Education & Policy

The STEM Crisis Is a Myth Forget the dire predictions of a looming shortfall of scientists, technologists, engineers, and mathematicians

Updated E-Learning Definitions By John Sener, Founder/CKO, Sener Knowledge LLC | No Comments | July 7, 2015 | Leave a comment Definitions of E-Learning Courses and Programs Version 2.0 April 4, 2015 Developed for Discussion within the Online Learning Community By Frank Mayadas, Gary Miller, and John Sener As e-learning has evolved into a global change agent in higher education, it has become more diverse in its form and applications. This increased diversity has complicated our ability to share research findings and best practices, because we lack a shared set of definitions to distinguish among the many variations on e-learning that have arisen. This paper is designed to provide practitioners, researchers, and policy makers with a common set of terms and definitions to guide the ongoing development of the field. Our hope is that it will move us toward a set of shared, commonly understood definitions that will facilitate the sharing of research data and professional standards in our field. In developing the definitions below, we have tried to incorporate existing definitions developed by others and have incorporated comments from colleagues who have reviewed earlier drafts. We do not present these as the ultimate definitions, but as a step toward more commonly held standards as our field continues to evolve. Additions and revisions will be published periodically, as needed.

"September 28, 2015 Why Policies Fail to Promote Better Learning Decisions By Lolita Paff, PhD Policies are necessary. They serve as a warning to students: this is what will happen if you are absent, miss an exam, turn work in late, text or surf the Web during class, and the like. Most institutions recommend teachers spell out consequences in their syllabi. Some schools employ institution-wide policies for certain behaviors like academic dishonesty. If policies are supposed to prevent these unproductive behaviors, why do students still engage in them? Are there reasons why policies don't work? Policies don't teach students why these behaviors hurt their effort to learn. Despite extensive evidence to the contrary, many students believe their learning is unaffected by technology distractions. "No screens" policies are aimed, at least in part, to minimize distractions that hurt learning (their own and peers'). But policies aren't nearly as powerful as an activity that demonstrates the effects of distraction."

"catchword in educational circles is "constructivism, " applied both to learning theory and to epistemology---both to how people learn, and to the nature of knowledge.1,2 We don't need to succumb to each new fad, but we do need to think about our work in relation to theories of learning and knowledge. So we need to ask: what is constructivism, what does it have to tell us that is new and relevant, and how do we apply it to our work? As far as I can see, there is nothing dramatically new in constructivism: the core ideas expressed by it have been clearly enunciated by John Dewey among others, but there is a new, widespread acceptance of this old set of ideas. and new research in cognitive psychology to support it. I would like to give a brief exposition of ideas central to constructivism and widely accepted today by educators. curriculum developers and cognitive psychologists, and then suggest what they mean for museum educators."

"A quote from my June 3 blog post appeared in the October 18 issue of the New York Times. I was thrilled until I read the beautifully written op-ed piece. It proposes more lecture and less active learning. My quote was used to illustrate the perspective of those of us who favor active learning. The author, a history prof, describes the various technology accoutrements found in her classroom, but she quests for what wasn't present-"a simple wooden lectern to hold my lecture notes." I loved this response from a community college faculty member: "Had I known Professor Worthen needed a lectern, I would have been happy to send one from the small community college in northern Wyoming where I teach English. After 20 years of teaching, … it [lecture] is a form I have largely abandoned.""

"We recently hosted a webinar exploring copyright and fair use of captioning third-party educational video. The event featured legal expert Blake Reid, Assistant Clinical Professor in Technology Policy and Telecom Law at Colorado Law. Blake has worked on captioning regulations with deaf and hard of hearing interest groups and the FCC, earning a reputation for expertise in copyright law. Copyright and captioning are a major concern for educators. A poll of webinar participants revealed that, while only about a quarter of respondents encountered copyright issues with their captioned video, over half worried that they would run into trouble down the road."

Although faculty and students are the primary learning management system users, administrators and IT experts often select the system. This article stresses the importance of involving all stakeholders in the selection process, offers a step-by-step guide to LMS selection, and enables readers to develop a customized list of LMS features that align with their institution's instructional and learning priorities.

"BECAUSE QUALITY AND EXCELLENCE IN ONLINE LEARNING MATTER The drive behind the Online Learning Consortium In 1997, Frank Mayadas, President of the Online Learning Consortium (renamed OLC), affirmed that any learner who engages in online education should have, at a minimum, an education that represents the quality of the provider's overall institutional quality. Any institution, he maintained, demonstrates its quality in five inter-related areas - learning effectiveness, access, scale (capacity enrollment achieved through cost-effectiveness and institutional commitment), faculty satisfaction, and student satisfaction. These five have become OLC's Five Pillars of Quality Online Education, the building blocks which provide the support for successful online learning. The intent of the quality framework, which is always a work in progress, is to help institutions identify goals and measure progress towards them"

"EFFECTIVE PRACTICE EVALUATION CRITERIA"

"Top 10 skills for the future A while ago, I came across a 'top 10 skills for the future' image, formed by the World Economic Forum following their Future of Jobs report. It really caught my attention and a lot of other people found it useful too. After recently experimenting with creating images for our Twitter page (@refthinking) and this blog, I loved the idea of mixing it up a little and adding some images. Feel free to share it, but please let us know by mentioning us if it's a tweet, as it's great to see it being shared even more! "

"In a 2002 case, the United States Supreme Court suggested that Congress envisioned FERPA applying only to files kept in a central file by a records custodian designated by the school, not to every record that might be generated across the school district by which a student can be identified. In Owasso Independent School Dist. No. I-011 v. Falvo, the Supreme Court found that students' assignments are not educational records under FERPA. 534U.S. 426. In so doing, the Court clarified that not every record in a school concerning a student is an education record. The Court looked to a provision in FERPA, 20 U.S.C. § 1232g(b)(4)(A), which requires that a record of access be kept when a request for student records is made. That record must be kept "with the education records" of the student. The Court found that this suggested that Congress intended that education records would be kept in one place. Moreover, FERPA requires that a "school official" and "his assistants" are responsible for the custody of the records. The Court indicated that this implies that "education records are institutional records kept by a single central custodian, such as a registrar, not individual assignments handled by many student graders in their separate classrooms."  534U.S. at 434-435."

"The Digital Learning Compass Partnership Since 2003, the Babson Survey Research Group (BSRG) has conducted national surveys on enrollments, activities, and attitudes regarding online learning for U.S. colleges and universities. When the U.S. Department of Education's Integrated Postsecondary Education Survey (IPEDS) began collecting distance learning enrollments in the Fall of 2012, BSRG switched to reporting the Department's statistics. e-Literate and WCET conducted their own separate and joint analyses of the IPEDS enrollment data. After noting small differences in the numbers reported, the three organizations harmonized the data sets they used and continued to share what was learned behind the scenes. Realizing that we accomplish more together (and that we liked each other's data wonk personalities), the three organizations partnered in 2017 to create the Digital Learning Compass. "

"What are the Noetic Sciences? no*et*ic: From the Greek noēsis / noētikos, meaning inner wisdom, direct knowing, or subjective understanding. sci*ence: Systems of acquiring knowledge that use observation, experimentation, and replication to describe and explain natural phenomena. no*et*ic sci*ences: A multidisciplinary field that brings objective scientific tools and techniques together with subjective inner knowing to study the full range of human experiences."

Exploring Students' E-Textbook Practices in Higher Education ShareShare RecommendLog in to Recommend by Aimee deNoyelles, John Raible, and Ryan Seilhamer Published on Monday, July 6, 20150 Comments Key Takeaways A two-year university-wide study of students' e-textbook practices found that e-textbook use has increased and become broader demographically. Lower cost and convenience remain the top reasons students purchase an e-textbook, not the interactive features designed to enhance learning. The instructor's role has not changed significantly in the past two years, suggesting the need for further professional development including increased awareness, instruction, and active modeling.

As an integral part of students' daily lives, mobile technology has changed how they communicate, gather information, allocate time and attention, and potentially how they learn. The mobile platform's unique capabilities - including connectivity, cameras, sensors, and GPS - have great potential to enrich the academic experience.3 Learners are no longer limited to the classroom's geographical boundaries, for example; they can now record raw observations and analyze data on location. Furthermore, mobile technology platforms let individuals discuss issues with their colleagues or classmates in the field. The ever-growing mobile landscape thus represents new opportunities for learners both inside and outside the classroom.4 We conducted two surveys - one in 2012 and one in 2014 - to investigate student use of mobile technology.

"The California Community Colleges Online Education Initiative will hold its first statewide informational town hall events at the Campus Technology Forum 2014. Held on April 9 of the April 8-9 CT Forum event, the town halls were created to inform community college administration and technology leadership about this important initiative."

(CNN) -- Anything creative begins with a question. The problem is that questions take us into uncertainty, which is a very dangerous place to be. If there were a predator next to you and your brain wasn't absolutely sure what to do, then it'd probably be too late. The need to translate ambiguous sensory information into meaningful behavior has been the fundamental drive of brain evolution, without which survival in a complex world would not have been possible. And yet a deep irony is that the best questions -- i.e., the ones that challenge our deepest sense of what is true -- create the most uncertainty.

Selecting technology is perhaps the easiest part of developing a distance learning program. Most colleges and universities find an array of available delivery systems ranging from interactive television to sophisticated Web-based asynchronous learning networks (ALNs). As these institutions strive to provide quality alternative instructional delivery and enter the increasingly competitive race for new students, two areas often receive little attention - policy development and planning. Soon the courses are on the air or travelling through cyberspace, and unprepared educators find themselves in legal, academic, fiscal, logistical and union controversies. "Regardless of the delivery system…the technology often precedes planning and policy development" (C.E.T.U.S., 1997, p. 7). Clearly, advanced policy deliberation and development is essential to the success of distance learning programs and their students.