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Does class size matter? http://www.magnapubs.com/newsletter/distance-education-report/270/Does-Class-Size-Matter-13523-1.html This article originally appeared in Distance Education Report. I've been the director of online education at my institution since 2007. One question I've been asked many times over the years is "What is the optimal number of students to have in an online class?" My usual response is to pretend I didn't hear the question and walk away as quickly as possible. Well, that's not totally true. But as you can imagine, this is not an easy question to answer, as there are many variables that come into play--the topic of the class, the overall course design, the academic rank of students in the class, the experience of the instructor teaching the class, etc. I've had many interesting discussions with students, staff and administrators over the years about enrollments in online courses. When I first started teaching online, my courses would fill almost immediately, sometimes within minutes. Inevitably, students would contact me and request an override for the course - not just one or two students, but dozens upon dozens of students. They were usually surprised when I said no. These frustrated students would often reply with a comment such as, "But it's an online class, so you can take unlimited numbers of students and it won't be any additional work for you." Surprisingly, I've heard this kind of comment from some faculty, staff and administrators as well. I usually view these interactions as opportunities to offer a bit of education about online learning. So I might say, for example, that if I had seven graded assignments in my online course, and 25 students, I would end up grading 175 assignments--with the emphasis on "I." However, if I doubled the number of students in my class and graded seven assignments for 50 students, that would be 350 assignments to grade. There were also 22 quizzes, two exams and multiple

In order to better understand faculty attitudes and practices regarding usage of library-specific tools and roles in a university learning management system, log data for a period of three semesters was analyzed. Academic departments with highest rates of usage were identified, and faculty users and non-users within those departments were surveyed regarding their perceptions of and experience with the library tools. Librarians who use the tools were also surveyed to compare their perceptions of faculty tool and role use. While faculty survey respondents showed high levels of positive perceptions of librarians, they also exhibited low awareness of the library tools and little understanding of their use. Recommendations for encouraging wider adoption and effective usage are discussed.

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.

Student Reflections @wattspoi on "Heutagogy & its Implications for Evaluative Feedback" http://t.co/xiuWsCsD #lrnchat #edchat

"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."

* Better cafeteria food with real ingredients * No school busses - nearly every child mentioned the bullying of bus rides as one of the reasons they hated school * More choice in their assignments or projects * Replace grades with feedback and portfolios (like we did in our class) * Staggered start and end times so that the school would "feel smaller" * More alternative sports in addition to the traditional ones * Off-campus community service once a week * Job-shadowing for one month of the year * A monthly educational field trip * iPads, netbooks or laptops in classes - they even brought up some interesting ways to raise money for these devices * More freedom in terms of leaving to use the restroom, eating a snack or getting a drink of water * More electives - while most of them agreed that we need math, they suggested that maybe they could choose pre-geometry or pre-algebra or in reading, they could have reading classes geared toward certain topics * A school garden

offers a great variety of video resources in several disciplines which SUNY faculty may excerpt to use in their online courses. A list of programming resources, including Annenberg/CPB (see their video catalog http://www.learner.org/catalog/catalog.html ) can be found at the following address: http://www.nyn.suny.edu/cable/programming.htm\ . If you would like to adapt any of these materials to your online course, please send your request to: geotucker@nyn.suny.edu See their online video catalog for a partial list of program providers and their web links. Their web sites are full of print and other materials designed to enhance your experience of these programs.

"Suggestions for improvement To be fair, the cons that I have listed above are not unique to the EDCMOOC, nor to online learning in general. I remember similar problems from my uni days on campus. Nonetheless, they inform my following suggestions for improvement… Week 1 should be set aside as a social week to allow the happy greeters to get their social proclivities out of their systems. It may be tempting to set aside a pre-week for this purpose, but the truth is it will bleed into Week 1 anyway. The instructors need to be much more active in the discussions. I recommend they seed each week with a pinned discussion thread, which marks the official line of enquiry and discourages multiple (and confusing) threads emerging about the same concepts. More importantly, the instructors should actively prompt, prod, guide and challenge the participants to engage in critical analysis. Explication of the implications for e-learning must be the outcome. A moderator should delete the spam and ban the spammers. A support page and discussion thread should be dedicated to helping the lost souls, so that they don't pollute the rest of the course with their problems. All in all, I am glad to report my first mooc experience was a positive one. I won't rush out to do another one in a hurry, but that's simply because I know how demanding they are. But one thing's for sure, I will do another one at some stage. I look forward to it!"

CapriSoft Formula Wizard is WYSIWYG equation editor for LaTeX system, MathML and HTML math documents. CapriSoft Formula Wizard One of main advantages of our equation editor for MathML is Equation Wizard, which allows to use many predefined equations. In CapriSoft Formula Wizard you can save the equation in LaTeX, MathML, BMP, WMF or GIF file format without losing the information about the structure of this equation. Most of graphic programs and web browsers interpret such files correctly. Because of that it is possible to use CapriSoft Formula Wizard as plug-in with, for example, Netscape Composer.

MathType is the Professional Version of Equation Editor. If you are familiar with our Equation Editor included in Microsoft Office and other products, then you will really appreciate MathType's extra features. It will let you create a wider range of equations for a wider range of documents, and help you work much more efficiently. We've added an enormous amount of functionality that effectively transforms Microsoft Word into a state-of-the-art math word processor and Web page editor.

...First-week final exam - One of the more controversial methods of measuring student learning is to have students take the final exam during the first week in class, but don't grade them on it. At the end of the semester give them that same exam again and compare the results. While letting students see their final exam makes some faculty nervous, Nilson says most students won't remember any of the questions, and if they do what's the harm? It will simply help them focus in on what you feel is important for them to know.

Before ... and after learning ...

"The goal of this project is to provide free, high quality, interactive, web-based resources for students and teachers of probability and statistics. Basically, our project consists of an integrated set of components that includes expository text, applets, data sets, biographical sketches, and an object library."

Graphmatica is an equation plotter which supports five types of planar graphs (including polar, parametric, logarithmic, inequalites and limited implicit plots), plots planar vector fields and solutions of the corresponding differential equations, unlimited graphs on screen at once, saving setup information and lists of equations, flexible grid labeling, lock-on coordinate cursor and several ways to resize the grid. Its calculus options include symbolic differentiation, drawing of tangent lines, and numerical integration (you use a mouse to select points and areas). Offers on-line help and demonstration files. grmat36d.zip is the DOS version (3.60), grmat16w.zip is the Microsoft Windows 3.1 version (1.60), and grmat16n.zip is the 32 bit or win32 version (1.60). This is a fully functional shareware package.

Quia is pronounced key-uh and is short for Quintessential Instructional Archive. Quia provides a variety of educational services, including: * A directory of thousands of online games and quizzes in more than 40 subject areas * Templates for creating twelve different types of online games, including flashcards, matching, concentration (memory), word search, hangman, challenge board, and rags to riches (a quiz-show style trivia game) * Tools for creating online quizzes * Quiz administration and reporting tools * Free teacher home pages