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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.

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."

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.

A good springboard page for information on Sugata Mitra and his learning centered ideas for young students. More questions than answers in his work, particularly in how it applies to post secondary education.

"The NMC Horizon Report > 2015 Higher Education Edition is a collaborative effort between the NMC and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI).....designed to identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have an impact on learning, teaching, and creative inquiry in education."

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)

Discussion about virtual universities and revenue. Who will really pay for the education.

Opinion Piece in the New York Times Online education is a one-size-fits-all endeavor. It tends to be a monologue and not a real dialogue. The Internet teacher, even one who responds to students via e-mail, can never have the immediacy of contact that the teacher on the scene can, with his sensitivity to unspoken moods and enthusiasms. This is particularly true of online courses for which the lectures are already filmed and in the can. It doesn't matter who is sitting out there on the Internet watching; the course is what it is.

Here is the very large report following ten years of studying online education. I think it probably has been or will be cited in other postings in this bibliography, but I thought it would be good to post the whole thing here. It's is very comprehensive but also easy to access. Enjoy!

Tenth annual report on the status of online learning in U.S. higher education. The survey is based on the response from more than 2,800 colleges and universities and addresses the status of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), the increasing importance of a long-term teaching strategy, ther percentage of students learning online, does it take more time and effort for faculty, is online comparable to F2F learning, faculty acceptance to online learning, and barriers to the adoption of online learning.

This is a multi-authored article that appeared in the journal Teaching Theology and Religion. I participated in the composition but the reason I am posting it is not my own little section on multi-sensory imagery but rather the part by Russell Haitch which discusses long distance education in the New Testament--the Apostle Paul to be specific. Haitch (as I recall) makes a good case that examples like this one show that one really communicate effectively and passionately, from a long distance, for the purpose of educational transformation. So, if you look at this, zero in on Haitch's case study.

January 2014 Tracking Online Education in the U.S. report

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.

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 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.

This is a relatively short (9 pages) piece that's not too difficult to read. I liked that it makes the distinction between 'big OER' (produced by larger, institutionally-based initiatives) and 'little OER' (produced by individuals). A quote: "The first may be that people don't value free things, or are suspicious of free. We have become accustomed to roughly equating monetary price with value or quality. Free is therefore obviously low quality or suspicious at least ... But in education there is still an expectation that high quality education costs." This is something I have thought about often in my career in higher ed here in GA, and that I'm especially attuned to now as I pack 2 children off to another institution of higher education.

Hi Ann, I really liked this article and the differentiation of context. The violin story is a good one that I believe we must ask--at Emory how much dependence upon open source is too much, how do we continue to give the ROI for the tuition? Great find.

Article summary: "This content is meant to do two things. It will, for the uninitiated, summarize the origins of heutagogy and the theories from which it was derived. At the same time we will have a look at more recent work and thinking from authors around the globe and see what they have discovered through using or thinking about heutagogical principles. The main theme is that people are naturally very efficient learners and that we can more effectively make use of this fact in our current education and training systems."

A bit dated, now, Hess is one of the few faculty who has treated the use of technology in theological education with sustained attention.