GlobalSkillsCC

Videos of the Learning Design Support Environment and the Online Pedagogical Pattern Data Collector on Vimeo

By Lloyd Armstrong on his blog Changing Higher Education, May 23 2011. Announcement of a new Gates Foundation grant to aggregate data from several large post-secondary systems that are members of WICHE (Western Interstate Commission for Higher Ed) in order to get a better picture of outcome data.

Positive outcomes have been reported for university preparation courses for students without disabilities. Little is known about whether these courses can offer the same benefit to students with learning disabilities and whether the inclusion of psychosocial factors, in addition to academic skills, would benefit both groups.

By Richard Schwier, Proceedings of EMEDIA 2009, Association for the Advancement of Computers in Education, June 2009. Schwier works out of the Virtual Learning Communities Research Laboratory at the University of Saskatchewan, and this paper looks at some of their key findings.

Professor of Educational Technology and Design at the University of Saskatchewan. Schwier does a lot of work on virtual learning communities (vlc).

In addition to bookmarking the home page of this site (follow tag: wep), I have bookmarked the About page where James Gee welcomes users and explains his vision for worked examples.

This site (currently in Beta) was founded by James Gee and is essentially a database of in-progress projects, begging for feedback/interaction/collaboration with and by others. For more on the site, click through or follow the wep tag to see the About page.

By L. Kupczynski, P. Ice, R. Wiesenmayer, and F. McCluskey in Journal of Interactive Online Learning, vol 9 (1), Spring 2010, pp. 23-43. Based in the Community of Inquiry Framework, this paper looks at the interactions between teaching, social and cognitive presence in the online learning experience.

By Tom Bissonette in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Commentary, August 14, 2011. The author brings attention to the fact that many students enter college with a variety of developmental issues and that these are not properly addressed. Faculty members are often lacking pedagogical education and knowledge of human development. The author argues for assessment of incoming students in several areas, including academic ability, social skills, study skills, vocabulary, general knowledge, work history, and community involvement. Results of these assessments would be used to identify appropriate support. The author believes that the concept of retention is misguided. When faculty and administration partner with students on the front end, the odds decrease that students will be unable to persist.

J.E.C. mentioned article in Summer 2011 Coffee Klatch

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.

This is a Universal Design for Learning project built by CAST, a nonprofit R&D organization that uses Universal Design for Learning as a tool to improve learning opportunities for all individuals, including those with disabilities (originally Center for Applied Special Technology). See the Featured Tools on the home page for some interesting "highly supported" digital tools.

Presented by Innovation in Teaching and Leaning for Technological Innovation at Nashville State Community College. The premise of this project is that a course is linked with a local business and the students work directly with business partners to solve "real-world problems." The site offers background on problem-based and case-based learning, as well as tools to help an instructor connect with a business and frame his/her course.

The website's tag line is "songs for teaching, learning & fun." Created, in part, with an NSF grant, the site's founders are interested in studying the "usefulness of music in science and math education." The searchable database is great, and the blog is interesting -- conferences and other updates on topics of interest to those interested in the intersection of music and education.

By Paul G. West and Lorraine Victor, prepared for The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, May 2011. This paper appears to be an excellent resource for collections of OER, both in the US and around the world.

Published by the University of Nottingham (UK). This site is a "continually updated collection of peer-reviewed academic development resources...[ranging from] "2-5 minute videos [to] 500-1000 word texts...." There are a variety of entry points to access the materials, ranging from discipline areas (on this page) to themes (see Teaching & Learning themes at the top). I also like the Guest editor block (this page, lower left), where a faculty member writes a brief editorial and selects resources of interest.

By Thomas Bailey, Dong Wook Jeong and Sung-Woo Cho, Community College Research Center, Teachers College, Columbia University in Economics of Education Review, Volume 29, Issue 2, April 2010, Pages 255-270. "The purpose of this paper is to analyze the patterns and determinants of student progression through sequences of developmental education starting from initial referral. Our results indicate that fewer than one half of the students who are referred to remediation actually complete the entire sequence to which they are referred..."

For GSCC faculty, there is a copy of this article available in Coffee Klatch

By Ryan Brown in the Community Colleges section of The Chronicle of Higher Education, July 18 2011. The article reports on a recent CCRC study of 51,000 community college students in Washington State between 2004 and 2009. In 2010, CCRC released a similar study looking at online learning in the Virginia community college system. Reasons for this gap are surmised to be "technical difficulties, a lack of structure, and isolation."

Produced by the Commonwealth of Australia, (c) 2008 (with regular updates). This site provides a repository of subject-area toolboxes which can be further customized as needed.

By Debbie Garber, The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, vol 5 (2), August 2004. This paper goes beyond technology to look at "the social process on which an online learning community if it is to flourish and be useful." Also stresses "importance of nurturing the community's health, and the natural life cycle of a virtual community...."

WHEN a college textbook, "Principles of Biology," comes out from the Nature Publishing Group in January, one place it won't be is on the shelves of school bookstores. Enlarge This Image An interactive graphic in "Principles of Biology," an electronic textbook from Nature Publishing, teaches students about the symptoms of a stroke. Enlarge This Image An interactive graphic from Wolfram Research lets readers change the display parameters of an oil spill. That's because the book was designed to be digital-only. Students will pay not for a printed edition at a bookstore, but for permanent access on the Internet ($49).