Emory College Strategies for Online Teaching

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

Assessments should reveal how well students have learned what we want them to learn while instruction ensures that they learn it. For this to occur, assessments, learning objectives, and instructional strategies need to be closely aligned so that they reinforce one another.

This is a provocative article (even more enjoyable reading the blogs concerning it) regarding faculty online "public presence". I know I am struggling with privacy versus connection in trying to establish an online presence.

Depth of Knowledge Levels

Leah, This is a great visual aid for those who need a quick reminder with constructing measurable objectives. Thanks for the connection.

Includes a map of modules and 9 key changes made when using a heutagogical approach to prepare new teachers for the self-determined lifelong learning essential for the real 21st century world.

Michael Morgenstern for The Chronicle of Higher Education. Talks about the changes occurring with E-Reading.

This was linked to from the Authentic Assessment website and looks like a treasure trove of useful assessment tools and rubrics for InfoLit. Page was last updated in March of this year too, so it's not likely to be full of broken links.

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.

Rodney Murray discusses trends in eLearning and technology. Parallels some of what we have been discussing in class.

Interesting article from the Chronicle of Higher Education that deals with the lack of proper research skills of college graduates as they engage the internet.

This article talks about the challenges of online courses that go global and not taking into consideration the politics involved.

This article talks about using the ADDIE model to design a one-shot library session. Since that is what I do, I may have to take another look at ADDIE.

Chart-Form of Instructional design theories, theorists, models, etc.

As we begin our peer assessment, this article from Troy who has used the Quality Matters rubric in their assessment of online courses gives great tips and tidbits for further improvement

I have not yet purchased this ebook, but I'm considering it. The author is well-known in the edtech and online/blended learning community.

The Sloan-C 2013 International Conference on Online Learning Proceedings provides interesting research and ideas for online learning, teaching and evaluation.