Group items tagged

By Will Richardson, on his blog "weblogg-ed: learning from the read/write web," posted 22 June 2010. Richardson's main focus seems to be K-12 (as is the focus of many of the very interesting comments that this post has received), but the questions he asks are relevant to students of all ages and at all levels: how do we measure more esoteric qualities like the ability to follow "passion," how to "earn...a living solving problems and helping to make the world a better place." It's as much about the quality of education as of assessment.

MDEC serves post-secondary education in Michigan with a network for educators to research and share best practices, refine strategies for quality programs, and to advocate for developmental education. This is not an online network - most meetings "held using a conference call format."

"Developing high-quality content is still a problem. This is why I'm currently infatuated with the idea of content curation and the tools that enable it."

Users of Aggregage are Bloggers, Marketers and Readers."Aggregage creates online communities by bringing together content from the best sources around particular topics. We identify a topic (Social Media, eLearning, Careers, Leadership, etc), find high-quality blogs around that topic, and then display their posts on a new site dedicated to that given topic. The original site on eLearning has become the highest traffic site on that topic."

As of Sept 2012, this project page seems out of date (last updated June 2009); project may be completed. From the About Qualti page Mission Statement, "We begin from a position that methodology is a distinctive form of social practice and knowledge production, and that research methods must be considered with/in the social contexts in which they are practised."

By Sara Lipka in the Students section of the Chronicle of Higher Education, Nov 11 2010. Reporting on the latest report from the Center for Community College Student Engagement, which states that "Increasing college completion is meaningless unless certificates and degrees represent real learning, which community colleges must work harder to ensure."

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 Marybeth Green and Lauren Cifuentes in Journal of Interactive Learning Research, vol 22 (1), 2011. The major finding of this article seems to be that "online follow-up with peer interaction increased the likelihood of completion of the professional development task." Abstract only available on this page. For full article check with your library.

By Robin Wilson in the Faculty section of the Chronicle of Higher Education, Sept 5 2010. This article looks at the resistance to measuring learning outcomes -- and the progress that is being made, as well.