Tue, 19 Aug 2014 14:43:00 By: Salman Khan Join the #YouCanLearnAnything movement My 5-year-­old son has just started reading. Every night, we lie on his bed and he reads a short book to me. Inevitably, he'll hit a word that he has trouble with: last night the word was "gratefully."

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

This article addresses barriers to the accessibility of information from state health department websites (rapidly becoming go-to resources for people and practitioners) across 4 dimensions: readability, disability access, non-English translation and privacy / security. The authors state, "These results raise fundamental issues of justice and equality in public health...In the meantime, inaccessible websites hurt the underprivileged and make it difficult to justify the investment in technology that has occurred in state governments...." I thought there was something for everyone in our cohort here.

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.

MERLOT is a CoI revolving around technology and learning objects. It is a repository of learning objects that can be accessed and used. The objects are grouped according to subject / content, and they are peer-reviewed. This is an excellent resource with something for everyone. (My personal favorite object - the "eye simulator," which demonstrates the actions of the 6 extrinsic muscles of the eye and lets you "paralyze" muscles specifically to examine the effect on eye movement - completely cool!) There is also a wealth of other information on their site (sorry - within their community :) Best of all - all the resources at MERLOT are free.

This is a pretty short, not-too-challenging read with some good ideas and strategies for having teachers (K-12, but certainly could be extended to include higher ed instructors) incorporate more resources into their classrooms and learning environments. The article is from 2002, but the strategies still seem sound.

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.

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).

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.

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 Blog about Open and Online Education (by Debbie Morrison) I really liked her entry, Start Here, because it discussed the PROS and CONS of some of the various instructional models presented in other resources. She made the connection between design and higher education - much of what I've been seeing relates to training in a corporate or business setting. I can more easily see how to use these models as tools to build my course now.

Faculty learning communities provide their members with both information and support as they move toward utilizing digital technology tools, learn new skills, and share meaningful instructional practices... This is off-topic for M3 , but it occur to me that we have established a learning community among ourselves with the above goals.

McLaughlin, Jacqueline E. PhD, MS; Roth, Mary T. PharmD, MHS; Glatt, Dylan M.; Gharkholonarehe, Nastaran PharmD; Davidson, Christopher A. ME; Griffin, LaToya M. PhD; Esserman, Denise A. PhD; Mumper, Russell J. PhD In recent years, colleges and universities in the United States have faced considerable scrutiny for their apparent failure to adequately educate students.

I read this article and found it to be enormously interesting and enlightening. The course coordinator was a seasoned veteran; there were numerous resources dedicated to this venture (full time graduate TAs, dedicated IT personnel) and yet the authors report that the coordinator still required 127% more time to prepare the online components of this course. I also noticed that many of the active learning strategies discussed (think-pair-share, as an example) are things that could easily be incorporated into a non-flipped classroom.

Several professors at UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy have embraced the flipped classroom model. View this video to see The Flipped Classroom: Innovations in Teaching and Learning in action by all of the divisions in the school.

This goes to the UNC Eshelman SOP site and there are a lot of interesting, practical links here. I thought it was very useful and I hope even those of you who are teaching less science-based content will find it helpful.