Digital Learning

Digital Learning Day is a nationwide celebration of innovative teaching and learning through digital media and technology that engages students and provides them with a rich, personalized educational experience. On Digital Learning Day, a majority of states, hundreds of school districts, thousands of teachers, and more than a million students will encourage the innovative use of technology by trying something new, showcasing success, kicking off project-based learning, or focusing on how digital tools can help improve student outcomes.

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.

The PER User's Guide is a web resource for physics educators to learn how to teach more effectively by applying the results of physics education research (PER) and teaching methods based on these results. Research in the field of PER has made enormous advances in understanding how students learn physics most effectively and in developing teaching methods that apply this understanding to achieve improved student learning. The goal of this site is to provide a synthesis of decades of physics education research in a format that is easy for busy physics instructors to understand and apply.

Almost everyone today has flown in an airplane. Many ask the simple question "what makes an airplane fly?" The answer one frequently gets is misleading and often just plain wrong. As an example, most descriptions of the physics of lift fixate on the shape of the wing (i.e. airfoil) as the key factor in understanding lift. The wings in these descriptions have a bulge on the top so that the air must travel farther over the top than under the wing. Yet we all know that wings fly quite well upside down where the shape of the wing is inverted. To cover for this paradox we sometimes see a description for inverted flight that is different than for normal flight. In reality the shape of the wing has little to do with how lift is generated and everything to do with efficiency in cruise and stall characteristics. Any description that relies on the shape of the wing is wrong.

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?

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. 

12. Sign your review. Or, if you can't bring yourself to do that, at least write your review as if the author will learn your identity and you wouldn't be embarrassed. I sign all of my reviews and have done so for many years. I think if everyone did, most of the problems of nastiness in reviewing would disappear. As psychologists have repeatedly shown (e.g., Zimbardo's prison experiment), human beings do not display their best behavior when they are cloaked behind the mask of anonymity. Signed reviews will usually be more polite and diplomatic, with much less tendency for brutal, unvarnished criticism. Of course, you still want to give your honest opinion, but (as discussed above) there are helpful and unhelpful ways of relating that opinion. Nonetheless, many discussions over the years have convinced me that people object to signing their reviews for all sorts of reasons. If you fall into this category, my advice is to still write the review as if you were going to sign it. This makes it more likely that you will follow the golden rule of "review unto others as you would have them review unto you." You may still frequently need to criticize papers, but you can learn to do so in ways that are not blatantly offensive. Signed reviews may not win friends because often you are saying "don't publish this paper," but it's the right course of action, at least for me. Be willing to stand behind your words, not snipe from behind the hills. Also, if you blow a point in your review, you can be sure that the author will let you know and you can be more careful in the future.