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Lastly, keep the flowers fresh.

A sense of time is created in discussion boards because they have only that week to complete the work and there is an understanding that the conversations happen in time. But often asynchronous discussions have wide gaps of time between student interactions. One way to bring time closer to the students is to allow them to subscribe to forum threads they are involved in. You can do this in most LMS solutions. Students get an email alerting them to activity in the thread they are active in and it brings them closer “in real time” to the events happening in the class. While this can be overwhelming in larger courses, in a class of 20 or 30 students it usually does not amount to an unreasonable amount of email notifications. One of the most effective ways to bring timeliness to an online course is do a quick recap of previous week, as well as provide a preview of what is expected for the current week. Using screen capture software to go through the course and set expectations is a great way to not only share a bit of yourself with students, but it is a pre-emptive way to answer questions students commonly ask.

Both students and instructors are learning while interacting. Communicating in the online classroom is very different than in a traditional face-to-face classroom.

Synchronous tools require real-time teamwork

tackle what colleges were doing poorly: graduating students. Half the students who enroll in post-secondary education never get a degree but still accumulate debt

school spends millions to employ more than 160 “admissions counselors” who man the phones, especially on weekends, guiding prospective students into the right degree program

“College is designed in every way for that 20 percent—cost, time, scheduling, everything,” says LeBlanc. He set out to create an institution for the other 80 percent, one that was flexible and offered a seamless online experience

online courses are created centrally and then farmed out to a small army of adjuncts hired for as little as $2,200 a class. Those adjuncts have scant leeway in crafting the learning experience.

highly standardized courses, and adjuncts who act more like coaches than professors

formal kind of learning

lifelong learning

job, learning from others, learning constantly, learning in any place, and at any time.

how to reconfigure courses into modules

enhance the learning process

ncorporation of multimedia

other technologies

online, multimedia presentations and interactive exercises with instructors and peers

synchronous and asynchronous learning,

attendance by students is not required

materials are being developed throughout the semester

online testing, various forms of assessment, and groupware discussions.

fail a module exam are required to retake the exam

two scores are averaged.

learner-centered environment

pace to match individual learning needs and styles

Web-presence

support new learning environments

increasing on/off-campus access to the teaching-learning community

What is exciting about the MOOC environment is that it will provide a rich opportunity to gather data that will tell us what does and doesn’t work and how students learn most effectively in as engaging an environment as can be provided. This will almost certainly mean that the current MOOC format will evolve rapidly over time as it is driven by this research supported by real data.

back-channel conversations

While keynote speakers and session leaders are speaking, audience members are sharing highlights, asking questions, and conversing with colleagues on Twitter

Ask your students to create accounts on Twitter or some other back-channel tool and share ideas that occur to them in your course. You might give them specific assignments, as does the University of Connecticut's Margaret Rubega, who asks students in her ornithology class to tweet about birds they see. During a face-to-face class session, you could have students discuss their reading in small groups and share observations on the back channel. Or you could simply ask them to post a single question about the week's reading they would like to discuss.

A back channel provides students a way to stay connected to the course and their fellow students. Students are often able to integrate back channels into their daily lives, checking for and sending updates on their smartphones, for instance. That helps the class become more of a community and gives students another way to learn from each other.

Deep learning is hard work, and students need to be well motivated in order to pursue it. Extrinsic factors like grades aren't sufficient—they motivate competitive students toward strategic learning and risk-averse students to surface learning.

Social pedagogies provide a way to tap into a set of intrinsic motivations that we often overlook: people's desire to be part of a community and to share what they know with that community.

Online, social pedagogies can play an important role in creating such a community. These are strong motivators, and we can make use of them in the courses we teach.

The papers they wrote for my course weren't just academic exercises; they were authentic expressions of learning, open to the world as part of their "digital footprints."

Collaborative documents need not be text-based works. Sarah C. Stiles, a sociologist at Georgetown, has had her students create collaborative timelines showing the activities of characters in a text, using a presentation tool called Prezi.com. I used that tool to have my cryptography students create a map of the debate over security and privacy. They worked in small groups to brainstorm arguments, and contributed those arguments to a shared debate map synchronously during class.

looked at three characteristics

gap of 35 percent between what students expected and what professors were able to deliver

professors did best at being "confident" and "rational"

worst at being "inspiring"

student evaluations prove to be the most effective at providing specific information for formative evaluations

should be an important part of teacher evaluations

At the end of every test or quiz, put in a few non-graded questions

What did you like most about learning this topic

What was most difficult

could the teacher have done a better job

What would you recommend to improve this course? What do you want to see more of in this class? Less of?"

21st-century education E-newsletter

Course is five days or less, then 3 hours of preparation for each hour of training. Course is between five and ten days, then 2.5 hours of preparation for each hour of training. Course is over 10 days, then 2 hours of preparation for each hour of training.

research generally shows that there is at least a 50% reduction in seat time when a course is converted from classroom learning to elearning. Brandon Hall reports it is a 2:1 ratio.

Estimated Average Cost Per Hour Of Instruction - $1,901.00 to $2,170.00

If your organization is inexperienced, expect your average developmental man-hours to be closer to 450-500 man-hours per instructional hour.

1995 August/September issue of CBT Solutions Magazine reported that 221 hours was the average development time.

Category 1: Baseline Presentation

34:1 -- Instructor-Led Training (ILT), including design, lesson plans, handouts, PowerPoint slides, etc. (Chapman, 2007). 33:1 -- PowerPoint to E-Learning Conversion (Chapman, 2006a, p20). 220:1 -- Standard e-learning, which includes presentation, audio, some video, test questions, and 20% interactivity (Chapman, 2006a, p20) 345:1 -- 3rd party courseware. Time it takes for online learning publishers to design, create, test and package 3rd party courseware (Private study by Bryan Chapman 750:1 -- Simulations from scratch. Creating highly interactive content (Chapman, 2006b)

Category 2: Medium Simulation Presentation

Estimated Average Cost Per Hour Of Instruction - $3,768.00

Category 3: High Level Simulation Presentation.

Estimated Average Cost Per Hour Of Instruction - $7,183.00

Verizon says once they develop enough learning objects, they will be able to build courses in five hours or less ($10,000 to $15,000)

includes the instructional designer, project manager, and outsourcing fees (the instructional designer takes the content that is written in instructional design format to three other companies and an in house group for bids)

They use a content management system from OutStart

between 40 to 80 hours and costs $15,000 to $30,000 to develop one hour of elearning (George & Mcgee, 2003)

If the elearning looks more like a PowerPoint presentation, then a 1:1 is probably close, however, the more elearning moves away from looking like a Powerpoint presentation and looks more like an interactive package, then the more the ratio starts to increase.

Outside Consultant - $90.00 hour

Chapman

Category 1: Baseline Presentation

“Sometimes students only need to get the main idea,” Singer said, “and then digital is just as good as print and a lot quicker … But if you want deep comprehension and synthesis of the material, have the students print it out and navigate the material that way. Think about what you want students to get out of a lesson” before assigning a printed or digital reading.

Donovan added, “I do agree that we’ve got to figure this out … because it isn’t going away, for sure, for lots of reasons: accessibility, cost, sustainability. We have to figure out how we can support students in comprehending from this format.”

But he said he believes “we can still get as much meaning out of digital text. We just haven’t found the right transitions to do what we actually do with a physical book, with digital text … We haven’t found the digital equivalent of interacting with text. We haven’t really trained people to do that.”