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Andrew Barras

News: The Thinking LMS - Inside Higher Ed - 0 views

www.insidehighered.com/...phoenix

education technology LMS profound learning2.0 nell

shared by Andrew Barras on 18 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • What can colleges learn from Facebook?
  • Where Facebook has shown unique value is as a data-gathering tool. Never has a website been able to learn so much about its users. And that is where higher education should be taking notes, said Angie McQuaig, director of data innovation at the University of Phoenix, at the 2010 Educause conference on Friday.
  • If Facebook can use analytics to revolutionize advertising in the Web era, McQuaig suggested, colleges can use the same principles to revolutionize online learning.
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  • The trick, she said, is individualization.
  • The most successful commercial websites are already moving in this direction, and higher education — which itself is growing increasingly Web-based — needs to catch up, McQuaig said. “What we really need to do now is deeply understand our learners,” she said.
  • This is where the University of Phoenix is headed with its online learning platform. In an effort ambitiously dubbed the "Learning Genome Project,” the for-profit powerhouse says it is building a new learning interface that gets to know each of its 400,000 students personally and adapts to accommodate the idiosyncrasies of their “learning DNA.”
  • “[Each student] comes to us with a set of learning modality preferences,” McQuaig said. The online learning platform Phoenix wants to build, she said, “reject[s] the one-size-fits-all model of presenting content online.” In the age of online education and the personal Web, the standardized curriculum is marked for extinction, McQuaig said; data analytics are going to kill it.
  • Phoenix is certainly not the only institution focusing on how data logged by learning management systems can be used to improve learning.
  • envoys from the South Orange Community College District had unveiled a project called Sherpa, which uses information about students to recommend courses and services. McQuaig said Phoenix has been in conversations with a number of universities that are working toward similar learner-centered online platforms.
  • In any case, she said, it will be expensive to make.
  • But that is where online education, and the Internet as a whole, is headed, McQuaig said.
  • Andrew Barras on 18 Oct 10
     
    Very cool article. Shows how personalization will arise in Higher Ed
Andrew Barras

News: The Rise of the 'Edupunk' - Inside Higher Ed - 0 views

www.insidehighered.com/...cref

education highered edupunk nell

shared by Andrew Barras on 09 Nov 10 - No Cached
  • Those in higher education who continue hand-wringing over the relative merits of online learning and other technology-driven platforms will soon find themselves left in the dust of an up-and-coming generation of students who are seeking knowledge outside academe. Such was an emerging consensus view here Monday, as college leaders gathered for the TIAA-CREF Institute's 2010 Higher Education Leadership Conference.
  • “We're still trying to fit the Web into our educational paradigm.… I just don't think that's going to work,” said Mary Spilde, president of Lane Community College, in Eugene, Ore.
  • several panelists alluded here to the possibility that if colleges don't change the way they do business, then students will change the way colleges do business.
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  • College leaders don't yet know how to credential the knowledge students are gaining on their own, but they may soon have to
  • While the concept of a self-educated citizenry circumventing the traditional system of higher education may have sounded far-fetched a decade ago, the fact that the likes of Spilde gave it more than lip service marks something of a shift. Indeed, there was more than a subtle suggestion across hours of sessions Monday that colleges are in for a new world, like it or not, where they may not be the winners.
  • Andrew Barras on 09 Nov 10
     
    Panel about Edupunks
Kelly Purdy

Blog U.: Student Affairs and Technology - Inside Higher Ed - 1 views

www.insidehighered.com/...student_affairs_and_technology

Student Affairs and Technology

shared by Kelly Purdy on 01 Sep 10 - Cached
  • Most of our students are not on Twitter. In fact, most people are not on Twitter. Do these statements dissuade me from promoting the use of Twitter when I speak at conferences? Not at all. Twitter is an amazing communication and engagement tool. I am frequently on Twitter asking questions, sharing information, and networking with other higher education professionals. Web-based microblogging is an exceptionally powerful medium.
  • ow many people are following your account. In fact, when it comes to prospective students, I would posit that followers, while an interesting metric, are not all that important. Twitter is like a tuning fork for student opinions, feedback, and observation. Using targeted Twitter search queries, an admissions officer can find out quite a bit of information.
  • Kelly Purdy on 01 Sep 10
     
    Hello
Andrew Barras

The Ed Tech Journey and a Future Driven by Disruptive Change -- Campus Technology - 0 views

campustechnology.com/...iven-by-Disruptive-Change.aspx

education technology disruptive nell

shared by Andrew Barras on 14 Sep 10 - No Cached
  • What is “disruptive change”?
  • On April 28, 2003, Apple launched the iTunes Music Store, and on April 3, 2008, less than five years later, it became the largest music retailer in the US, with 50 million customers and 4 billion songs sold. Then about two years down the road, this past February, Apple more than doubled that sales figure to 10 billion songs. This is what I consider to be disruptive change.
  • As educators, we must ask: Could there be a parallel in our own industry, or the potential for other disruptive changes ahead? What might higher education look like in a future filled with disruptive change?
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  • a quick historical review of the digital revolution shows us: huge increases in data speeds and transfer rates, exponential growth in computer power, massive increase of storage capacity—again, all while the technology is getting cheaper and smaller.
  • In a 1960s lecture hall you might typically find TV monitors
  • Then if you jump 30 years into the future, to the 1990s, you find that analog technology was replaced by digital technology: projection systems that were considered very, very sophisticated at that time.
  • ask yourself: What did not change? The instructors still lectured, delivering in a broadcast/absorb model the very same way they did in the 1960s. In terms of learning, this was just a little bit of a shift. While the digital revolution disrupted so much of our society and our lives, it impacted education only in small, incremental ways. And generally, that is still true today in 2010.
  • I often make the argument that over the past 50 years, we’ve been primarily focused on automating education
  • but we haven’t really geared up to change or transform the basic way we’re teaching
  • Open Education Trends
  • At the core of the open content movement in higher education are illustrious efforts that have been going on now for almost a decade, to make high-quality university-level course materials free and openly available to the world, via the web.
  • Connexions has focused on building an environment that allows experts to collaborate on developing textbook content.
  • People have raised questions about the sustainability of open content models.
  • But what we’re starting to see now—and it is still relatively early in the unfolding story of open content—is a commercial ecosystem beginning to grow up around existing open content.
  • Impact of Open Content
  • We’re on the verge of seeing the cost of education content fall dramatically. The $150, $200 textbook model, I believe, is simply unsustainable, and we are going to see that model fall apart in the not-too-distant future.
  • I also think we may see an important movement toward best-of-breed content.
  • For example, I might put out a particular piece of educational material. Someone may take that material, modify or tweak it, and bring his own innovation to it. Over a relatively short period of time, we end up with high-quality, innovative, best-of-breed materials.
  • We’re entering an age when it’s becoming more and more ridiculous that our faculty are, every year, re-creating Econ 101 over and over again at our institutions.
  • largest population of users of MIT/OCW materials are not educators, and they’re not students. They are self-directed learners. They’re people who are coming to MIT because they have a passion to learn something.
  • Personal and Open Learning
  • Let’s move on and look at learning technology trends, especially the emergence of the personal learning environment [PLE] and the open learning network [OLN], e-portfolios, and the semantic web.
  • you’re probably aware of the “post-LMS era” that people feel we’re entering.
  • I have yet to find a standard definition of the PLE, but some of its characteristics include that it tends to be a highly customized environment, built by the learner himself.
  • Learners use web 2.0 tools to aggregate content and connections—so you can gather information from many sources, while at the same time making connections with other people around that content.
  • we see that while the LMS has been out there and in development for 10-20 years or so, it has really been built just to support status quo teaching—lecturing and very traditional forms of education—while personal learning environments like mine tend to be much more open and participatory, as well as learner-centric.
  • The question becomes: Will the LMS and the PLE diverge?
  • The idea here is to leverage some of the open standards that are emerging—the IMS Common Cartridge and Learning Tools Interoperability standards, plus standards outside of education like the open social API standards from Google—and to use these standards to allow us to mash up the LMS and personal learning environment.
  • Next, electronic portfolios: Since 2003, the use of e-portfolios on our campuses has tripled.
  • Reflection is a critical component of any really good e-portfolio implementation; it’s a great way for students to engage in learning.
  • A missing piece, I would argue, especially on the reflective side of e-porfolios, is a credentialing model. A new credentialing model will open the doors for better uses of e-portfolios, and possibly unlock the floodgates of disruption in fundamental education practices.
  • Andrew Barras on 14 Sep 10
     
    Great article about disruptive change in education!
Andrew Barras

News: Mixing Work and Play on Facebook - Inside Higher Ed - 0 views

www.insidehighered.com/...facebook

education technology highered nell

shared by Andrew Barras on 06 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • Mixable, is positioned as an e-learning environment that empowers students, and can be used as a little study room and course library inside Facebook.
  • Drawing on course registration data, Mixable invites students in virtual rooms with classmates in each of their courses. Once there, it lets them post and start comment threads about links, files, and other materials that might be relevant to the course — or not. The point is, there is no administrative authority determining what should (or must) be posted or discussed, and students are free to abstain from participating — just like on Facebook. Professors can join in, but they don’t run the show. And students can choose to make posts viewable by some classmates and not others. “In essence, the conversation is owned by the student,” says Kyle Bowen, the director of informatics at Purdue.
  • Purdue CIO Gerry McCartney says it made sense to position it as an application within Facebook. He cites the quote attributed to the bank robber Willie Sutton who, asked why he robbed banks, said "because that’s where the money is." Says McCartney: “So why go to Facebook? Because that’s where the students are.”
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  • In short, it is a learning-management system — though not the kind that is likely to supplant existing learning-management systems, its creators say. Mixable is a different breed: more an optional study group than a classroom.
  • Andrew Barras on 06 Oct 10
     
    Mixing Facebook and the SIS
chris deason

Second Life Education - Virtual Meetings, Events, Training, Prototyping, Simulation, an... - 1 views

education.secondlife.com

education secondlife web2.0 virtual virtualworlds sl virtual worlds second

shared by chris deason on 30 Oct 10 - Cached
  • chris deason on 30 Oct 10
     
    Economic pressures from budget cuts and the rising cost of education continue to mount. While students are forced to pay higher tuition fees, share resources, and even drop classes, educators are obligated to creatively "do more with less" by designing curricula that accommodates economic constraints. For forward-thinking learning institutions committed to the cost-effective employment of emerging technologies for communication, collaboration and learning, Second Life supports and amplifies the ongoing mission to deliver world class education.
Andrew Barras

A 'Stealth Assessment' Turns to Video Games to Measure Thinking Skills - Technology - T... - 0 views

chronicle.com/...125276

education assessment games

shared by Andrew Barras on 12 Nov 10 - No Cached
  • Colleges no longer simply want to know what their students know, but how they think.
  • Higher-order thinking skills are "something that schools are paying a little bit more attention to these days," says Jeffrey Steedle, a measurement scientist at the Council for Aid to Education, whose Collegiate Learning Assessment essays are used at several hundred colleges to test students' abilities to synthesize arguments and write persuasively. "It's largely in response to the recognition that these skills are needed to be competitive in the global marketplace."
  • But educators also say that paper-and-pencil examinations have limits—for one thing, knowing that you are being tested can drag down performance—and they are looking for new methods to measure skills like critical thinking, creativity, and persistence.
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  • Valerie J. Shute, an associate professor of educational psychology and learning systems at Florida State University, believes she has a solution in "stealth assessment"—the administering of tests without students' knowing.
  • To do that, Ms. Shute and other stealth-assessment researchers have turned to video games, which let educators watch students solve complex tasks while immersed in virtual worlds.
  • "Everybody likes to play," she says. "And so much could be done using games."
  • Andrew Barras on 12 Nov 10
     
    Great article about using video games to assess students
Andrew Barras

Why We Switched to Sakai -- Campus Technology - 0 views

campustechnology.com/...Why-We-Switched-to-Sakai.aspx

education technology LMS nell

shared by Andrew Barras on 13 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • Pepperdine University has made the decision to adopt Sakai as the single, university-wide learning management system (LMS), effective Jan. 1, 2011.
  • because of the significant cost savings that will accrue as a result of this adoption, our decision highlights an approach for proactively dealing with the economic uncertainty arising from the "new normal" that now affects all higher education institutions.
  • Although the LMS often comprises the "third rail" of our technology services, a very large majority of our faculty and students not only support this change, but are applauding it.
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  • Five findings led to our decision:
  • Our research suggests that the potential of the LMS to transform teaching and learning is diminishing quickly. While the LMS is vitally important, in the same sense that commodity services such as e-mail, bandwidth, and disk storage are, the LMS by itself can no longer be considered strategic. Rather, it is the mash-up of different types of collaborative technologies, such as blogs, tweets, wikis, social networking sites, online media, and document sharing systems, together with the LMS, that appears to have the greater potential to transform our technology and learning practices.
  • The LMS is important, but is no longer transformative
  • Students prefer Sakai
  • As a part of our planning process, beginning in the summer of 2009, Pepperdine began running Sakai in parallel with our existing LMS.
  • Greater numbers of student respondents preferred Sakai over our current LMS when comparing the following features: announcements, assignments, gradebooks, resources (course materials), forums, calendars, quizzes and tests, dropboxes, and blogs.
  • So do our faculty
  • Faculty respondents preferred Sakai to our current LMS when comparing the following features: assignments, gradebooks, resources (course materials), forums, calendars, and dropboxes.
  • Our IT staff members find Sakai much easier to support
  • Overall, our IT staff finds that supporting Sakai is a remarkable improvement over our current LMS.
  • The financial savings is equivalent to the salaries of two faculty members
  • Our planning process involved the participation of hundreds of faculty and students, required presentations at dozens of meetings, and necessitated buy-in from our faculty and approval by the provost and deans. Serving as a change advocate regarding the effective delivery and use of technology, particularly in the technology and learning space, is an increasingly important role for our IT organization.
  • My words of advice for other IT leaders contemplating similar initiatives include the following:
  • Don't shy away from this type of challenge: Lead
  • Let faculty be your advocates
  • Use data to break the ice with difficult change initiatives
  • resistance to LMS change efforts is often based on closely held myths that sometimes fall apart under scrutiny. Properly used benchmarks and other measures are effective tools in any change initiative.
  • Andrew Barras on 13 Oct 10
     
    Good article about changing LMS technologies
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