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this storify consists of active learning videos and resources - may want to view the Tools to Encourage Active Learning from the Hawaii Arts Alliance - this was a fun in-class activity

While this paper set out to discover what activities and/or interaction channels might be expected to lead to more highly engaged student s, what it found was a bit different. After first creating a scale to measure online student engagement, and then surveying 186 students from six campuses in the Midwest, the results indicate that there is no particular activity that will automatically help students to be more engaged in online classes. However, the results also suggest that multiple communication channels may be related to higher engagement and that student-student and instructor-student communication are clearly strongly correlated with higher student engagement with the course, in general. Thus, advice for online instructors is still to use active learning but to be sure to incorporate meaningful and multiple ways of interacting with students and encouraging/requiring students to interact with each other.

Practitioners are regularly confronted with significant events which present them with learning opportunities, and yet many are unable to recognise the learning opportunity these significant events present. The ability to recognise a learning opportunity in the workplace and learn from it, is a higher-order cognitive skill which instructors should be seeking to develop in learners.

This article is a rather old (1999) meta-analysis of the effect of small-group learning on undergraduate students in STEM majors and the outcomes of collaborative, cooperative, or mixed form learning on student achievement, attitudes and persistence. What we like about this article is that it is scientifically robust, from a really high impact (5 point impact factor) educational research journal. It serves as primary research evidence about how important small group learning can be on a number of outcomes, not just the outcome of achievement. While it doesn't address specifically online work, it is powerful research about the benefits of this kind of learning, which is really convincing, especially when we have students who might resist collaborative learning.

Learning Contract Study and Undergraduate Students Policy Empire State College is committed to the principles that: effective learning derives from purposes and needs important to the individual learning occurs in varied ways and places styles of learning may differ significantly from person to person and from one setting to another.

Reconceptualization of the CoI framework that proposes learning presence as an additional construct in the framework. Reflects the unique contributions of students and teachers and embeds the social dimension as part of each presence (i.e., Social-Learning Presence, Social-Teaching Presence, and Socio-Cognitive Presence).

Kristy, thank you so much for locating and sharing this article and study. It's an important find. I really like the fact that it is hosted within our library system and that the authors are suggesting that the model may need some revisions - there is still much to learn and develop in the digital learning environments. Bookmarked!

Introduction It is generally agreed that learning involves interaction and that it is a communal activity (McMillan & Chavis, 1986; Sarason, 1974). The traditional setting where communal learning activity occurs has been the in-person classroom; however, with the advent of technology that is no longer the case.

Curtis and Lawson (2001) looked for "evidence of good quality interactions among students who are not present in the one physical site from data obtained from students' online exchanges" (p. 21). They focused on the "depth of on-task activity" (p. 21) in an asynchronous situation, which they argue is the most common form of online courses, of a small collaborative learning group. They found that "the analysis of participants' postings reveals many of the behaviors associated with collaborative learning in face-to face situations" (p. 29). However, "the students spontaneously demonstrated a need also to use synchronous communication" (p. 24). Some did this via text or email, often when they did not agree with another student and some organized synchronous chat sessions. This shows that "there is a need to incorporate among the asynchronous interactions…opportunities for real-time interactions among students" (p. 29).

Mobile Learning: A Designer's Guide to Fighting Learner Distraction One of the biggest issues in eLearning is distractions. The brain is constantly bombarded with stray thoughts even when users exert great self-control. The problem is yet more pronounced in mLearning, as devices themselves may cause distractions such as phone calls, email alerts, and the knowledge that the user could easily be doing something different.

I follow this blog although it is primarily for course design. In any case, this topic seemed relevant to our course design assignment.

It seems to me that instructional design and course design models presume that every student in the class has to pursue the same objectives and should be taught in the same fashion; yet, as universal design ideas suggest, we may need to occasionally use different assignments and allow different learning approaches. And maybe, to take this idea a step further, learning in general should be personalized and course designs become more flexible. At least that's what some educational pioneers from Silicon Valley have declared. What follows is the introductory passage of a very recent New Yorker article, an article which is ultimately quite skeptical of the new models and of the role of technology in the classroom: "Seen from the outside, AltSchool Brooklyn, a private school that opened in Brooklyn Heights last fall, does not look like a traditional educational establishment. There is no playground attached, no crossing guard at the street corner, and no crowd of children blocking the sidewalk in the morning."

As the article goes on to highlight, the founders of the company AltSchool intend to break with traditional educational models. In the older model, the founder Max Ventilla asserts, the teacher is "an artisanal lesson planner on the one hand and disciplinary babysitter on the other hand." Not just that, the teacher also creates, following Common Core for example, standards and objectives for his or her class; one teacher quoted in the article claims that "by looking for standards to pull everyone up we are forgetting to address what the individual needs." This is where the AltSchool idea intervenes. This new school's approach "acknowledges and adapts to the differences among students: their abilities, their interests, their cultural backgrounds." How so? By monitoring students and collecting as much data about each student as possible, thus personalizing plans and projects for students (sound familiar? Ventilla worked for Google before founding AltSchool). While I think the idea of personalized learning is compelling, I also read with interest about the mixed results of AltSchool and other similar institutions - plus, the schools seem to be very utilitarian, focusing on what the student purportedly needs to succeed in the workplace (languages are supposedly rather useless, for example, because everyone will carry an electronic, speaking dictionary in 20 years from now). On a slightly different - and final - note, I was also intrigued by a quote from Daniel Willingham, education scholar at UV: "The most common thing I hear is that when you adopt technology you have to write twice the lesson plans. You have the one you use with the technology, and you have the backup one you use when the technology doesn't work that day." Congratulations! If you read this sentence, you have survived the challenge of reading this epic post.

This also is another fairly short read from the pre-digital era (ie, 1990s). (I'm trying to spare you all the 21-page scholarly works). If you looked at the learning object at the CoI community of inquiry, this parallels the short video about traditional education models and preparing students to be nimble, active and adaptable thinkers in rapidly changing environments - something we worry about a lot in healthcare education.

Andragogy--self-directed learning--is making a comeback, thanks to online education. But why did Malcolm Knowles, its author, and the approach based on educating adults lose interest among educators? This article delves into why it faded from favor and why it's on the rebound.

A series of 15 slides that concisely delineate assessment strategies for online courses.

This is a good summary of how to organize our thoughts about "flipped classrooms".

This is a good summary of how to organize our thoughts about "flipped classrooms".

This website is designed for practitioners that want to develop online environments to build and sustain new audiences by using facilitation techniques that affect learning in these informal spaces. Below you'll find different tools that we believe can help you successfully facilitate an online environment.

Assessment of undergraduate research (UR) programs using participant surveys has produced a wealth of information about design, implementation, and perceived benefits of UR programs. However, measurement of student participation university wide, and the potential contribution of research experience to student success, also require the study of extrinsic measures....

This particular article relates more to undergraduate research experiences and their relationship to student success than to online teaching and learning. When viewing and reading the "student as producer" content, I immediately thought of undergraduate research experiences (URE). URE in STEM fields are thought to be valuable in promoting gains in student knowledge and skills, enhancing retention of students in STEM fields (particularly underrepresented minorities and women), among other goals. A commonly reported outcome of studies on URE is that "students learn to be scientists," (to paraphrase a bit). Fechheimer et al. looked at participation in UR in all fields by UGA students for more than a single semester, and found positive, quantifiable outcomes (like increased GPA) in this study. UR is an approach to reach some of the same goals that we have in online teaching and learning. I would argue that it also is a learner-centered approach. And, it certainly allows students to produce products that require novel assessments (for example, a poster or presentation at a conference; co-authorship of a paper). Interestingly, I'm not sure that the evidence to date is clear on the ability of URE to promote and develop higher order skills in students.

This article applies Bloom's Learning Taxonomy to online teaching, suggesting concrete activities to promote each phase of student learning.

Love concrete activities :)