Group items tagged

Quia is short for Quintessential Instructional Archive. It provides instructional tools including: templates for creating online activities, online testing tools, access to over 3 million online activities and quizzes, a schoolwide network to promote collaboration, a centralized classroom management system, a class Web page creator and online surveys for gathering student and teacher feedback.

Article by Peter Chepya (professor of instructional design at Post University in CT) in 2005 on E-Personality: The Fusion of IT and Pedagogical Technique, how to create the 'there" on line. The excerpt below speaks to the transformation that occurs with Jam newcomers as they move from text-based exchange to passionate dialogue online. We need to figure out how to convey this in a Jam video. Excerpt: My online teaching relies on the "human element," expressed in features such as companionability and presence. The cumulative effect creates an atmosphere I call "presence learning" as opposed to the outdated misnomer "distance learning" often used with Internet courses. Presence learning creates a palpable connection between the instructor and the student, engaging students in "reality," not "virtual reality"--another outdated aphorism. Once while delivering a paper at a conference of online educators, I was challenged by a participant who thought my online course (being projected onto a screen) was "heavy on the text." Upon learning that the questioner's field was American literature, I asked hi if he thought Moby Dick was "heavy on the text." If the work is compelling, the medium disappears and the experience becomes actual. ...We came to accept the telegraph as "real" communication, as we then did the telephone, radio, recorded music, television, and cinema. We forgot the medium in each case.

By Oliver Dreon, PhD in Online Education section of Faculty Focus website, May 13 2013. Citing research titled Critical inquiry in a text-based environment...from The Internet and Higher Education (2000), the author have 5 steps to improve the community aspect of online classes, including introductions and a "common area" for students to meet for discussions that are off-topic.

Confirming much of what we've learned with our communities.

A program of the College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales (Australia), this is an online project that aims to help teachers "gain a working understanding of successful online teaching pedagogies that they can apply in their own unique teaching situations."

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.

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.

Published by staff from Forum One, "The Online Community Report features best practices, strategies, research, and events for Online Community and Social Media professionals," per About the OC Report. Editors include Jim Cashel, Heather Virga, and other Forum One staff.

A series of online forums sponsored by UNESCO to look at issues surrounding OER, particularly re-use of OER materials. Scheduled themes of discussions are: 23 - 29 September 2010: Taking OER beyond the OER Community: Policy and Capacity; 20 - 26 October 2010: What works, what does not and under what conditions?; 10 - 16 November 2010: Copyright and the development and re-use of OER. This page contains other background information, including links to the online forums.

By Naava Frank in e-Jewish Philanthropy, May 2 2013. The author compares online communities to cocktail parties, in order to remind community sponsors that "guests" must be cultivated and introduced to each other. She describes a "relationship infrastructure" of equal importance to the technology infrastructure. The article concludes with a protocol that includes working in pairs, requiring an "assignment" (e.g. common goal) and for participants to post their responses -- and then to reply to each others' responses.

Frank's protocol matches KPI's findings in terms of engagement.

by Jon Marcus on The Hechinger Report, December 26, 2011. Open University, a successful British online public university to be used as a model in the U.S. The goal is to help students who are intimidated by higher education adapt to and succeed in college. Next Generation Learning Challenges, a Gates funded initiative, will adapt two free Open University, at-your-own-pace online courses for use at about a dozen U.S. colleges and universities this academic year: one to help students be more comfortable with math so they do better on placement tests or move more quickly through remedial courses, and another to teach students skills to prepare them for college.

By Todd D. Reeves and Joseph J. Pedulla in Professional Development in Education, vol 37 (4), 2011. A look at the USA's e-Learning for Educators (EfE), specifically and at online professional development (OPD) more generally. NOTE: This page has abstract only. For full article, check with your library.

NOTE: OPD (online professional development) might be a good keyword.

"An LMS for Elite MOOCs? March 7, 2012 - 3:00am By Steve Kolowich Google artificial-intelligence guru Sebastian Thrun made a splash last month when he left Stanford University to start a company based on an A.I. course he made freely available last fall to tens of thousands of students on the Web. Now, two of Thrun's former Stanford colleagues who conducted similar experiments have spun off their own free online courses into a for-profit venture."

"Online collaboration delivering on-target solutions Doing business in today's world means stepping up to the plate to meet complex and fast moving challenges. To make critical business decisions, you need world-class expertise, preferably on-demand. How can you harness this knowledge for virtually any industry or functional area, anywhere, any time? The answer is 10EQS Online Collaboration. With 10EQS' global platform, you leverage a next-gen "workforce in a cloud" combining proven management consulting techniques with on-line mass collaboration."

By Dawn Foster in Web Worker Daily, Jan 30 2009. This is a nice article (with slides) outlining what an online community manager does.

Guy Raz interviews Anya Kamentz (reporter and author) on All Things Considered (NPR), March 13, 2010. According to this story, "about 10 percent of students in America are now enrolled at these online universities." Assume that they mean for-profit online universities, since that is the topic of the report.

By Sophia Lin in Wired Campus, The Chronicle of Higher Education, June 28 2010. An online textbook project at the University of Illinois that will also serve Illinois' community colleges. The comments are also of interest.

By Beth Fertig, reported on WNYC March 24, 2010. In this education feature, Fertig reports on an experimental afterschool program called School of One, an individualized math program where students work online with math tutors and also occasionally work together. Their self-paced work plan is based on frequent online assessments. Daniel Willingham is quoted for his work on learning styles. MP3 is available, in addition to the transcript.

Gao, F. & Sun, Y. (2010). In C. Maddux et al. (Eds.) Research Highlights in Information Technology and Teacher Education. Article examines how to use VoiceThread to support online learning communities for professional development in teacher education

Blog and business site for Nancy White, a leader in "online group facilitation of distributed work, learning and community groups." The site includes both a blog that speaks to White's current work and interests, and also resources for online communities and related work.

White is a favorite of the KPI team.

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.