Group items tagged

"U of C Student Success Centre Goes Mobile Students at the University of Calgary can stay connected to services offered by their Student Success Centre (SSC) with a new custom mobile application. The application allows students to read recent news, to register for workshops or seminars, to book appointments with advisors, writing tutors, career and academic development specialists, and to access the SSC events calendar 24/7. "We are committed to effective communication with students and to making it easy for them to access the programs and services we offer," says Joel Wilkinson, Director of the Student Success Centre. "Most students do almost everything online and our new application will allow them to stay connected with the resources and events available to support their path to success." The application was developed by the company 4abyte Inc., which was founded by Charles Newton Price, a recent U of C graduate student. "We were pleased to be part of this project," says Charles. "Given the prominent presence of smartphones on campus, going mobile has become indispensible for post-secondary institutions." SSC's sharp, attractive, and easy application, available for iPhone, Android, and Blackberry Torch devices, adds to the University of Calgary's steps to remain at the forefront of student engagement. The application is available for download on iTunes (iPhone only) or via the SSC website at: http://ucalgary.ca/ssc "

Discussion about networks and social media in PD

Digital Badges for faculty PD

Analytics in Higher Education: Benefits, Barriers, Progress, and Recommendations The objectives of this research were to assess the current state of analytics in higher education, outline the challenges and barriers to using analytics, and develop a maturity index to provide a common means of assessing progress in analytics.

These skills and competencies for digital curators include seven areas: 1) Communication and interpersonal competency: This competency is required for clear and effective communication with a variety of audiences, including users, creators, managers, researchers and collaborators. 2) Curating and preserving content competency: This competency is required to understand and carry out a range of activities as defined in the digital curation lifecycle model, including the creation, acquisition, management, representation, access, organization, transformation and preservation of digital content. 3) Curation technologies competency: This competency is required to identify, use, and develop tools and applications to support digital curation activities. The context of this competency is the information technology infrastructure, including the tools and applications deployed to support digital curation. 4) Environmental scanning competency: This competency is required to identify and use resources to stay current and on the leading edge regarding trends, technologies and practices that affect professional work and capabilities within the field of digital curation. 5) Management, planning and evaluation competency: This competency is required for planning, coordinating, implementing, and assessing programs, projects and services related to digital curation. 6) Services competency: This competency is required to identify, understand and build services to respond to a community's and/or institution's digital curation needs. 7) Systems, models and modeling competency: This competency is required for high-level, abstract thinking about and critical analysis of complex systems, workflows and conceptual models related to digital curation.                                                                      Robin Good

"What is lost with this settlement is the chance for something better. The shift away from Access Copyright in recent months has led to a growing awareness of the large number of licensed materials on university campuses, the benefits of open access, the emergence of open educational resources, and the move to digital course materials. Investing in new open materials - which pay the creator but allow for more flexible use and reuse - would offer innovative teaching materials at the very time that Canadian higher education should be rethinking how course materials are developed and disseminated in a digital world. This is hard work as new models require real investment, commitment from faculty, and patience from students. The payoff would have been significant, but the AUCC is seemingly more interested in "cost certainty" than in education innovation. The big question now is whether its members feel the same. My guess is that most will sign, but perhaps some will carefully assess their experience of operating outside the collective and see some short term pain for long term gain. "

New agreement re ACCESS copyright this week.

"Discover the innovative work taking place in colleges and universities across Ontario in the area of technology applications, course development, student support services, marking, exams, and many other aspects of online and mobile learning."

"The author of the best-selling What the Best College Teachers Do is back with more humane, doable, and inspiring help, this time for students who want to get the most out of college-and every other educational enterprise, too. The first thing they should do? Think beyond the transcript. The creative, successful people profiled in this book-college graduates who went on to change the world we live in-aimed higher than straight A's. They used their four years to cultivate habits of thought that would enable them to grow and adapt throughout their lives. Combining academic research on learning and motivation with insights drawn from interviews with people who have won Nobel Prizes, Emmys, fame, or the admiration of people in their field, Ken Bain identifies the key attitudes that distinguished the best college students from their peers. These individuals started out with the belief that intelligence and ability are expandable, not fixed. This led them to make connections across disciplines, to develop a "meta-cognitive" understanding of their own ways of thinking, and to find ways to negotiate ill-structured problems rather than simply looking for right answers. Intrinsically motivated by their own sense of purpose, they were not demoralized by failure nor overly impressed with conventional notions of success. These movers and shakers didn't achieve success by making success their goal. For them, it was a byproduct of following their intellectual curiosity, solving useful problems, and taking risks in order to learn and grow."

Program Development and Evaluation

"March 1, 2011 Designing Online Courses with Course Updates in Mind By: Patti Shank, PhD, CPT in Online Education Add Comment Online courses are rarely "done." Over time, things change, including the curriculum and content (because of changes in the field and changes to available content) and the technologies (ways that the content can be delivered and tools for interacting with it and with others in the courses, including you). Bottom line: Just like initial course development, updating courses can be quite a lot of work. You can reduce the hassles and work (but not eliminate them) by designing your online courses with updating them in mind. That is, design so that updating is built into the process, not tacked on as an afterthought. Identify change-likely elements"

This article might really help us decide how to keep our courses updated more effectively.

"For the Millennial perspective, the ICPL members enlisted the closest college students at hand: their kids. Alongside Mitrano and Schaff, John King, the vice provost for strategy at the University of Michigan's School of Information, appeared with his son, Matthew, a spring graduate of Eastern Michigan University. Cynthia Golden, the director of instructional development and distance education at the University of Pittsburgh, brought her daughter, Hannah Somers, a rising sophomore at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. The discussion focused mainly on Facebook. The younger panelists copped to being ignorant of how the data they volunteered might be used and who might end up seeing their postings when they first joined Facebook during high school. They reported having since wised up and availed themselves of Facebook's ever-changing privacy settings, but acknowledged that many of their peers are not so careful."

"The number of people browsing the Web from a mobile device has more than tripled since 2009, and it is sure to continue growing, with browser platforms such as iOS and Android offering mobile browser support that is almost identical to what we have come to expect from a desktop experience. As the mobile consumer market continues to grow, so will the aspirations of individuals and companies who look to embrace what the mobile Web has to offer. With this in mind, many website owners have begun to develop a strategy for providing information and services to their mobile visitors. However, mobile strategies can vary massively from website to website, depending on what the company wants to offer visitors. For example, eBay's strategy will be very different from an individual's strategy for a portfolio website, which might simply be to improve readability for those viewing on a mobile device."

"It found that more structured on-boarding tactics made employees happier and more confident, and more likely to believe they fit both the job and organization. In turn, those who went through a structured program were significantly more likely to feel engaged and loyal to their employer than those that didn't the researchers estimate "In most organizations, they think of the on-boarding process as primarily imparting information, which is necessary, but that's not enough," Prof. Gruman said. Additionally they need to create opportunities for employees to quickly develop a social network, establish where to get information and support, provide work that's engaging enough to make them feel they are making a contribution and feedback that they are valued, the researchers found."

"The Utah Education Network is a case in point. It left Blackboard, the market leader, for Instructure, a year old Utah-based developer with an open source product called Canvas. Consider the way messages are sent and received on Instructure's Canvas: The receiver has a choice between traditional university E-mail, gmail, Facebook and text messaging; Blackboard's system uses traditional E-mail and was designed before Facebook was created. For a student body that uses social media the way earlier generations used pencil and paper, the differences between the two competitors are profound."