at 24 pence ($0.39). SMART Technologies, the leader in interactive-whiteboard technology is faring better, but not by much. After opening at $16.62 on the NASDAQ in June 2010, it is now trading at $1.70 per share.

In practice, we found Explain Everything to be more useful to our teaching than Educreations. While the simple screencasts of Educreations are fun to create, truly effective delivery of content such as screencasts depend on flexibility, and that means owning the video output directly. Since Educreations hosts videos only on its own site and only provides various linking and embedding options, neither students nor teachers can download them. Explain Everything offers full ownership and possession of the videos hosted at YouTube, or in MP4 format when downloaded from DropBox

It is a social bookmarking program that allows you to save your 'favorites' online, so that they can be accessible from any computer with an internet connection. However, Diigo does much more than this.