Group items tagged

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.

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 short article comes from the Chronicle of Higher Education. It is part of the ongoing research around MOOCs. This article deals with the management of a MOOC. I hope to create an online class for Candler that will also serve as a MOOC. This will contribute to the learning of how each is different. In December 2013 a group of academics gathered during a Texas snowstorm and began the second phase of a discussion about massive open online courses. They were not terribly impressed by the hype the courses had received in the popular media, and they had set out to create a better body of literature about MOOCs-albeit a less sensational one.

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.

Online Learning Journal Volume 20, Issue 1 March 2016 FREE PDF download for members Volume 20, Issue 1 - March 2016 Introduction Peter Shea, University at Albany, State University of New York With the announcement of our latest issue of Online Learning we report the achievement of a significant milestone.

The most up-to-date information and research of online learning and teaching.

This 2002 essay by Wilson and Peterson may be a bit dated, but it is one of the few broadly reflective essays I found on the anthropology of online communities. It is not a "how to" for online teaching, but I think an occasionally more critical, reflective piece can be very useful both for understanding our place in broader social processes related to online learning and in piercing through some of the enthusiastic corporate-talk through which these technologies are presented by our universities. I have included the abstract below. The URL is to the JSTOR site, which you probably need to access through your Emory account. I was not sure how to add a link here that would get you in directly, and that is something I need to follow up on with Leah. Abstract: Information and communication technologies based on the Internet have enabled the emergence of new sorts of communities and communicative practices-phenomena worthy of the attention of anthropological researchers. De- spite early assessments of the revolutionary nature of the Internet and the enormous transformations it would bring about, the changes have been less dramatic and more embedded in existing practices and power relations of everyday life. This review ex- plores researchers' questions, approaches, and insights within anthropology and some relevant related fields, and it seeks to identify promising new directions for study. The general conclusion is that the technologies comprising the Internet, and all the text and media that exist within it, are in themselves cultural products. Anthropology is thus well suited to the further investigation of these new, and not so new, phenomena.

Georgia Tech Research on Accessible Distance Education (GRADE) is a research project at the Georgia Tech Center for Assistive Technology and Environmental Access (CATEA). Provides actual modules showing how courses that present challenges due to their nature (engineering, mathematics) or inclusion of rich media can be designed to increase accessibility.

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)

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.

This is a great research guide designed to help faculty who wish to incorporate UDL into their classes. See especially the UDL syllabus rubric page (listed under the tab "UDL Course Changes"

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.

Good communication from the facilitator to the group and between group members is essential in online learning in order for the group to bond and survive. Pauleen & Yoong (2001) studied how facilitators of virtual teams were able to build and maintain these relationships. They found that prompt communication was key stating "The facilitators in this study have clear expectations that e-mail, as well as other communication messages such as voice-mail, will be replied to in a prompt manner. They believe that a lack of timeliness can lead to poor communication, the creation of ill will, and an undermining of relationships" (p. 16).

I found this article to be very helpful in providing a sense that it will be possible to control time use when teaching on line. It gives great tips on how to overcome the feeling that online teaching will be a 24/7 class rather than one that meets TTh 10-11:15 in White Hall 208! I like this one a lot.

Not surprising (to me), there are very few studies of online teaching in Linguistics. The authors of this article state that they found only one prior to this 2014 publication. Similar to other research on online teaching in general, they found that time management, communication, and detailed instructions are crucial for a successful course. They also discuss how attitudes toward technology play a significant role in course success.

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!

"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).

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.

This paper reports the findings of a case study in which audio feedback replaced text-based feedback in asynchronous courses. Previous research has demonstrated that participants in online courses can build effective learning communities through text based communication alone. Similarly, it has been demonstrated that instructors for online courses can adequately project immediacy behaviors using text-based communication.