Group items tagged

Some studies reveal deep doubts among students and faculty that distance learning ever can have the degree of interaction in a non-distance environment. Horn (1994) and Hirumi and Bermudez (1996) are among those who find that, with proper instructional design, distance courses actually can be more interactive than traditional ones, providing more personal and timely feedback to meet students' needs than is possible in large, face-to-face courses.

Interesting perspective - especially relevant since so many IDs are in the process of getting a Masters!

"The Rental Phenomenon In the past two years, the post-secondary textbook rental market has exploded. Driven by the outcry over book prices, federal legislation, readily available pricing information on the Internet, and sophisticated web-based rental management platforms, old and new competitors are disrupting the $10 billion college textbook business. Book rental isn't really a new phenomenon-a few college stores have been renting books since the Civil War. The National Association of College Stores (NACS) proclaimed fall 2010 as the "Year of the Rental." Players include long-timers like Follett and Budgetext, institutional stores and fast-growing start-ups. BookRenter, started in 2008, netted $40 million from investors in a funding round this past February. Chegg, started in 2007, has raised $200+ million in venture capital and attracted senior management from Yahoo and Netflix. The same drivers are growing trade in used books, eBooks, and online instructional content. Rental is also driving new business models for sourcing and distributing educational materials that may carry the industry forward into digital. Having book inventory isn't necessarily required-at least one high-flying firm, BookRenter, exists mainly as an online marketplace. Read on to see how this change in distribution is impacting the higher education market. Next month we'll look at what all this means for K-12."

"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."

"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. "

A nice compilation of learning objects centered about teaching, learning, and course design.

Interesting chat about how someone gave up flipping classrooms for something better ... Not reverting to old ways but something better.

I may have missed the boat on the technical definition of Flipped classroom but I have always thought that student centered learning was Flipped classroom and not just lecture capture. At least that is what we try and encourage up here that capturing lectures is still a lecture.

Introduction: "Across North America and increasingly the world, there is a move within education to adopt a constructivist view of learning and teaching. In part, the argument for this move is a reaction against teacher-centred instruction that has dominated much of education, particularly adult and higher education, for the past forty years or more. While I do not argue with the basic tenets of constructivism, I do resist the rush to adopt any single, dominant view of learning or teaching. Unless we are cautious, I fear we are about to replace one orthodoxy with yet another and promote a 'one size fits all' notion of good teaching."