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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.

"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."

"Competency-based" education appears to be this year's answer to America's higher education challenges, judging from this week's news in Washington. Interesting opinion piece by John Ebersole.

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.

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.

A couple of comments here: I apologize if the link doesn't open right away. I got the article through PubMed at WHSLibrary. The article presents an interesting approach to the use of Bloom's taxonomy for grading discussion boards integrating collaborative learning process and higher-order thinking. It also does a good job discussing how to evaluate a rubric.,

The survey sought to dig deeper on the quality question, asking respondents which aspects of credit-bearing online courses they think can be better than, or at least equal to, those of in-person courses. Faculty members say they think online courses are the same quality as or better than face-to-face classes in terms of grading and communicating about grading, and in communicating with the college about logistical and other issues. And professors were split 50/50 (the same or better vs. lower quality) on online courses' "ability to deliver the necessary content to meet learning objectives."

"Much of the faculty consternation in the last year about how institutions (and, increasingly, state legislators) want to use online education has revolved around the perceived quality of online offerings (although there are undoubtedly undercurrents of concern about whether colleges and universities will use technology to diminish the role of, and ultimately the need for, instructors)." Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/survey/survey-faculty-attitudes-technology#ixzz38WwyClaW Inside Higher Ed I think it's interesting that indicators of 'quality' that were considered important (by faculty) included whether or not the online course was offered for credit. But, there are plenty of for-credit courses offered at accredited colleges in a traditional format that are pretty....bad. And I think that the EFOT course has given us the clear indication that online courses almost need instructors MORE than traditional f2f courses.

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.

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.

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.

With the number of students taking online classes increasing, the need for instructors to be versed in the world of online teaching also increases. What are some best practices of online teaching? Do MOOCs have a place in the higher education learning market? How will the virtual classroom evolve?

I appreciated this article's insistence that our focus needs to be on learning outcomes rather than technology. Recently, I taught an in-person class that was designed with a strong audio-visual component. This was for an adult education program outside Emory. But after the first class I realized that the audiovisual material was distracting me and not contributing that much, so I ditched it. What worries me about being an online instructor is not being able to make quick changes to the audiovisual regime during the semester.

This article has a follow up major piece in the June 24 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education. I cannot send that one to you because it is "locked." However, this piece describes what two very famous psychologists, Gosling and Pennebaker, are doing at UT Austin with online psychology classes. They describe here a synchronous massive online course in which (as now described in the Chronicle, they have 1500! students registered. Twenty four students are invited to attend F2F classes twice per week and the rest are online live. This SMOC, as they term it, allows faculty to interact live with an audience while teaching but affords huge enrollments. This seems to me to be a way of maintaining the "feel" of F2F while benefiting from the usefulness of technology. This is a very interesting development and, with these two psychologists being so well known, teachers of large lecture classes will take notice. I would love to explore the idea further!

This is pretty amazing! I wondered to what extent this was also a flipped class - did students do their readings and watch lectures before coming to class, and in the synchronous sessions, mostly focus on solving problems through group discussion? It seems to require a lot of technological and instructional support: TV studio, laptops, apps, and tutors serving as group advisors, but the better learning outcome may make it all worth it! Of course, at 500 students a class, it could save cost in a big way, too. So, are we all prepared to face the camera? :)

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

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.

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.

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/