Group items tagged

Teacher resources and professional development across the curriculum

"This research study provides new insight into how teachers use social networking sites, such as Twitter, as professional learning networks." Article was published in The Journal of Online Learning and Teaching (JOLT).

Eight different views of the design process are described with the purpose of broadening the practitioner's concept of instructional design. Views both internal and external to instructional design are considered, so that instructional designers can see the traditions of their field in the context of design activity in other professional fields.

One of the most important professional documents in my field is the Council of Writing Program Administrators (CWPA) Outcomes Statement. This statement, the result of years of collaboration and revision, defines general learning outcomes for first-year composition (FYC) courses. Most importantly for others in our EFOT class, the statement contains sections that explain how faculty in all programs and departments can build on the preparation students receive in FYC.

I thought some of you might find this document helpful for thinking through your approach to plagiarism. The Council of Writing Program Administrators is a national organization comprised of college and university faculty who run or have professional interest in researching and running writing programs. This document is a statement of best practices for educating students about plagiarism and for building educational environments in which academic honesty flourishes.

David, This is very useful for those of us teaching writing intensive courses - thank you.

I like that this encourages working with students (even PLAGIARISTS) in order to help them get past bad or misguided habits and develop better, more ethical writing practices. Even in the short time I've been teaching, it seems like students are becoming both (a) less attentive to issues of casual plagiarism and (b) less responsive to punitive approaches. I think these guideline could be helpful, for both online and traditional courses, in helping students to think about the kinds of writers they want to be. (...or the kinds of writers *I* want them to be)

Using Fuller's concerns-based model for teacher development, this study identifies concerns and strategies experienced by 103 online instructors in a six-week online professional development course offered multiple times over a three-year period. The study reveals that online instructors identified concerns related to self, task, and impact. (VIP: Includes PRACTICAL ideas that can be implemented)

I thought you might be interested in Shulman's research, in that he has worked a good bit with students in programs like ours (nursing and theology), which are both professional and academic. He is wrestling, in this essay, with the categories of engagement and commitment in processes of learning.

This website shows the work of a group of educators of theatre who, through years of experience, have come up with more than 15 assessment models that can be used in the professional theatre education. Models are templates or transportable models. I found particularly helpful that they compare "traditional" assessment of teaching King Lear ("a multiple-choice test on the play at the end of the ten weeks") with "performance" assessment of KL (including " informal check-ins, observations, academic prompts, mini-quizzes and something called a performance task at the end of the course"). Student anxiety rises with the amount of overseeing and work, but "clear exercises with rubrics" help. Bottom line: smaller, more clearly focused assessment rounds help student prepare better for the final performance. Hmm... Website has assessment models and results, case analysis, reports for audiences, and lots of ideas. Some a bit calculated, but good food for thought. Comment from the website: "The result of using TEAM's Assessment Models is a more accurate picture of student learning. For example, a more accurate picture of student learning might include a student who does not just know Shakespeare, but knows how King Lear ends and has an opinion about an alternative ending for that play based on what he or she learned in class."

Although the target readership is grade 6-12 instructors, I find the methodology in this article applicable to what we are trying to do. Give it a read and see what you think.

Over the last decade, larger student numbers, reduced resources and increasing use of new technologies have led to the increased use of multiple-choice questions (MCQs) as a method of assessment in higher education courses. This paper identifies some limitations associated with MCQs from a pedagogical standpoint....

Trying to catch up and get ahead as I leave town this week :) I teach beginning undergraduates in typically large (150+ students) classes, often with little or no (or ineffective) TA assistance. Multiple choice questions are an absolute necessity as a management tool. I find that many of my colleagues in traditional liberal arts colleges think that multiple choice questions are unacceptable as a means of student assessment. However, I've noticed that many of the online adaptive learning tools and licensing exams required by many professional programs (nursing among them...) are also based primarily on multiple choice questions. I looked for an article to rebut the reading from the flaguide website (http://www.flaguide.org/) which stated, "...the multiple choice test..... [is] usually most effective at measuring fact-based knowledge and the ability to perform algorithmic problem-solving...However, if our goals include different student outcomes than these....then this assessment technique will not provide useful feedback about attainment of these goals." The above article gives several ideas for creating and using multiple choice questions to assess higher order thinking, my favorite being the idea of assigning scores based not only on student answers to the questions but also their confidence in their answer. I also liked the idea of the self-tests that students can take repeatedly to check their mastery of concepts, which seems to play into the instructional design loops that we were studying in M3.

Since 1948 we have helped millions of students who are blind, dyslexic or have other learning disabilities achieve confidence and independence in the classroom and in life. More about our mission We work with our partners to raise awareness of learning differences.

When I was a graduate student, I volunteered with this organization (formerly known as Recording for the Blind and Dyslexic). I read fiction books and textbooks, recording in a booth on my own or with a director. Volunteers completed training to learn how to cue the audio reader to turn book pages, to transition between text and pictures or figures, and to indicate punctuations (ellipsis, quotations, subscript/superscripts, etc.). The experience helped me to improve the use of my voice in communicating to learners and the ways to chunk the information appropriate for visually impaired and dyslexic learners. As Learning Ally, the organization now offers professional development for teachers to help them with utilizing the wide range of audiobooks in their collection.

Very clear message that if we, and I mean we collectively don't adapt we will be left behind. Another aspect is that in the workplace, orientation to a new job, continuing education, as well as continuing professional education are often in the online format. So we defiantly need to set the stage for alternative methods of learning.

Perhaps here is a good place to add this connection as well: http://www.westga.edu/~distance/ojdla/

The National Education Technology Plan, Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology, calls for applying the advanced technologies used in our daily personal and professional lives to our entire education system to improve student learning, accelerate and scale up the adoption of effective practices, and use data and information for continuous improvement.

This is a brief article aimed at University of Nebraska-Lincoln graduate students offering time management and email writing tips. I chose this article both because I find the general time management tips helpful for everyone and I feel that many of my students would benefit from similar suggestions/guidelines when communicating professionally online. I especially enjoyed the line reminding students, "that many faculty view an e-mail message as a letter that was delivered quickly rather than a quick conversation."