Group items tagged

Universal Design for Learning is a set of principles for curriculum development that give all individuals equal opportunities to learn. UDL provides a blueprint for creating instructional goals, methods, materials, and assessments that work for everyone--not a single, one-size-fits-all solution but rather flexible approaches that can be customized and adjusted for individual needs."

As reported in U Connecticut's Daily Campus newspaper, N. Katherine Hayles, a professor at Duke University, recently gave a lecture on the impact of everyday digital media use on university students. The bottom line: the perpetually connected lifestyles of today's students means they are coming to the classrooms with significantly shorter attention spans than previous cohorts. Professors can ignore that, stay calm and lecture on - or we can respond by adjusting our teaching styles.

Seven out of 10 undergraduate students attending the University of California, Riverside don't buy textbooks, preferring to rent them, rely on instructor-provided materials, or go without. According to a recent "Undergraduate Experience Survey," run annually, 73 percent of respondents reported postponing the purchase, and 74 percent chose to skip buying them altogether. Those counts are similar to results from a 2010 survey.

"Facebook disabled the profiles of McDonald and his girlfriend Leola Lewis Wednesday morning, according to Donnelyn Curtis, the University of Nevada librarian who set the profiles up as a way to engage students in learning about history. "

"What role, if any, should colleges and universities play in the shift from print to digital textbooks (eTexts)? One perspective is that eTexts are a consumer transaction between a publisher and student, and institutions need not be involved. Another perspective is that volume licensing by institutions can dramatically reduce the costs to students and improve the terms through a business-to-business negotiation. Likewise, what software is needed? Do institutions want a common software platform for eText reading and annotation, or are four different software systems to read five eTexts just fine for a freshman?"

"LectureTools turns student laptops into in-class communication tools and increases student participation regardless of class size."

Praise for ability is commonly considered to have beneficial effects on motivation. Contrary to this popular belief, six studies demonstrated that praise for intelligence had more negative consequences for students' achievement motivation than praise for effort. Fifth graders praised for intelligence were found to care more about performance goals relative to learning goals than children praised for effort. After failure, they also displayed less task persistence, less task enjoyment, more lowability attributions, and worse task performance than children praised for effort. Finally, children praised for intelligence described it as a fixed trait more than children praised for hard work, who believed it to be subject to improvement. These findings have important implications for how achievement is best encouraged, as well as for more theoretical issues, such as the potential cost of performance goals and the socialization of contingent self-worth.

A diagram explaining why some individuals are resiliant and others are lazy when it comes to learning and facing obstacles.

UD employees, 2011

"Want to get started in blended learning but don't know where to begin? UCF has created the Blended Learning Toolkit (BLT), an open educational web-based resource. In addition to BLT's broad overviews of blended learning models, processes, research findings, and evaluation models useful for institutional administrators, of particular interest to blended learning faculty and instructional designers are numerous detailed do-it-yourself (DIY) resources in the BlendKit Course designed to support them in developing their first blended learning course."

"The iPad Institute is organized in five clusters that correspond to the five days of direct instruction and hands-on practice aimed at accomplishing the objectives outlined below. To help accomplish all of this within the span of five days, participants will use iBooks to to work through the iPad Primer that includes video tutorials and links to the apps taught in the Institute. To download the Primer your iPad needs to have your Apple ID."

"Full Committee Hearing - The Promise of Accessible Technology: Challenges and Opportunities"