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Dimitris Tzouris

Faculty and IT: Conversations and Collaboration (EDUCAUSE Review) | EDUCAUSE - 20 views

  • IT staff should participate in academic planning to develop course projects and institution-wide outcomes, and faculty should sit on technology committees to develop shared goals and values with IT staff.
  • Only with the insight this provides can IT staff propose systemic technological solutions that meet the specific needs, as well as the broader academic objectives, of faculty.
  • faculty need to know how students learn with technology and what students can create or do because of it.3
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  • the most effective collaborations come from a common sense of purpose and goals.
  • In the spirit of building relationships and sharing knowledge, IT staff could sit in classes to observe the teaching and learning process and to see how technology is — or could be — used. Faculty could attend academic technology conferences alongside IT staff. And when a technology solution is warranted, IT staff could provide faculty with a vetted set of instructional technology tools to explore and choose from. In return, faculty can invest in becoming tech-savvy enough to assess, and ultimately use, those tools. Faculty won't be blindly "window shopping" for technology tools, and IT staff won't be proposing solutions in a vacuum; instead, they will be sharing in goals and challenges.
  • faculty need technology that helps them to be better professors and that helps students become more sophisticated learners.
  • Faculty can start by identifying specific teaching and learning challenges they are trying to resolve, as individuals and as a faculty body, and can then challenge themselves and IT staff to find creative ways to solve them.
Julie Golden

Need your help! - 39 views

New Link! Thanks everyone for letting me know Please consider taking my survey. It is anonymous, so I won't be able to send a proper thank you.Please know that I will pay your kindness forward to ...

D. S. Koelling

Embracing the Cloud: Caveat Professor - The Digital Campus - The Chronicle of Higher Ed... - 37 views

  • My work as chief privacy and security officer at a large public university has, however, given me pause to ask if our posture toward risk prevents us from fully embracing technology at a moment of profound change.
  • Consequently, faculty members are accepting major personal and institutional risk by using such third-party services without any institutional endorsement or support. How we provide those services requires a nuanced view of risk and goes to the heart of our willingness to trust our own faculty and staff members.
  • The technologically savvy among us recognize that hard physical, virtual, and legal boundaries actually demark this world of aggressively competitive commercial entities. Our students, faculty, and staff often do not.
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  • But can we embrace the cloud? Can the faculty member who wears our institution's name in her title and e-mail address, to whom we've entrusted the academic and research mission of the institution, be trusted to reach into the cloud and pluck what she believes is the optimal tool to achieve her pedagogical aims and use it? Unfortunately, no. Many faculty and staff members simply use whatever service they choose, but they often do not have the knowledge or experience needed to evaluate those choices. And those who do try to work through the institution soon find themselves mired in bureaucracy.
  • First we review the company's terms of service. Of course, we also ask the company for any information it can provide on its internal data security and privacy practices. Our purchasing unit rewrites the agreement to include all of the state-required procurement language; we also add our standard contract language on data security. All of this information is fed into some sort of risk assessment of varying degrees of formality, depending on the situation, and, frankly, the urgency. That leads to yet another round of modifications to the agreement, negotiations with the company, and, finally, if successful, circulation for signatures. After which we usually exhume the corpse of the long-deceased faculty member and give him approval to use the service in his class. We go through this process not from misguided love of bureaucracy, but because our institutions know of no other way to manage risk. That is, we have failed to transform ourselves so we can thrive and compete in the 21st century.
  • But our faculty and staff are increasingly voting with their feet—they're more interested in the elegance, portability, and integration of commercial offerings, despite the inability to control how those programs change over time. By insisting on remaining with homegrown solutions, we are failing to fall in lockstep with those we support.
  • Data security? Of course there are plenty of fly-by-night operations with terrible security practices. However, as the infrastructure market has matured (one of the generally unrecognized benefits of cloud services), more and more small companies can provide assurances of data security that would shame many of us even at large research-intensive institutions.
  • If higher education is to break free of the ossified practices of the past, we must find ways to transfer risk acceptance into the faculty domain—that is, to enable faculty to accept risk. Such a transformation is beyond the ability of the IT department alone—it will require our campus officials, faculty senates, registrars, and research and compliance officers working together to deeply understand both the risks and the benefits
Julie Golden

Need Your Help!! - 35 views

New Link below. Thanks so much for letting me know. Please consider taking my survey. It is anonymous, so I won't be able to send a proper thank you.Please know that I will pay your kindness forwa...

Web 2.0 elearning collaboration E-learning teaching education higher ed edtech

Becky Roehrs

Conflicted: Faculty and Online Education, 2012 | Inside Higher Ed - 0 views

  • Faculty members are far less excited by, and more fearful of, the recent growth of online education
    • Becky Roehrs
       
      Even though the questions posed in this survey are about online education, the majority of faculty who responded taught face-to-face (75%), not online. Not too surprisingly, a majority of faculty who had taught online, as well as faculty at institutions that had more online offerings, stated that online education was as effective (or more effective), than face-to-face instruction (as has been noted in numerous research studies). It may be true that faculty who only teach face-to-face may be more conflicted about online education, but based on the teaching background of faculty who chose to respond to the survey, I would not make assumptions about faculty excitement or fears about online education.
Maria José Vitorino

To Share or Not to Share: Is That the Question? (EDUCAUSE Review) | EDUCAUSE - 28 views

  • Open digital faculty do more than just share and participate in open resources; they transfer their approaches to the teaching space. Learning becomes a shared activity in which the students also collaborate and participate in shaping the course activities. Student participation takes place in open environments where students might tweet what they learn, share insights on a group blog, create their own website of resources, or participate in a class wiki.
  • The difference is that today's sharing facilitators leverage technology to reach a much wider audience.
  • Although the natural inclination toward sharing cannot be altered, the moral responsibility to share can be influenced by the surrounding culture. The sense of obligation to share or not to share may be similar to the decision to be a vegetarian. For some, it is a lifestyle choice that may form slowly over a long period of time after many conversations with friends and colleagues. For others, the change can be sudden: a paradigm shift caused by participation in an unusual event. If an institution places value on faculty participation in open academic communities and social media activities (e.g., academic blogging), that culture can slowly influence faculty to be more open.
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  • These digital activities should not be the sole measure of tenure, but they should be counted in the tenure formula. The irony today is that if the open activity is analog (e.g., participation on a committee), it likely counts toward tenure, but if the open activity is digital (e.g., writing an academic blog), it probably does not.
  • They will push at (and leak out of) the boundaries of whatever learning management system (or other enterprise systems) the institution wants them to use. This is not because they are uncooperative; it's simply that these enterprise systems tend to be locked down, allowing only employees and students to share within these environments
  • For me, an interesting side effect of sharing on the open web is that I've learned to be more careful about what I say and write.
  • Looking for indicators of open digital faculty is easier than coming up with a strict definition. The presence of several of the following characteristics should be taken as an indication of open digital faculty: Writing a public blog or maintaining a public wiki to share academic interests Freely sharing what might otherwise be guarded intellectual property (e.g., textbooks, research-in-progress, computer programs, course materials, artwork) Participating in a learning community in a social networking platform (e.g., Twitter or LinkedIn discussion groups) Participating in a social network that includes students, both current and past (e.g., Facebook) Encouraging students to participate in class-related projects that employ web-based media (e.g., student blogs, group wikis) Creating or participating in open courses Sharing video or audio content created for a course (e.g., podcasts) Sharing information and ideas from conference talks on the web (e.g., recordings, tweets, presentation links)
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    Open digital faculty do more than just share and participate in open resources; they transfer their approaches to the teaching space. Learning becomes a shared activity in which the students also collaborate and participate in shaping the course activities. Student participation takes place in open environments where students might tweet what they learn, share insights on a group blog, create their own website of resources, or participate in a class wiki.
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    University context for open sources, sharingand digital trends era
D. S. Koelling

Shared Governance Is a Myth - Commentary - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 14 views

  • It takes years of rank and the bitter­sweet experience of extensive committee service to realize that faculty influence on the operation of the university is an illusion, and that shared governance is a myth.
  • Committees report to administrative officers who are at liberty to accept, reject, or substantially alter faculty recommendations.
  • One would think that faculty senates exercise jurisdiction over a range of college life and policy. In reality, the right of many senates does not extend beyond making recommendations to the president, who is under no obligation to accept them.
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  • A more probable source of this way of doing business is the residue of an old ideal of the university. Such survivals of previous practices are not unusual in social life. Physicians, for example, experience a struggle between two competing understandings of their field: the prevalent view that treating patients is a business, and the residue of the old ideal that it is a calling. Ministers live the same ambiguity. Faculty committees constitute the respect that today's university pays to the old notion that it is a community of students and scholars. The impotence of the committees is acknowledgment that at this time in history, institutions of higher education are business ventures, in certain ways similar to factories.
  • If education is primarily a business, managers hire the faculty. If universities are communities of students and scholars, faculty members hire the managers.
  • The growing disempowerment of the faculty is accelerated by the distance of governing boards from campus processes.
Maureen Greenbaum

'Interactive Learning Spaces' at the center of Ball State U.'s faculty development prog... - 29 views

  • The rooms are part of a larger faculty development program intended to promote active learning techniques and cut down on lecturing
  • university is researching whether teaching at-risk students -- those withdrawing from or earning a D or F in a basic math course -- in the classrooms could improve academic outcomes and, eventually, graduation rates.
  • Pavlechko described the two spaces as “intake classrooms” -- faculty members who work in the development program are required to teach in them for two semesters. By the end of this academic year, the classrooms will have hosted 68 faculty members representing 29 of the university’s 48 departments and more than 3,500 students.
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  • How do we set ourselves apart? In our case, by the development of these interactive learning space classrooms, we are demonstrating to everyone that we are committed to the concept of faculty development.”
  • researchers found at-risk students who took the course in classrooms that promoted active learning (which included some rooms other than the renovated ones) were 2.8 times more likely to succeed -- that is, to earn a grade higher than a D -- than students in traditional classrooms.
  • The company has surveyed hundreds of students and faculty members at the universities it has worked with, and says it has found a statistically significant correlation between classroom configuration and student engagement. The survey doesn't include any academic results.
  • “We actually found a fairly moderate to strong correlation between what they think of these areas and if they think they have the ability to get a higher grade -- or their motivation to attend class and also their engagement in class,”
  • “Perception-wise, students are telling us ‘I can do better when I’m in these spaces,’ ” Jones said. “Maybe that’s enough of a win?”
Julie Golden

Need your help!! - 25 views

eLearning faculty please consider taking my survey. It is anonymous, so I won't be able to send a proper thank you. Please know that I will pay your kindness forward to another doctoral student in ...

education elearning edtech faculty community collaboration online research

started by Julie Golden on 13 Sep 15 no follow-up yet
Beth Hartranft

Student Response System: Faculty: Best Practices - 51 views

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    "Tips on effectively integrating and using clickers in the classroom Best practices are lessons learned throughout our first year using clickers. The following information was created by input from faculty, faculty development, and support. " from University of Milwaukee
Kate Pok

FinAid | Loans | Public Service Loan Forgiveness - 67 views

  • Employment: The borrower must be employed full-time in a public service job for each of the 120 monthly payments. Public service jobs include, among other positions, emergency management, government (excluding time served as a member of Congress), military service, public safety and law enforcement (police and fire), public health (including nurses, nurse practitioners, nurses in a clinical setting, and full-time professionals engaged in health care practitioner occupations and health care support occupations), public education, early childhood education (including licensed or regulated childcare, Head Start, and State-funded prekindergarten), social work in a public child or family service agency, public services for individuals with disabilities or the elderly, public interest legal services (including prosecutors, public defenders and legal advocacy on behalf of low-income communities at a nonprofit organization), public librarians, school librarians and other school-based services, and employees of tax exempt 501(c)(3) organizations. Full-time faculty at tribal colleges and universities, as well as faculty teaching in high-need subject areas and shortage areas (including nurse faculty, foreign language faculty, and part-time faculty at community colleges), also qualify.
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    FYI
Bill Graziadei, Ph.D. (aka Dr. G)

Imagining College Without Grades :: Inside Higher Ed :: Higher Education's Source for N... - 1 views

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    Inside Higher Ed offers free online news and job information for college and university faculty, adjuncts, graduate students, and administrators, higher education jobs, faculty jobs, college jobs and university jobs
Ed Webb

Imagining College Without Grades :: Inside Higher Ed :: Higher Education's Source for N... - 0 views

  • A professor who tells his students that “grades are the death of composition.” Another said: “Grades create a facade of coherence.”
    • Dana Huff
       
      Interesting. I agree. I wish that we didn't have to grade student writing and could just give written or oral feedback. I love the "facade of coherence" comment.
  • politically impossible
    • Dana Huff
       
      Key words. Grading is political.
  • grades were squelching intellectual curiosity.
    • Dana Huff
       
      Totally true in more places than prestigious law schools
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  • growing use of e-portfolios
    • Dana Huff
       
      I like portfolios for demonstrating learning, but I haven't learned how to effectively integrate them into my own classroom.
  • most professors and students are much more likely to complain about grading than to praise its accuracy or value.
    • Dana Huff
       
      Amen!
  • Done right, she said, eliminating grades promotes rigor.
  • the elimination of grades — if they are replaced with narrative evaluations, rubrics, and clear learning goals — results in more accountability and better ways for a colleges to measure the success not only of students but of its academic programs.
    • Ed Webb
       
      This strikes me intuitively as correct. Grades are a substitute for thoughful assessment of learning outcomes, not an equivalent to it.
  • the idea of consistent and clear grading just doesn’t reflect the mobility of students
    • Ed Webb
       
      Absolutely. My own institution, Dickinson College, sends ~70% of its students abroad for at least a semester, and most often a year. I have experience in education in different national contexts, and grading conventions simply do not translate.
  • ending grades can mean much more work for both students and faculty members.
    • Ed Webb
       
      Aye, there's the rub. Those of us who are serious about learning - students and faculty - have to recognize that better learning is more work. On the other hand, it's more fun, too.
  • When faculty members are providing written, detailed analyses of multiple course objectives and are also — for majors — relating performance to larger goals for the major, so much more is taking place she said, than in a letter grade.
    • Ed Webb
       
      Yes. Grades are a terrible assessment tool.
  • the training that colleges provide to professors before they start producing narrative evaluations, and officials of the no-grades colleges all said that training was extensive, and that faculty members needed mentors as they started out.
    • Ed Webb
       
      And how much training do faculty get before they start handing out grades?
  • they end up favoring the evaluation system
    • Ed Webb
       
      This is the point. Users have to be educated in the advantages of the system - once they have been, they are likely to favor it over grading.
D. S. Koelling

A Perfect Storm in Undergraduate Education, Part I - Advice - The Chronicle of Higher E... - 40 views

  • at least 45 percent of undergraduates demonstrated "no improvement in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills in the first two years of college, and 36 percent showed no progress in four years."
  • What good does it do to increase the number of students in college if the ones who are already there are not learning much? Would it not make more sense to improve the quality of education before we increase the quantity of students?
  • students in math, science, humanities, and social sciences—rather than those in more directly career-oriented fields—tend to show the most growth in the areas measured by the Collegiate Learning Assessment, the primary tool used in their study. Also, students learn more from professors with high expectations who interact with them outside of the classroom. If you do more reading, writing, and thinking, you tend to get better at those things, particularly if you have a lot of support from your teachers.
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  • Increasingly, undergraduates are not prepared adequately in any academic area but often arrive with strong convictions about their abilities.
  • It has become difficult to give students honest feedback.
  • As the college-age population declines, many tuition-driven institutions struggle to find enough paying customers to balance their budgets. That makes it necessary to recruit even more unprepared students, who then must be retained, shifting the burden for academic success away from the student and on to the teacher.
  • Although a lot of emphasis is placed on research on the tenure track, most faculty members are not on that track and are retained on the basis of what students think of them.
  • Students gravitate to lenient professors and to courses that are reputedly easy, particularly in general education.
  • It is impossible to maintain high expectations for long unless everyone holds the line in all comparable courses—and we face strong incentives not to do that.
  • Formerly, full-time, tenured faculty members with terminal degrees and long-term ties to the institution did most of the teaching. Such faculty members not only were free to grade honestly and teach with conviction but also had a deep understanding of the curriculum, their colleagues, and the institutional mission. Now undergraduate teaching relies primarily on graduate students and transient, part-time instructors on short-term contracts who teach at multiple institutions and whose performance is judged almost entirely by student-satisfaction surveys.
  • Contingent faculty members, who are paid so little, routinely teach course loads that are impossible to sustain without cutting a lot of corners.
  • Many colleges are now so packed with transient teachers, and multitasking faculty-administrators, that it is impossible to maintain some kind of logical development in the sequencing of courses.
  • Students may be enjoying high self-esteem, but college teachers seem to be suffering from a lack of self-confidence.
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    So many issues here to deal with. Good read.
onepulledthread

Why Changing the Mission of Grad Programs is Hard… and Getting Harder | Sad Iron - 16 views

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    blog discusses increasing workload for faculty, threats to faculty governance, and lower number of tenured professors.  Good blog generally to follow on higher ed issues
Javier E

'There's Something Very Exciting Going On Here' - Jordan Weissmann - The Atlantic - 20 views

  • One effort I started in June was to announce a seed grant program to support individual faculty and small teams that wanted to try different ways of teaching their course. So the internal funding helps support students or assistants or web developers or other people to help faculty recraft all or part of their course in order to see if new approaches really help.
  • here isn't an actual fixed fund. We got about 40 applicants. Maybe 20 of those things we funded. Each one was up to $25,000. I think I'd like to continue that on a quarterly basis. And really, we're new at all this. So the scale of this effort will depend on the faculty input and the outcome of how effective we find this to be.
  • We now have the ability for individual faculty or programs on campuses to produce appealing online content with relatively low effort and distribute that wide
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  • we'd like to see a number of things tried so we can have a good discussion that's informed by rational experiment and collected data. Beyond these individual experiments, one class at a time, I think it would be great to have one or two departments really try to integrate an online experience into their core curriculum so we can understand how that works, so we can provide students more options
  • Many of these first round of MOOCs were produced with a webcam by an individual instructor using a tablet PC. That's on the order of a thousand dollars worth of equipment. Maybe. Certainly, it's extremely inexpensive compared with a laptop 5 years ago. So the cost of the technology is lower. There's good software for editing video -- we're in an era where producing video is similar to word processing. And everyone is used to interacting with people online in different ways than were prevalent 10 to 15 years ago. The kind of discussion you can have online is more sophisticated. People understand social conventions for how to contribute constructively to an online discussion. Those factors really contribute to the effectiveness of a MOOC or a smaller scale online course.
  • I think we'll see an evolution of a range of different ways of using technology, and probably some expansion of the set of options that a student has. Instead of going off to college, maybe some students will live in their parents' homes or elsewhere and take a first year or two online. Or they'll spend two years in college and finish two years online as they work. There will be different, in effect, educational programs coming out of this phenomenon that offer credit, certification, job placement, and other things beyond the self learning that MOOCs provide. So I think we really are going to see a transformation in the way teaching and learning are developed and delivered
Marc Patton

A Brief Guide to Tech Training for Faculty | edcetera - Rafter Blog - 3 views

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    A Brief Guide to Tech Training for Faculty
D. S. Koelling

Views: What's High School For? - Inside Higher Ed - 35 views

  • In theory, dual enrollment enables high school students to accrue college credits for very little cost and imbues them with a sense of confidence that they can complete college work. If students can succeed in college classes while still in high school, conventional wisdom holds, they will be more likely to matriculate at the postsecondary level.
  • In reality, though, dual enrollment may do more harm than good.
  • The problem is that high school is not college and completion of a dual enrollment high school class is not always a guarantee that students have learned the material.
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  • As a result, classes that used to be termed “college-prep” are now seen as college proper.
  • In practice, however, courses covered in a high school setting on a high school calendar are often vastly different in practice.
  • This is not a criticism of high school teachers. Many are excellent educators and care deeply about students. But they often teach more classes than college faculty do, have myriad extracurricular responsibilities, and lack the requisite training that enables college faculty to introduce best practices in the field. In contrast, college faculty members expect a higher level of work from students, including having them study independently, write in the discipline and be exposed to the latest research. They are less likely to offer extra credit, or evaluate students based on an inflated high school norm.
  • High school students, especially sophomores and juniors, are not like college students. A collection of 15-, 16-, and 17-year-olds are normally at a different stage of intellectual and moral development than are college students. Treating a high school student like a college student does not always do them a favor.
  • This student, as a sophomore in high school, earned a “C” in a “college” English course, which exempts her from our basic English 111 College Writing class. Even though her ACT score indicates her writing skills are deficient, we are limited in what we can do. Like many students who have already passed a “college” class, she thinks she already has the necessary writing skills to be successful in college. We know she very likely does not. Our willingness to increase student access by accepting transfer credit means that, without taking this student’s credits away, we cannot help her with her writing. Instead, by virtue of an average performance as a high school sophomore, this student will be placed into college classes for which she is unprepared.
  • Most colleges willingly accept credits from like institutions because we trust that our courses are equivalent and that our faculty are credentialed. I doubt that same trust applies to high schools. The best service a high school can provide is to prepare students for college, not substitute for it.
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    High school dual enrollment programs may not be helping students succeed in college.
Mark Glynn

(32) (PDF) An Overview and Study on the Use of Games, Simulations, and Gamification in ... - 14 views

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    "This article examines the use of both game-based learning (GBL) and gamification in tertiary education. This study focuses specifically on the use of games and/or simulations as well as familiarity with gamification strategies by communication faculty. Research questions concentrate on the rate, frequency, and usage of digital and non-digital games and/or simulations in communication courses, as well as instructor familiarity with gamification. A survey was constructed with questions emerging from the game-based learning and gamification literature. It was distributed to communication faculty at public institutions of higher education in a southern state. In this context, the author argues that while the term gamification is novel, the approach is not. Based on the results, current gamification strategies appear to be a repackaging of traditional instructional strategies."
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