Group items tagged

Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching. This resource hosts communities for members to contribute and share learning and teaching materials. The communities are categorized by higher education disciplines. In addition to contributing materials, members can comment about outside learning materials that are used, share information about themselves and knowledge about their discipline, put together personal collections to use in the classroom and become a Peer Reviewer of learning materials in member's discipline. In addition to discipline communities, there is the Community of MERLOT Partner Academic Support Services (COMPASS). This community is made up of ePortfolio, Faculty Development, Library and Information Services, Online Courses and Pedagogy. The ePortflio Portal centers educational resources around ePortfolio use in higher education, among students and faculty. Partner Communities like GLOBE extend the MERLOT network. The Global Learning Objects Brokered Exchange (GLOBE) alliance was established between ARIADNE Foundation in Europe, Education Services Austrailia, LORNET in Canada, National Institute of Multimedia Education (NIME) in Japan and MERLOT with the goal to "work collaboratively on a shared vision of ubiquitous access to quality educational content." The majority of MERLOT members are faculty/instructors and the balance are students, campus administrators, librarians and other members of higher education who are concerned with online learning materials, technology, teaching and learning, and innovation.

Presented on P2PU (Peer 2 Peer University), "a grassroots open education project," this new course on online, self-directed learning is being presented by Anya Kamenetz. In this particular course, participants are directed through the processes of writing a personal learning plan, building a personal learning network, and finding a mentor, all while sharing the process with their fellow learners. Unlike many of the other P2PU courses (which have a more topical focus), this is open to those who want to learn on any subject.

The Learning Network Blog on NYTimes.com. For two years, students, teachers, parents and others have posted and commented on this blog. Daily lessons for subjects across curriculum based on Times content are offered. Suggestions are given for using the The Learning Network posts in the classroom. The Learning Network is accessible without a digital subscription, as are the articles linked from Learning Network posts.

"Abstract The use of design patterns is now well established as an approach within the field of software systems as well as within the field of architecture. An initial effort was made to harness patterns as a tool for elaborating the design of the elements of personal learning environments as part of the University of Bolton's Personal Learning Environment project; however, this earlier effort had a number of limitations that prompted a revisit to the pattern language documented here. In particular, the initial patterns, while functionally useful, lacked some of the moral and generative qualities that are the essential qualities of an effective pattern language. This paper presents a revised pattern language focused around two primary categories, learning networks, and personal learning tools."

Posted by Shelley Wright, on the website Powerful Learning Practice: Professional Development for 21st Century Educators, Oct 8 2012. In this post, Wright describes how she no longer adheres to the model of the "flipped"classroom because she has learned to fully use student-centered and project-based learning models. She carefully describes the differences between the two, as well as giving an overview of how -- at semester's end -- her chemistry students learned 10 new concepts in 8 weeks.

By Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, University of Chicago Press, 2011. The authors argue that students learn very little as undergraduates at most colleges and that, often, "an institutional culture...puts undergraduate learning close to the bottom of the priority list."

JN uses a summary of this book and it's follow-up study with her students, to help them to think critically and to understand that learning is supposed to be hard and to manage their expectations about good grades.

"Learning is at the center of higher education. It is an essential part of the mission of all colleges and universities. The EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) is a community of higher education institutions and organizations committed to advancing learning through information technology (IT) innovation. ELI is a strategic initiative of EDUCAUSE. While EDUCAUSE serves those interested in advancing higher education through technology, ELI specifically explores innovative technologies and practices that advance learning. As these innovations mature, ELI works with the larger EDUCAUSE community to integrate them into the higher education mainstream."

By Evan Weissman, Dan Cullinan, Oscar Cerna, Stephanie Safran and Phoebe Richman, with Amanda Grossman. National Center for Postsecondary Research (NCPR) Teachers College Columbia University. February 2012. Link to full report at the bottom of the summary on this page. The colleges in this study are two of six in the NCPR Learning Communities Demonstration, in which random assignment evaluations are being used to determine the impacts of learning communities on student success. NCPR has presented finding from all six colleges. They show that when one-semester learning communities have impacts, they tend to be concentrated in the semester in which students are enrolled in the program. Another report, a final one will be released in 2012. That report synthesizes the findings across all colleges studied and includes an additional semester of student follow-up at each college.

Contents of eLearning Papers No 27, published by elearingeuropa.info December 2011. This collection of 6 papers (plus an editorial) focus primarily on how technology has (or has not) impacted learning design. Full text of all articles is available here, along with a PDF of the print version.

Familiar terms in some of the article titles, including patterns, students as learning designers, invitational online learning environments, and "blended collaborative construction participation."

This explanation, from (channel) Thirteen/Ed Online, defines collaborative learning as the larger category of students learning in groups. Cooperative learning, a subset, is where students are in small groups, working together on structured activities. Work is assessed both individually and as a group.

Excerpted from Biehler/Snowman, Psychology Applied to Teaching, 8th ed., 1997, this page is part of Houghton-Mifflin's Project-Based Learning Space. This review of cooperative learning resources looks at the models of the Johnson Brothers, Slavin, and Sharan & Sharan, comparing and contrasting each. This page includes resources, results, and methods for using cooperative learning in the classroom.

Originally bookmarked by Brenda. By Terry Anderson. Chapter 2 of The theory and practice of online learning, ed Terry Anderson, published by Athabasca University, 2E, 2008. In this chapter, Anderson looks at learning theories generally, in order to look at and develop more useful theories of online learning.

Site dedicated to teaching and learning with digital media, from faculty, librarians, students and staff at New School. Tool Kit suggests resources for different areas of digital learning.

D.W. mentioned in Coffee Klatch, April 2011.

Posted by Tony Bates to his blog on August 1, 2011. Bates, who runs a consultancy to teach about e-learning, argues that online learning is ever more important in post-secondary education (he writes from Canada, but his statistics are for all of North America), but that most post-secondary teachers have been trained very little in pedagogy and "teaching" at all, less so in online teaching and learning. He seeks comments and feedback to his argument.

By Josh Fischman, and part of The Chronicle (of Higher Education's) 2011 Special Report on Online Learning, published Nov 6 2011. Central Piedmont Community College developed an Online Student Portal learning system to improve retention among its students. They have had success with the system (in use 2004-2008). Now, with a Next Gen grant, they will roll the system out to 6 additional local schools to see if they can match the retention improvements. The system is based both on learning styles and on frequent intervention by students and counselors.

By Professor Terry Doyle, Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning, Ferris State University. No date.

TO'C (week 3, semester 3) used this presentation with her students to generate conversation on their feelings about/experiences of deep learning.

Presented by the Center for Teaching at Vanderbilt University, this guide provides excellent resources to a wide range of cooperative learning publications, from a guide (Students Working in Small Groups) to key articles on the topic. There are two case studies, provided by instructors who have adopted some cooperative learning practices in the classroom.

By Khairil Imran Ghauth and Nor Aniza Abdullah in Australasian Journal of Educational Technology 2010, 26(6), 764-774. From the abstract, "we propose a new e-learning recommender system framework that uses content-based filtering and good learners' ratings to recommend learning materials, and in turn is able to increase the student's performance."

By Claire E. Weinstein, published in Handbook of College Teaching: Theory and Applications, ed. by Keith W. Prichard, R. Mclaran Sawyer. Greenwood Press, 1994. This is an excerpt of Weinstein's article. Her basic premise is that developmental ed students often must learn how to learn. Full chapter can be purchased from this link. The book might be available in your college library, or via interlibrary loan.

From the Learning Theories Knowledgebase at Learning-Theories.com, n.d. This page presents brief entries on Social Development Theory (Vygotsky) and Communities of Practice (Lave and Wenger), with links to further details for each.