EET Learns

"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."

"A study by the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project confirms the idea that young adults-particularly undergraduate and graduate students-are more likely to use the Internet and own tech devices than is the rest of the general population. But nonstudents ages 18 to 24 were more active on social networks than were college students, sending more updates to Facebook and Twitter."

"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."

"But a new study urges caution to those who believe that online education is a panacea for educating more community college students. The study finds that students who enrolled in online courses -- controlling for various factors that tend to predict success -- were more likely to fail or drop out of the courses than were those who took the same courses in person. Notably, there was not a gap in completion between those enrolled in hybrid and in-person courses. "

"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."

"A month or so before back-to-school season begins in earnest, Amazon has jumped into the lucrative college textbook market with Kindle Textbook Rental. Amazon claims students can save as much as 80% off textbook list prices by renting from the Kindle Store. The company is offering tens of thousands of textbooks, which students can rent for periods ranging from 30 to 360 days. Amazon has also extended its Whispersnyc technology so that students can access all their notes and highlighted content in the Amazon Cloud, even after the rental agreement is over."

Textbook rentals at up to 80% off the hard copy price. Wow!

"Have you ever said to yourself, "I really should do something about this course, but..."?? This web site is designed to provide practical and effective help for faculty members interested in designing or redesigning a course."

"Four major textbook providers-Cengage, Macmillan, Pearson, and John Wiley & Sons-today announced that they will build tighter links between their advanced e-textbook platforms and Blackboard's popular course-management system. Blackboard announced a similar deal with McGraw-Hill last year. So the company now has partnerships with the five dominant textbook publishers. For students, a major benefit will be the ability to get to the publishers' e-textbooks and online assignments through the campus network without having to create new logins and passwords. For professors, the new links will make it easier to push students' grades on online quizzes from the publishers' e-textbook systems to the gradebook they use on the Blackboard system."

This is a real plus for BB.

"The Institute for Scholarship of Teaching and Learning at Mount Royal University is pleased to announce our 2011 Centennial Symposium on Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, November 10-12, 2011 in Banff Alberta Canada. This gathering of teacher/scholars is a "practitioners conference" dedicated to developing individual and collaborative teaching and learning scholarship, sharing nascent data and findings, going public with compelling results of completed research projects, and building an extended scholarly community. The goals of this event, and the Institute for Scholarship of Teaching and Learning at Mount Royal University, include understanding and improving student learning through systematic scholarly inquiry and building collective knowledge for the future."

"Too often assessment is an additional chore to be completed for compliance and reporting reasons. Waypoint Outcomes builds software that streamlines the interactions between learners and teachers. The results can mean a dramatically improved dialog about outcomes and rich data on student learning. Tightly integrated with Blackboard, Moodle, and Blackboard Vista or used as a stand-alone tool, Waypoint® helps educators improve the quality of feedback to students on authentic tasks and build a culture of continuous improvement."

"This development is getting a great deal of attention in the OER community as well as by the Creative Commons movement which supports REA and open education. If adopted the legislation would require open access for any federally subsidized or funded educational works to be made available through an open license."

"The small liberal-arts college in this Pennsylvania town offers students an intimate learning experience. There is one professor for every eight students, each of whom pays about $40,000 for that kind of access. Now the college wants to add courses that are partly online into this setting, and it wants other liberal-arts institutions to follow suit."