Group items tagged

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.

"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."

In a few slides, he'd spelled out the nine essential components of a university education: admissions, lectures, peer interaction, professor interaction, problem-solving, assignments, exams, deadlines, and certification. While Thrun admired MIT's OpenCourseWare-the university's decade-old initiative to publish online all of its lectures, syllabi, and homework from 2,100 courses-he thought it relied too heavily on videos of actual classroom lectures. That was tapping just one-ninth of the equation, with a bit of course material thrown in as a bonus.

Discovery Education's new "Techbooks" are more than just digitized versions of static textbooks, the Techbooks include videos, embedded assessments, and other interactive features that leverage the power of the internet. "Our framework recognizes that coupling informational text with multi-modal content on the same topic, at varying reading levels, provides an unparalleled experience for 21st-century learners. "

Canvas Instructor Resources The link above will take you into a public Canvas course with access to online documentation and video tutorials maintained by Instructure Canvas and their partner institutions.

The University of California, Irvine OpenCourseWare is now offering four new courses in Public Health, Physics, and Chemistry on iTunes U. iTunes U provides users with free public access to lectures, videos, books, podcasts, and courses from colleges and universities across the globe. Users can download the content to their iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch with the iTunes U app.

In this session, we'll briefly describe Indiana University's e-text agreements with five publishers and with Courseload, the provider of the e-text e-reader software. These agreements are resulting in substantial cost savings for students and providing them with new tools for teaching and learning. The IU agreements evolved from two years of pilot testing and in response to substantial input from students, faculty, textbook publishers, and authors. We will also discuss how these agreements can be extended to other institutions through short- and long-term pilot programs, which will allow them to gather valuable data about student and faculty use of e-texts.

ComETS is an Iowa State University community that promotes dialog and events focused on technology in learning & teaching. ComETS is a university-wide community where ideas and resources can be shared, and debate can occur on future technology directions at ISU.

See the eText Panel Discussion.

"Emily Furgang, Doctoral Candidate in Occupational Science and CIDD Fellow shares how a traditional Blackboard course was transformed into a problem-based, hybrid Sakai course (part online, part face-to-face instruction). For students, Sakai becomes "a universal meeting place.""