Group items tagged

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.

This article has GREAT examples of instructions to students about discussion posts and rubrics for discussion posts. It also says to let the students create the questions for discussions, rather than providing questions for them.

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.

Teaching English as a Second Language (ESL) to immigrants and refugees who are visually impaired or blind involves complex challenges such as working with mainstream ESL programs that have low expectations of people with disabilities, coping with inaccessible intake tools and training materials, locating and recruiting students from immigrant and refugee populations that do not always believe people with disabilities can become literate and productive citizens, locating and recruiting appropriately trained volunteer tutors, and matching students with tutors.

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.

Discusses the difficulty of changing the educational paradigm to a servant professor instead of a professor led classroom--both virtual and real. How steep will be the learning curve to replace lecture-test evaluation with student driven and student centered needs.

This UCF website, prepared by Carissa Baker, explores the way in which many literature professors are "trying innovative technology strategies within the literature classroom to increase knowledge and engagement." With theoretical as well as practical sources, the site offers many ideas on student engagement and literature immersion; it also has a few videos with ideas for staging virtual worlds; and a starter bibliography with 10 articles on a range of topics, including virtual literature circles; native avatars, online hubs, and urban indian literature; victorian novels and technoRomanticism; using Tweeter in the Literature Classroom (hmm...); online teaching Old English; and hypertext use to enhance students reading experiences, among others.

My department spent a lot of time this year thinking about assessment in a process driven by accreditation. We came up with some fairly broad learning outcomes and not much in the way of detailed assessment. So I am very impressed by this webpage from the Dept. of Sociology and Anthropology in Ohio. Their departmental webpage includes very detailed assessment information that may be useful for everyone to keep in mind, but probably does not do much to attract students. In our own discussions we sometimes ran into confusion between providing information for current students about what we would be assessing and departmental advertizing-- two very different things.

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.

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.

This resource gives some great, easy to read ideas for matching your learning objectives with your assessment techniques. It also has a list of criteria for writing clear assignments, which could be useful as a checklist when creating a new assignment.

Hi Susan - I particularly liked the Alignment tab, which gave some very clear suggestions of assignments that align with stated learning objectives. Your suggestion of a checklist is brilliant! I also noticed that they linked to their Institutional Assessment page from this page - a nice reminder that everything needs to be in alignment at every level.

Susan, Great find, I too find the tabs really helpful and have bookmarked this reference to my Bookmarks page so that I can refer to it over and over. Thanks so much!

I liked the article in this week's reading on creating an interactive syllabus and found this article about how writing students contributed to an interactive course syllabus. This resonated with me since I teaching writing courses.

This page is actually a brief (but helpful and concise) overview of the use of rubrics. The main reason I am posting it here is because the entire site (Cornell University Center for Teaching Excellence) has a wealth of information on design, assessment, student engagement and using technology in the classroom.

Similar to the triad of education model...this model explains how a "student" teacher transitions to become an experienced teacher with the assistance of a 'co-operative' teacher and 'university' supervisor. The article also explains the areas which need further research to strengthen the model and its application in practice.

In brief, the study shows that yes online teaching is time consuming but NOT because of the technology involved but because it is a great time investment to interact with all students. Again brings me back to my point that YES online teaching helps to 'individualize/personalize' the student learning process. Therefore, requires greater inputs and personalize mentoring than a traditional classroom engagement.

Tinto, V. (2003). Learning better together: The impact of learning communities on student success. Higher Education monograph series, 1(8). The theme for M5 is "community, presence and interactions." This piece by Tinto is a pretty quick read and although it doesn't address online learning in particular, I thought it was appropriate as it emphasizes the idea that it takes a community of learners to make effective learning happen. He discusses 3 things all learning communities have in common: shared knowledge, shared knowing and shared responsibility (which really struck me as we start our group project).

As we move into different modalities, it is nice to remember that our students will arrive in our classroom familiar with these technologies. As the use of on-line tools increase in public education, our students will arrive with a baseline comfort level with the google tools, which still remain robust for many activities. These graphics really bring this home.

http://www.educatorstechnology.com/2014/06/handy-google-hangout-cheat-sheet-for.html This is a cheat sheet for the Google Hangout...