itcss-instructionalsupport

Interesting conclusion on his research: Presenting students' common misconceptions in a video alongside the scientific concepts has been shown to increase learning by increasing the amount of mental effort students expend while watching it.

Makes sense what they list as the 10 services. I like #9, pedagogical support: As more and more faculty become involved in online or blended courses, the need for support has grown in lockstep

a wide variety of apps that correlate with the different levels of Bloom's thinking levels.

improving the quality of instructional design will be key to whether MOOCs eventually find their role within American higher education,

Interesting article

"I found that producing video lectures spurred me to hone pedagogical presentation to a far higher level than I had in 10 years of teaching the class on campus," he said. The result was an online class that he describes as "significantly more rigorous and demanding than the on-campus version." It takes an immense amount of work to produce an adequate MOOC," The continuing participation of top faculty members in massive online courses, he said, will depend on whether their colleges are willing to let MOOCs distract them from their traditional duties. At that point, Mr. Owens said, campus officials will need to ask themselves whether they want to give that faculty time to online students, "99 percent of whom who are not at their universities."

Interesting summary -

The National Federation of the Blind (NFB) has released a fact sheet for proposed national legislation to enact a key recommendation of the Postsecondary Accessible Instructional Materials (AIM) Commission report released over a year ago.

Interestingly, the center found that students in hybrid classes - those that blended online instruction with a face-to-face component - performed as well academically as those in traditional classes. But hybrid courses are rare, and teaching professors how to manage them is costly and time-consuming. Colleges need to improve online courses before they deploy them widely. Moreover, schools with high numbers of students needing remedial education should consider requiring at least some students to demonstrate success in traditional classes before allowing them to take online courses.

"Recently we added a Crocodoc integration to SpeedGrader in Canvas.  We think this will make a good thing better.  Now, when students submit digital files for grading (in Word, PowerPoint or PDF formats), instructors are able to annotate the files and grade the submissions right on the screen."

"In collaboration with Academic Partnerships, the University of Delaware's Alfred Lerner College of Business and Economics has announced an innovative new online master of business administration (MBA) program. Academic Partnerships was selected to work with the Lerner College to deliver their faculty's curriculum to a growing number of students who want a top MBA delivered in a highly-flexible format. The program is expected to launch in spring 2013. "