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"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."

I like the point about designing engaging activities using problem - solving: "Instead of a series of click-and-read screens, give the learner a problem to solve. Then provide all of the information that you would normally have pushed by creating access to additional, just-in-time resources. As the learner attempts to solve the problem, she'll pull the information she needs." Perhaps this is how we should be using Articulate Engage - to present problems with potential solutions... Food for thought!

This article raises some great questions - how much "instruction" do we still need to give to students on using things such as the "play" feature etc.? Can we assume they have the skills - or do we need to do a little research to find out what types of instructions that seem obvious to us might not be obvious to them, and vice versa. Food for thought! Connie

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?

I heard a great interview with the founder of The Noun Project on CBC's The Spark. This project offers some excellent simple, clean icons for easy use. Food for thought!

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.

Food for thought - this could be a interesting experience

Wow - this goes against all we learned about Plain language / easy-to-read fonts etc. Good food for thought. Not sure if my experience agrees - but it sure makes me re-think.

Ian - I thought you might enjoy this article

This looks like an interesting conference, especially since we are looking into ways of using rapid development processes. Food for thought!

Instructional Design Resources

Old vs New Ways of Thinking About…

Thought you might enjoy the reference to Vygotsky!