Group items tagged

"After you create your syllabus, go back to and take a closer look at your learning outcomes for the course. As you read through the outcomes, write a discussion question related to each outcome. For example, suppose you teach a political science course and one of your learning outcomes is, "Students will be able to discuss current issues in political science informed by popular media and scholarly evidence." Now take that learning outcome and write a discussion question. "

This week's UBC podcast includes a discussion about the pros and cons of mobiles phones in schools.  As well a link to the Ericsson Mobility Report

Discusses the success of using peer-instruction during lecture time to help students solidify concepts.

What I like about this article is how it discusses using students to help teachers learn technology and its applications for learning.

Experts discussing the competencies needed to be successful in an online teaching environment.

Discussion about networks and social media in PD

This article discusses research on students' ability to read text presented online. It provides some good food for thought in designing our courses, especially the content-heavy courses. Should we be encouraging more page breaks? What do you think?

"Ken Robinson: Changing education paradigms This delightfully illustrated video entertains while educating. The video does a wonderful job of explaining how today's factory-like education model is outmoded and how it needs to evolve into a more personalized model if we are going to take it to a new level. Sugata Mitra: The child-driven education This video discusses "The Hole In The Wall" experiment that Mitra started in New Delhi in 1999. Children deprived of learning opportunities available in other parts of the world nevertheless figured out the computer at their disposal and started using it to learn and to teach each other. These results repeated themselves as the experiment was conducted in various other locales. Kids can and will teach kids. How can we take advantage of this to improve on education across the world?"

"As many of my colleagues know, I have not been a big fan of Twitter for academic purposes. Why? The impression I had is: * Twitter is tacky. Great if you want to know what Paris Hilton's dog is up to, otherwise: aahhh, no. * Twitter is unfiltered. Too much chaff, no wheat! * Twitter is too open. Students will be encouraged to let loose, to mix topics, to lose the thread that an instructor can maintain in a more tightly controlled discussion forum In the interest of an open mind, lately I have been exploring Twitter a bit, and while I still basically believe the points above, I have found some uses for Twitter that might be helpful."

"Vision: Our vision for WikiPODia is for it to become a repository of our collective and emergent understanding of our field. It is meant to be nimble and live, moving us from a smattering of disparate comments to a collective understanding of critical and important topics. Building from conference, listserv and other community initiated conversations we view WikiPODia as an important 'next level' resource for the POD community; providing an intermediate state between the POD listserv discussions and a formal POD publication. "

"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."

"Define Your Boundaries How you choose to set boundaries on the kinds of communication you have with colleagues and students will ultimately be a personal decision, albeit shaped by campus policy (on office hours or the use of email) and departmental culture (some departments expect your attendance at frequent social events, and others don't). Because the language of social media (following and friending) tends to blur boundaries, it's very important that teachers communicate carefully with students about their own practices (I and many other faculty simply have a rule of not friending students on Facebook, for example) and especially when social media are included in course requirements. Jason and Alex's discussion of the creepy treehouse problem offers some good suggestions on making your reasons for using social media for the course transparent. "

"Welcome to the brave new world of Massive Open Online Courses - known as MOOCs - a tool for democratizing higher education. While the vast potential of free online courses has excited theoretical interest for decades, in the past few months hundreds of thousands of motivated students around the world who lack access to elite universities have been embracing them as a path toward sophisticated skills and high-paying jobs, without paying tuition or collecting a college degree. And in what some see as a threat to traditional institutions, several of these courses now come with an informal credential (though that, in most cases, will not be free). "

Can you imagine 160,000 students registered in a course?

See also http://www.tonybates.ca/2012/03/06/discussion-of-moocs-more-links-and-questions/ for more info on MOOCs. This link notes the completion rates for some courses.

Great discussion on how to design self-checks - what options should we be giving the learners?

"Book Recommendations on College Teaching "