Group items tagged

From this page, "The Peer Review of Teaching Project (PRTP) provides faculty with a structured and practical model that combines inquiry into the intellectual work of a course, careful investigation of student understanding and performance, and faculty reflection on teaching effectiveness." The site was developed as an "international repository for course portfolios written by faculty...."

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.

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."

With a presence both on the internet and on TV (PBS), Teaching Channel calls itself a "showcase" of "inspiring and effective teaching practices in America's schools." The organization's mission "is to revolutionize how teachers learn, connect, and inspire each other to improve the outcomes for all K-12 students across America." Browse videos by subject, grade level or topic (all from the left-hand navigation). In addition, there is a blog. Users are encouraged to subscribe, and the Teachers space is also organized by subject and grade-level, as well as by roles. The site also provides a workspace.

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.

From the About page, "The mission of the Center for Teaching, as approved during the process of its creation, is to 'promote and support efforts to enhance instruction at The University of Iowa'"

I tagged Iowa's Center for Teaching in light of our naming centers for teaching as potential audiences for our work.

by Derek Bruff, November 6, 2011. The best justification of the Innovation Lab premise that I have seen. "Sharing student work on a course blog is an example of what Randall Bass and Heidi Elmendorf, of Georgetown University, call "social pedagogies." They define these as "design approaches for teaching and learning that engage students with what we might call an 'authentic audience' (other than the teacher), where the representation of knowledge for an audience is absolutely central to the construction of knowledge in a course."" Often our students engage in what Ken Bain, vice provost and a historian at Montclair State University, calls strategic or surface learning, instead of the deep learning experiences we want them to have. Deep learning is hard work, and students need to be well motivated in order to pursue it. Extrinsic factors like grades aren't sufficient-they motivate competitive students toward strategic learning and risk-averse students to surface learning. Social pedagogies provide a way to tap into a set of intrinsic motivations that we often overlook: people's desire to be part of a community and to share what they know with that community. My students might not see the beauty and power of mathematics, but they can look forward to participating in a community effort to learn about math. Online, social pedagogies can play an important role in creating such a community. These are strong motivators, and we can make use of them in the courses we teach.

By Catherine M. Casserly and Marshall S. Smith. This is a free pdf download of a chapter from the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching publication, Opening Up Education: The Collective Advancement of Education through Open Technology, Open Content and Open Knowledge.

Published by the University of Nottingham (UK). This site is a "continually updated collection of peer-reviewed academic development resources...[ranging from] "2-5 minute videos [to] 500-1000 word texts...." There are a variety of entry points to access the materials, ranging from discipline areas (on this page) to themes (see Teaching & Learning themes at the top). I also like the Guest editor block (this page, lower left), where a faculty member writes a brief editorial and selects resources of interest.

Under the auspices of the US Department of Education, discussions are held via a listserve about professional development. This wiki contains an organized multi-day discussion on using video in teaching and staff development carried out through the list-serve. The list-serve is subscriber based but I guess both the discussion and accompanying wiki are open to the public. Issues for me: Should KPI consider offering the organized Jam transcript in the form of a wiki? Should it be open for discovery or only available to Jam participants?

By Michael Feldstein on the blog e-Literate, May 13 2012. In the context of last year's NERCOMP LMS Unconference, Feldstein first explains the concept of an unconference and then describes his own (successful) strategy to giving the keynote. Along the way, he defines a third way of teaching (or conducting a conference), in opposition to "guide on the side" or "sage on the stage," he suggests "guide on the stage," while acknowledging that each of these methods is correct and has its proper place/time/audience.

Many of Feldstein's ideas about "priming the pump," unconferences, and "guide on the stage" might be useful in Jams as well.

By Jabari Mahiri, published by Digital Culture Books, University of Michigan Press, 2011. This book documents a collaboration between a university and a local public high school, where the high school teachers "extended their own professional learning to revitalize learning in their classrooms." The collaboration was called TEACH (Technology, Equity, And Culture in High-performing schools). The book is offered free, through this web page.

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.

JISC is a UK-based group that "inspires UK colleges and universities in the innovative use of digital technologies...." The e-learning program offers 5 tracks to will help teachers learn how to teach in the e-learning environment. Support includes OER.

By Stephen Sawchuk in Education Week, published online August 5 2011. A look at some new teacher training programs that have been recently approved by the New York (State) board of regents. The article also briefly discusses some of the debate about practical teaching skills vs. theoretical ones.

By Geoff Cain on his blog, Brainstorm in Progress, October 27 2012. Cain looks at the instructional design of MOOCs -- and what instructional designers can borrow from MOOCs and apply to more traditional courses. His big take-aways are to provide paths toward community for the students (ideally even open the model to students from previous cohorts who may now be actively using these acquired skills in the field) and to model the behaviors (e.g. technologies) that you are teaching.

Published by the National Institute for Excellence in Teaching (NIET), March 2012. This paper argues that, based on two recent studies, "job-embedded PD can be highly effective, but only when there is a sufficient infrastructure in place to support it." NIET's own program, TAP: The System for Teacher and Student Advancement, is such a program. Cited studies: Biancarosa, G., Bryk, A.S., & Dexter, E.R. (2010, September). Assessing the value-added effects of Literacy Collaborative professional development on student learning. The Elementary School Journal, 111(1), 7-34. -- and -- Saunders, W.M., Goldenberg, C.N., & Gallimore, R. (2009, December). Increasing achievement by focusing grade-level teams on improving classroom learning: A prospective, quasi-experimental study of Title I schools. American Educational Research Journal, 46(4), 1006-1033

While this analysis seems somewhat biased (clearly written in support of NIET's own program), many of the characteristics of their program match work that KPI has done in PD.

"Technology enhanced learning (TEL) aims to design, develop and test socio-technical innovations that will support and enhance learning practices of both individuals and organisations. It is therefore an application domain that generally covers technologies that support all forms of teaching and learning activities. Since information retrieval (in terms of searching for relevant learning resources to support teachers or learners) is a pivotal activity in TEL, the deployment of recommender systems has attracted increased interest. This chapter attempts to provide an introduction to recommender systems for TEL settings, as well as to highlight their particularities compared to recommender systems for other application domains. "

WHEN a college textbook, "Principles of Biology," comes out from the Nature Publishing Group in January, one place it won't be is on the shelves of school bookstores. Enlarge This Image An interactive graphic in "Principles of Biology," an electronic textbook from Nature Publishing, teaches students about the symptoms of a stroke. Enlarge This Image An interactive graphic from Wolfram Research lets readers change the display parameters of an oil spill. That's because the book was designed to be digital-only. Students will pay not for a printed edition at a bookstore, but for permanent access on the Internet ($49).

The National Education Research and Development Centers are funded through IES's NCER. The mission of the R&D Centers is to contribute to the production and dissemination of rigorous evidence and products that provide practical solutions to important education problems in the United States. The R&D Centers achieve this mission by developing, testing, and disseminating new approaches to improve teaching and learning, and ultimately, student achievement. Each of the Centers conducts a focused program of education research in its topic area. In addition, each Center works cooperatively with NCER, conducts supplemental research within its broad topic area, and provides national leadership in defining research and development directions within its topic area. Currently, there are 18 National R&D Centers.