Gwenna Moss Centre for Teaching Effectiveness

"The Wikipedia Education Program's vision is to mobilize and empower the next generation of human-knowledge generators to contribute to Wikimedia projects. Based on the learnings from the Public Policy Initiative, a pilot program to use Wikipedia in university classrooms in the 2010-11 academic year, the Wikipedia Education Program strives to expand Wikipedia's use as a teaching tool worldwide. Professors who participate in our program assign their students to edit Wikipedia articles as part of their coursework. Students are assisted by trained Wikipedia Ambassadors, who help both in the class and on wiki. You can get a quick introduction to how the program is structured at Wikipedia Education Program/A-Z. Additional resources are available at the Education portal."

Not shocking, but still interesting. Still, as pointed in this post, there is a place for technology in the classroom "If you're worried that your students or children are eroding their vocabulary due to texting, you may want to sit down. Thanks to a new study in New Media & Society, it appears that students who text on a frequent basis perform worse on grammar tests."

"Hashtag is a great way for users to locate and keep track of particular information within the massive tweets. Know the topic you are interested in and look for its corresponding hashtag and try to continually check it for updates. This is the established way Twitter experts use to fish for new updates in their fields of interest."

"The traditional lecture may have been an efficient format for transferring information 100 years ago, but it's no longer practical in an era of exploding medical knowledge, says Dr. David Snadden, executive associate dean of education for the faculty of medicine at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. "We've actually reached a stage where we can't fit [in] all the curriculum. It's just not possible." "The thing that's becoming really critical for us is helping our students understand how to manage information, access and sift information" as they'll need to do as practising physicians, he adds. Shifting course material onto the Internet offers a solution to both these challenges, Snadden says. In addition to freeing class time for more active learning, the model allows students to control the pace of their learning and "skip the things that don't seem relevant or that they already know." 

"Until this week I had not known that George Washington (the President, not the institution) had considered the foundation of a national university to be of the utmost importance. In fact, he had meant to give it a starring role in his Farewell Address, and complained at length when Hamilton excised it from the work. Here's Washington to Hamilton on why the university merited mention in the address:"

The is a quick online tool to determine the "readability" of your written content. You simply paste in some text and it gives you an indication of how many years of formal education would be needed to be able to understand the reading. This tool is helpful when designing your course content. For example, if you paste in text for a first year course and get a reading level of 16 years of education on the Gunning Fog index; then you should try to state your content more simply. You don't need to "dumb down" the content, but rather re-state it.

"This site is designed to answer the question being asked: What does a high quality online course look like? It is ourhope that instructors and instructional designers will use this site to learn more about the Rubric for Online Instruction, and be able to view examples of exemplary courses that instructors have done in implementing the different components of the rubric."

Article that explains how an instructor is "Crowd-sourcing" the evaluation of his course. Students determine what grade level they are aiming for based on criteria and then having the other students in the course determining if the work is satisfactory or not. If all work completed is satisfactory, the student will receive the grade in the grade level they chose.

Examples, 6 steps outlined, definitions, types and more from the POD Network

An article in EDUCAUSE by Randy Bass. The article is about how the formal curriculum is being disrupted as "high-impact educational practices" and "the experiential co-curriculum" move from the margins of higher education into common practice. He also addresses how the current "participatory culture " and the trend toward "informal learning" are affecting the curriculum. The article concludes with recommendations for instructors on how they can change their teaching practices to "keep pace with our expanded understanding of learning." - the description provided by Christopher Price, Director, Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching (CELT), The College at Brockport, State University of New York.

This is a short piece written in the Wall Street Journal by Ken Bain to accompany the release of his new book - What the Best College Students Do.

Interesting article that describes the student data being collected at some universities. The data is be used to "eAdvise" students into the proper programming and courses, which leads to higher retention rates. The data may be used to go as far as even monitoring card swipes and analyze student social interactions.

"The expectation for researchers to have a presence beyond academia coincides with another shift that is making social impact now possible, for many researchers, and this is the rise of social media. These new, virtual environments are not just characterized by popular, personalized platforms like Facebook and Twitter, although I will come to these. Rather, social media encompasses the entire architecture of the scholarly Web today, best known as Web 2.0, which is a new way of organizing digital media content. While computing transformed scholarship in many ways before the rise of social media platforms, the average end-user experience, even for a novice, has altered considerably within just the last five years."

A detailed 8-minute introduction to giving audio feedback to students, because quicker than writing/typing, feels like the instructor is speaking to students directly, and students gain greater depth of understanding.

"The goal of Teach With Tournaments is simple -- immerse students in the personalities and character of the great men and women of history through competition. For this school year, the tournament focused on one theme: the most courageous figure in U.S. history. Each student chose a historical figure he or she thought best embodies courage in U.S. history, from military heroes such as Alvin York to civil rights leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks to humanitarian pioneers such as Clara Barton. Each choice was then paired off in the bracket system. Students were required to research their character's accomplishments and then defend their choice in front of the class. Afterward, the class voted and the winners moved on to the next round, eventually narrowing the field of 64 to one champion."

"The flipped classroom is a pedagogical model in which the typical lecture and homework elements of a course are reversed. The notion of a flipped classroom draws on such concepts as active learning, student engagement, hybrid course design, and course podcasting. The value of a flipped class is in the repurposing of class time into a workshop where students can inquire about lecture content, test their skills in applying knowledge, and interact with one another in hands-on activities. Although implementing a flipped classroom places different demands on faculty and forces students to adjust their expectations, the model has the potential to bring about a distinctive shift in priorities-from merely covering material to working toward mastery of it."

eBook that explains how to create a Google Account and how to use Google Docs. Google Docs are great for student collaboration on assignments without being in the same room.

Session introducing threshold concepts by Ray Land delivered in October 2011 at UCC in Ireland.

Mike Neary, Dean of Teaching and Learning at University of Lincoln, keynote on Student as Producer at NAIRTL Conference

20 minute mini-lecture Eric Landrum from Boise State University on Perry's Scheme of Intellectual Development prepared for the Boise State Course Design Institute.