Group items tagged

We are a social entrepeneurship company that partners with the top universities in the world to offer courses online for anyone to take, for free. We envision a future where the top universities are educating not only thousands of students, but millions. Our technology enables the best professors to teach tens or hundreds of thousands of students.

Schools see valuable opportunities in moving course evaluations online, but only if they can raise student-participation levels.

"Given your critique of "online education," I find it ironic that learning designers and others who work day-in, day-out on online (and blended) learning spend much of our time saying similar things to our faculty partners and university stakeholders as you so eloquently articulated in the above quotes. The error that you make, and it is a fundamental error, is that you confuse what is going on at Stanford, Yale, Harvard, M.I.T. with edX and Coursera, with traditional online learning. You write as if you are critiquing online classes, but what you are really taking issue with are the new crop of massively open online courses (MOOCs). This error is not merely semantic. Confusing online learning with MOOCs disallows any meaningful analysis of the challenges and benefits of either format. Conflating online learning with MOOCs also closes the possibility of any substantive discussion of how institutions of higher education are responding to challenges around access, cost and quality. And perhaps most troubling, by conflating online learning with MOOCs you are mischaracterizing and devaluing the hard work of your fellow educators to bring the active learning principles, the principles that you yourself espouse, to new teaching modalities."

Anchored discussion is a form of collaborative literature processing. It "starts from the notion of collaborative discussion that is contextualized or anchored within a specific content" (van der Pol, Admiraal & Simons, 2006). In this course, the discussions we participate in are based on prompts that address ideas included in each of the required resources for each module. However, an anchored discussion is a discussion that is focused on one piece of literature. As students read and digest the material, discussions about the meaning of that material occur within a window where the material is present. It is like having an asynchronous chat window open next to a research article. (van der Pol et al., 2006) As I started learning about anchored discussions, I saw many connections to shared annotation such as what we use Diigo for. Van der Pol et al. (2006) state that "shared annotation might leave more room for individual processes, but is shown to have some limitations in supporting interactivity". Anchored discussions take shared annotation a step further in that it requires conversation (as opposed to individual notes) regarding a resource. The collaborative piece of anchored discussions really got my attention in that it provides greater opportunity for the development of teaching presence by both students and the instructor. The opportunity to facilitate a discussion within the context of a required reading is an exciting idea for me. The use of anchored discussion allows for all three facets of teaching presence: instructional design and organization, facilitating discourse, and direct instruction (Shea, Pickett, & Pelz, 2003). I am wondering if there is a way to use Diigo in creating anchored discussions.