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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.

I won't say that this makes shifting conceptions of assessment in one's own courses less daunting, but I appreciate that it acknowledges the significant demand that changing assessment criteria can put on teachers. I have to admit that lot of the time, when I read about new assessment techniques, they sound interesting but exhausting to implement. We've seen a lot of stage-based models for education/assessment/collaboration/etc., but this one is especially clear and I like the thoroughness of the horror story example.

Dan I greatly appreciate your view point on this and can share another horror story with you that actually turned out to be a fairy-tale situation in the end! I'll make a note to discuss in tomorrow's live session. Cheers!

The more that I read about student centered learning and assessment, the more I realize that this is the direction I have been (slowly, glacially) moving in for years. Thanks for this!

The number of distance education courses offered by nurse anesthesia programs has increased substantially. Emerging distance learning trends must be researched to ensure high-quality education for student registered nurse anesthetists. However, research to examine distance learning has been hampered by a lack of theoretical models. This article introduces the Community of Inquiry model for use in nurse anesthesia education. This model has been used for more than a decade to guide and research distance learning in higher education. A major strength of this model lies in its direct applicability for guiding online distance learning. However, it lacks applicability to the development of higher order thinking for student registered nurse anesthetists. Thus, a new derived Community of Inquiry model was designed to improve these students' higher order thinking in distance learning. The derived model integrates Bloom's revised taxonomy into the original Community of Inquiry model and provides a means to design, evaluate, and research higher order thinking in nurse anesthesia distance education courses.

Authors: Lehman, Rosemary M. and Conceicão, Simone C. This volume highlights the need for creating a presence in the online environment. The authors explore the emotional, psychological, and social aspects from both the instructor and student perspective. It provides an instructional design framework and shows how a strong presence contributes to effective teaching and learning. Contains methods, case scenarios, and suggested activities.

Researchers say that some online students don't like group work. How to deal with dissonance? One idea is to have students list their reasons and then discuss. Another is to show them a video on collaboration and team-building. There are a lot of lousy team-building videos on YouTube. But here's a fun and engaging Ted Talk presentation. Why are kindergarteners better at collaboration than business school students? Tune in.

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)

Matthew Guterl writes in the Chronicle of Higher Education about the alternative of open curriculum. It is a nice opinion piece in our discussion of Heutagogy.

I really like this piece, David, thanks for sharing. The conclusion asks some pretty good questions: Parents need to think about the interior work of the curriculum and understand that what is learned in pursuit of a college degree is more than the sum of courses taken. And faculty members and administrators need to be asking themselves: What sort of student emerges from our curricula? A student who can follow a map, or a student who can make one? Because we sorely need more of the latter. And, as much as I love teaching at this place, they shouldn't all come from Brown.

Not an academic article, but a page to find several reflections on heutagogy. Everyone needs a community of practice!

Thanks Susan, I found these short and informal essays very helpful. I keep circling around this material feeling as if I cannot quite pinpoint why, even though I agree in essence with much that is said, I am resistant to the terminology and sense that this is a new revelation in educational theory rather than an articulation of what many educators have wanted to achieve for a long time.

A statement of a learning objective contains a verb (an action) and an object (usually a noun). The verb generally refers to [actions associated with] the intended cognitive process. The object generally describes the knowledge students are expected to acquire or construct. (Anderson and Krathwohl, 2001, pp.

Online teaching redefines the faculty member's schedule. The feeling of being a 24/7 professor can lead to frustration. Managing one's time as an online teacher can be a challenge. As the popularity of online education continues to grow, teaching faculty need to develop effective time management behaviors to be efficient and not just busy.

Thank you for sharing this! I find the tips all very useful. As one example, I am going to give the students a syllabus quiz, for sure. When I took the Zaption quiz Leah prepared during M1, I was a bit surprised by how much information my brain did not retain reading through the course guidelines. The quiz was obviously helpful.

I've been concerned with translating of a sense of teacher's personal presence into online course design; while this article is brief (and maybe over-dependent on a graphic), it nevertheless invites specific choices of format, teaching strategies, instructor roles, and type of technology, all to the end of suggesting an active and engaging professorial presence.

OK. Here is the other article I promised. My interest was to find out about the principle of redundancy, but this article is not just about that. Editor's Note : Effective online learning requires careful preparation, design, implementation, and follow-up. This article combines best practices from a variety of resources - research studies, publications, and discussions among online instructors. The analogy of a garden is used to reinforce practices that will ensure a successful "harvest!"

Hi Yu, I like this article. For some points, I had not thought about them. Thanks for sharing.

Michael Wesch has been on the lecture circuit for years touting new models of active teaching with technology. The associate professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University has given TED talks. Wired magazine gave him a Rave Award. The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching once named him a national professor of the year.

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.

In designing my syllabus, I'm trying to decide whether to include testing like I do in the conventional version of the course, which has a midterm and a final. This resource from Iowa State is helping me think about whether a midterm will be useful in the same way for an online course as it is for a conventional one-and how I might format it if I decide to have one.

Great resource, I could have used this many times. I will keep handy going forward. Thanks

Graphics-based exampled of questions to answer in the syllabus. Ignoring the ugly UT brown color, this is a bulleted document that offers good points in simple fashion.

This lays a lot of information out nicely and is especially helpful in thinking about what the students need to get oriented to the class. Hideous brown, though, it's true.

I agree with all the above, including the poor color choice, however ... am I the only once feeling daunted and this point? I am beginning to wonder if it takes a certain "type" of faculty member to create an appropriate online course - someone who can think and manage in multiple platforms, constantly, both synchronously and asynchronously!! What about all the rest of our work engagements? how do they fit in?

an account of using diigo vs. evernote

Thanks Leah, I have been playing with diigo this week and am sure that eventually it will become a "go to" site, as Evernote currently is for me. Unfortunately, I am not tech savvy, such as the people who write these commentaries, rather I am like the "old dog" who has mastered "one bone". Having become familiar with my "bone" no matter how chewed-up it is, and how old it is... it is comfortable. In this lies perhaps my biggest challenge with technology - I am not comfortable jumping from one platform to the next and transforming my "work" into new platforms at what appears to be constant speed! Is this type of classroom rendering perhaps more appropriate for younger generations??

I think it might be just like buying a car: Most will get you where you want to go, but you have to take it for a test drive to feel if it is right for you. I've not used Evernote, but now I will certainly kick the tires on it to see how it compares. When designing sound for theatrical productions, I often use Audacity, a free program, over more sophisticated programs such as Amadeus and Logic, because it is quicker to move through the interface. It cannot do as much as the other programs, but the comfort level is higher with the "get you where you need to go" mantra. And then I use the more sophisticated programs as necessary.

The Blended Synchronous Learning Handbook is the primary output of the Blended Synchronous Learning Project. It includes the summative findings of the Blended Synchronous Learning case studies, a Blended Synchronous Learning Design Framework, and a range of other resources and information to support blended synchronous learning design research and practice.