Group items tagged

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.

The centrality of teaching actively comes up a lot. All is not lost! Teaching presence is the key to social and cognitive presences.

This study affirms the need to attend to individual differences among learners. Whatever technologies we use or approaches we take, we need to keep in mind that there will be significant variation in how students use all these components of the course. Aim too low and we lose the top to boredom. Aim too low and we lose the bottom to confusion. I think this means we need to be reactive and be ready to alter plans and methods as needed. Leah demonstrated this when she made the group project optional.

Universal Design in the ESL classroom

I like this list, Jane, though I feel the author Kregg Strehorn could have elaborated on some of the suggestions to explain more clearly what is meant and what a particular method entails. Maybe there was a strict word limit to which Strehorn had to adhere. In any case, some of the ideas are very interesting but also seem to be very time-consuming and potentially confusing. Don't get me wrong, I think it's wonderful that Stehorn reads and records some of the texts they are using in the class, reads and records and transcribes lectures, gives students different assignment choices, writes detailed class outlines and shares them with students, etc. All of these ideas make sense to me, but how do you have time as a teacher (and in my/our case instructor and full-time staff member) to do all that, unless you teach the same course over and over again? I am a great supporter and believer in universal design; plus, online classes in particular are, almost by nature, using a range of tools, thus serving students with different needs. Yet, Strehorn should discuss the amount of work involved in creating this course and should also address students' responses to this course as well as potential pitfalls in terms of student assessment. Perhaps Strehorn has done so in a different place.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Michelle Pacansky-Brock's book

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.

Stumbled on this as I'm trying to find a way to develop an online simulated lab experience this week. It may be geared more for science and math

Since 1948 we have helped millions of students who are blind, dyslexic or have other learning disabilities achieve confidence and independence in the classroom and in life. More about our mission We work with our partners to raise awareness of learning differences.

When I was a graduate student, I volunteered with this organization (formerly known as Recording for the Blind and Dyslexic). I read fiction books and textbooks, recording in a booth on my own or with a director. Volunteers completed training to learn how to cue the audio reader to turn book pages, to transition between text and pictures or figures, and to indicate punctuations (ellipsis, quotations, subscript/superscripts, etc.). The experience helped me to improve the use of my voice in communicating to learners and the ways to chunk the information appropriate for visually impaired and dyslexic learners. As Learning Ally, the organization now offers professional development for teachers to help them with utilizing the wide range of audiobooks in their collection.

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.

This report offers some observations on the use of multimedia resources in online courses. The focus is more on course development (both time investment and quality of materials produced) than on student experience or learning outcomes, but this can still be a valuable tool for instructors thinking about whether (and how) to use multimedia in their online course designs.

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.

Learning Contract Study and Undergraduate Students Policy Empire State College is committed to the principles that: effective learning derives from purposes and needs important to the individual learning occurs in varied ways and places styles of learning may differ significantly from person to person and from one setting to another.

May 2015 - Published by and with the support of: International Council for Open and Distance Education - ICDE Lilleakerveien 23, 0283 Oslo, Norway icde@icde.org www.icde.org Complete report, Executive summary and Appendices: http://icde.typepad.com/quality_models/