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Ted Curran

What the Best Online Teachers Should Do - 0 views

  • we explore methods of fostering student engagement, stimulating intellectual development, and building rapport with students when teaching online
  • What the Best College Teachers Do, Ken Bain (2004) identified a set of core characteristics of exemplary college teachers
  • The FLC was supported by funds provided by the Academic Affairs Division, and its members received a stipend of $500 for their participation.
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  • arguments and evidence are more important than facts and figures
  • communicating clear goals and expectations
  • incorporating multiple active learning opportunities
  • providing frequent, prompt, and constructive feedback
  • creating teacher support resources
  • an exploratory study of the practices of exemplary online teachers, Lewis and Abdul-Hamid (2006)
  • efforts to provide constructive and individualized feedback to students
  • facilitating student interaction
  • paying attention to how a course is organized and how teacher presence is enhanced
  • involvement and learning
  • most of the literature deals with the “science” of online teaching rather than the “art” of online teaching. In this paper, we attempt to remedy this state of affairs
  • Faculty Learning Community
  • The program typically includes a curriculum about enhancing teaching and learning with regularly-scheduled meetings and activities that provide participants with opportunities pertaining to the FLC’s major focus. An important component of an FLC is an emphasis on the scholarship of teaching and learning
  • eLearning Pedagogy FLC
  • Its general goal was to increase faculty interest in learning and teaching with instructional technologies
  • Peers are viewed as important in the learning process by creating an environment where “students can reason together and challenge each other” (p. 53) and grapple with the content together while building a sense of community
  • participants attended monthly meetings that included teaching and learning activities, development and training opportunities, and community building
  • participants read the literature on the scholarship of teaching and designed individual projects that allowed the assessment and evaluation of their instructional changes, suitable for presentation or publication in a professional journal
  • At the start of our FLC, we read Bain’s book, with the goal of discussing it in terms of its implications for teaching online
  • during these discussions, each FLC member listed out the major and most interesting points from Bain’s book
  • understanding is more important than remembering
  • we analyzed the advantages and disadvantages of what the best teachers studied by Bain did in terms of online teaching
  • creating effective student interactions with faculty, peers, and content
  • fostering student engagement
  • s timulating intellectual development
  • confronting intriguing, beautiful or important problems, authentic tasks that will challenge [students] to grapple with ideas, rethink assumptions and examine mental models of reality
  • building rapport with students
  • behaviors such as demonstrating and encouraging trust and potential in students, flexibility, self-directed learning, communicating learning and success intentions to students, and conveying realistic goals and expectations.
  • Fostering Student Engagement
  • foster engagement through effective student interactions with faculty, peers, and content
  • see the potential in every student, demonstrate a strong trust in their students, encourage them to be reflective and candid, and foster intrinsic motivation moving students toward learning goals
  • The best teachers want students to learn, regularly assess their efforts and make adjustments as needed, and accommodate diversity with sensitivity to student needs and issues
  • we summarized the major categories of behaviors shown by Bain’s best teachers that are most applicable to online teaching and learning
  • Class content – through its design, lectures, discussions, and assignments – supports the student learning objectives
  • Accordingly, the best teachers use meaningful examples, stimulating assignments, and thought provoking questions to motivate students to know more about their discipline
  • creating a community of learners where the quantity and quality of interactions with peers and faculty foster student engagement
  • Student-to-faculty interaction is considered paramount in fostering student engagement
  • student-to-student interaction is equally important as the quality and quantity of exchanges are predictors of success
  • students should “feel a personal and emotional connection to the subject, their professor, and their peers
  • In the online environment, lecture need not and should not be the primary teaching strategy because it leads to learner isolation and attrition
  • The most important role of the teacher is to ensure a high level of interaction and participation
  • This is achieved by means of greater student-to-faculty contact, participation in class discussions, and a more reflective learning style
  • it is imperative that students be active, not passive, to create a true learning environment
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    An account of a professional development project based on exemplary teacher best practices.
Ted Curran

AcademicCopyrightInformation - Keck qwiki wiki @USC - 0 views

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    Academic Copyright Information Disclaimer: The purpose of this wiki webpage is to provide links to information about copyright and "fair use" to help faculty and students make informed decisions about copyright issues. Nothing on this page is intended to serve as legal advice. If you have legal questions about copyright, you should consult a lawyer or the general counsel's office in your institution. Nothing on this page should be construed as representing the policy or opinion of the University of Southern California. Please send comments to RayMosteller Related: CopyrightInformation - AlternativeCopyrightOptions - UscCopyrightInformation - EducationalResources Copyright and Fair Use Case Law Academic Publishers vs. Georgia State University - Lawsuit filed April 15, 2008 Basic Books, Inc. v. Kinko's Graphics Corp. - 758 F.Supp. 1522 (S.D.N.Y. 1991) Princeton University Press v. Michigan Document Services, INC. - No. 94-1778 6th Cir. 1996 decision vacated Key Court Case Summaries on Fair Use Columbia University Copyright Advisory Office - Columbia University Libraries / Information Services Fair Use Checklist Copyright Scenarios Court Case Summaries - Regarding Fair Use Fair Use Resources Cornell University Copyright Information Center Cornell Copyright Policies, Guidance, and Policy Interpretations Cornell Electronic Course Content Copyright Guidelines - Press release Cornell Electronic Course Content Copyright Guidelines - (PDF) Course Reserves Copyright Guidelines - (PDF) Copyright Term and the Public Domain in the United States Copyright Resources Cornell Copyright Decision Tree - (PDF) Indiana University - Purdue University, Indianapolis (IUPUI) Copyright Management Center Fair-Use Issues Fair-Use: Overview and Meaning for Higher Education Fair-Use Guidelines Key Court Case Summaries on Fair Use Teach Act and Distance Learning North Carolina State University Intellectual Property Student Privacy Law (FERPA) Penn State Uni
Ted Curran

Envisioning the Post-LMS Era: The Open Learning Network (EDUCAUSE Quarterly) | EDUCAUSE - 0 views

  • Faculty use the CMS primarily as an administrative tool … rather than as a tool anchored in pedagogy or cognitive science models."
  • Several reports confirm that instructors overwhelmingly use content distribution and administrative tools in the LMS while using interactive learning tools only sparingly
  • LMSs have become little more than "storage facilities for lecture notes and PowerPoint presentations."11
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  • largely failed to empower the strong and effective imaginations that students need for creative citizenship
  • First, LMSs are generally organized around discrete, arbitrary units of time — academic semesters. Courses typically expire and simply vanish every 15 weeks or so, thereby disrupting the continuity and flow of the learning process.
  • Second, LMSs are teacher-centric. Teachers create courses, upload content, initiate threaded discussions, and form groups. Opportunities for student-initiated learning activities in the traditional LMS are severely limited.
  • Finally, courses developed and delivered via the LMS are walled gardens, limited to those officially enrolled in them. This limitation impairs content sharing across courses, conversations between students within and across degree programs, and all of the dynamic learning affordances of the read-write web.2
  • personal learning networks (PLNs) to manage information, create content, and connect with others
  • personal cyberinfrastructures
  • Campbell argued that we should embrace technologies that enable co-learners to frame, curate, share, and direct learning "engagement streams
  • Value accrues to the system as a whole because the more users or ‘nodes’ there are in a network, the more possible connections there are
  • several significant weaknesses and challenges associated with PLEs
  • support
  • support
  • Teachers and learners should be encouraged and supported in their efforts to find and use the most appropriate and effective best-of-breed tools outside the LMS
  • the University of Mary Washington deployed an instance of WordPress MultiUser (WPMU) as an alternative teaching and learning platform (UMW Blogs)
  • enabling the creation of blogs that automatically enroll students in courses as "members" of class blogs created by instructors
  • A pilot currently under way at Duke University (http://blogs-dev.oit.duke.edu) is aimed at assessing the viability of WPMU as an alternative platform for instructors teaching undergraduate and graduate courses. The list of potential uses on the pilot site includes using a WordPress blog as "the central course administrative tool" instead of Blackboard.
  • The LMS paradigm assumes that since some data must be kept private and secure, all data must be kept private and secure.
  • As depicted in Figure 1, proprietary applications and data such as the student information system (SIS), secure online assessment tools, and a university gradebook should be situated inside the private, secure university network. Personal publishing space, social networking, and collaboration tools live in the open, flexible cloud.
  • a loosely coupled gradebook is perhaps the essential module that brings all of the "small pieces" together.
  • instructors and students need a private, secure way to communicate about student performance on assignments, quizzes, and tests
  • If these artifacts are published on the web, they are individually addressable via URLs, so the OLN’s loosely coupled gradebook would simply require the submission of the URL instead of requiring students to upload the artifacts to a traditional gradebook. Instructors would then see a list of student names and links to the artifacts they published on the web
Ted Curran

Teachers texting students: Teachers face new social-media minefield that can explode wi... - 0 views

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    Outlines the dangers when students and teachers use new media to communicate.
Ted Curran

Blackboard vs. Moodle: North Carolina Community Colleges Assessment - 0 views

  • “The end-of-term student and instructor surveys showed that Blackboard and Moodle are not that different.” All of these systems are pretty good/bad.
  • “The real difference is found in student perception of their teachers’ comfort level with the application. There exists a significant correlation between student survey scores of both Blackboard and Moodle with the perceived comfort level of instructors using either application. Thus, student perceptions of both CMSs were influenced by instructor experience, training, and skills.” The fact that your faculty reviewers are more familiar with your old system than some of the alternatives may bias their evaluations significantly.
  • “Case studies of four exclusively Moodle institutions indicated that while transition to Moodle was challenging, ultimately the case study students and faculty preferred Moodle over Blackboard.”
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  • “The CMS application functionality comparison by online administrators (application and network) and online instructors indicated that Moodle 1.9x has a higher perceived functionality than any version of Blackboard evaluated. The large number of “did not use” responses suggested that neither CMS platform was utilized to full capacity.” Having a system with 39,000 seldom-used features that require a course to learn how to use is not as valuable to you as having a system with 39 features that most people will find useful and can figure out how to use on their own.
  • “The analysis revealed the total pre-transition year cost for all four case study colleges totaled $184,410. There was a 35% increase in total cost in the transition year to $248,300, due to supporting two CMSs simultaneously. Lastly, the post-transition year cost of ownership was $52,296, which accounted for a 72% decrease in total cost compared to that of the pre-transition year. The total cost savings from preto post-transition years for all of the case study colleges was $132,114.” Consider long-run costs as well as short-run costs. Migration may be cheaper than staying put, and the more expensive migration in the short run may be cheaper in the long run.
Ted Curran

David Wiley: Open Teaching Multiplies the Benefit but Not the Effort - Wired Campus - T... - 0 views

  • In 2004 I began asking my students to post their homework on their personal, publicly accessible blogs.
  • By changing their homework assignments from disposable, private conversations between them and me (the way printed or e-mailed assignments work in students’ minds) into public, online statements that became part of a continuing conversation, we realized very real benefits.
  • The result was a teacher’s dream — the students’ writing became a little longer, a little more thoughtful, and a little more representative of their actual intellectual abilities.
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  • When the visits and comments from professionals around the world started coming in, students realized that the papers they were writing weren’t just throw-away pieces for class – they were read and discussed by their future peers out in the world.
  • I began posting my syllabus on a publicly available wiki and doing my best to select only readings that were also publicly available and that I could link to from the syllabus.
  • I needed to find online articles and materials that my students would be able to get with a single click at no cost.
  • As I began blogging about my online teaching materials, people from around the world began to see and make use of them in their own courses. Others outside universities started using them to guide their personal study.
  • Introduction to Open Education.
  • Do we professors, who live rather privileged lives relative to the vast majority of the planet’s population, have a moral obligation to make our teaching efforts as broadly impactful as possible, reaching out to bless the lives of as many people as we can? Especially when participatory technologies make it so inexpensive (almost free) for us to do so? I believe the answer is yes. —David Wiley
Ted Curran

Defining Generation Y Bradford.pdf (application/pdf Object) - 0 views

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    Great article that defines students' level of comfort in educational learning tasks as a function of A) their comfort with technology, and B) their confidence as learners. Dispels the myth that technology is "native" to younger users, and provides a way forward in educating different students different ways.
Ted Curran

To Share or Not to Share: Is That the Question? (EDUCAUSE Review) | EDUCAUSE - 0 views

  • The use of open materials by faculty is something of a continuum, with those who closely guard their intellectual property and privacy on one end, with faculty who seek out and use open content and technologies in the middle, and with those who actively contribute to open content on the other end.
  • All the faculty I spoke to could think of at least a few contexts in which they would not be willing and/or able to share or participate openly.
  • For example, few faculty are willing to embark on large, time-intensive projects, such as writing textbooks, without some guarantee that they will be compensated for their personal investment (time
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  • Research faculty may need to closely guard patentable research under the terms of their institutional contracts, even if their inclination drives them to share openly
  • Science faculty, for example, often publish their research with multiple authors and may be more used to a collaborative model, whereas humanities faculty write for publications that favor a single-author model.
  • Commonly, faculty will lock down some content (research or texts) under intellectual property laws but feel morally obligated to share in another aspect of their field.
  • Two factors delineate a faculty member's attitude toward openness: a nature influence and a nurture influence.
  • the strength of a person's inclination toward sharing
  • On the one end are the keepers, faculty who ask themselves: "Why would anyone outside my course want to know what I think?" At the other extreme are the sharers, faculty who believe that their contribution to the conversation, content, and/or community is invaluable.
  • The second factor that influences attitude toward openness is how strongly the person feels a moral responsibility to share freely with his or her community.
  • Many said something to the effect that they felt it was their duty as an educator to share
  • that everyone in education should share
  • Open faculty see sharing their ideas and expertise as a way to quickly validate or refute ideas, to promote important academic programs, and/or to mentor those instructors with less experience or to be mentored by those with greater experience or more creative ideas. Open faculty value the ideas and content shared by others in their networks and feel an obligation to share alike. This sense of moral responsibility to share is so strong in some faculty that it bothers them when ideas and content are closely guarded. They see this as an affront to their values.
  • In the category of faculty who are strong sharers and strongly open, we find project leaders and thought leaders.
  • What's the difference between those faculty who share with colleagues locally and those who share on the web? Technology skills.
  • Open faculty are learning some of these technology skills from formal workshops and professional training, but many spoke of learning technology skills from other open faculty (or even students) during on-the-fly informal learning sessions.
  • Many of the faculty I spoke to suggested (strongly) that participation in open digital activities (e.g., blogging, writing open-source software, being a curator of open-source materials) should count toward tenure and promotion.
  • Naturally, administrators worry about open digital faculty. What if they say something the institutional leaders don't agree with? What if their work with students on the web creates a liability? Administrators can do three simple things to minimize these issues: If a faculty member writes or shares content openly on the web, using space provided by the college, the inclusion of a simple disclosure statement can provide some separation between the individual and the institution (for example, "These views/materials are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of my institution"). To guard against liability, administrators can make sure that open faculty receive training on copyright issues with materials used, privacy issues with students, and security issues with web technologies. These days, most campus activities involve the potential for liability. All administrators can do is make a good-faith effort to protect the institution by ensuring that faculty have a solid grounding in the potential risks. Today's students live much of their lives in the digital world. Faculty have the potential to model and promote good Internet behavior to future workers and leaders. Administrators can support open digital faculty by making an effort to understand what the faculty do: read some of what they write; take them to lunch and discuss their latest projects; try to understand that these faculty are public ambassadors of the institution and stealth faculty developers on campus. In gaining the trust of open digital faculty, administrators will more likely be seen as advisors than as adversaries.
Ted Curran

Problem-based learning in medicine and beyond: A brief overview - Barrows - 2006 - New ... - 0 views

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    A Review of Literature on Student-Centered Learning in Medical Ed. 
Ted Curran

Digital Natives » Blog Archive » Instructional Technology in College Courses - 0 views

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    A student-led inquiry into how teachers are using digital tech in college courses.
Ted Curran

Selecting an Open-Source Online Course Development and Delivery Platform: An Academic P... - 0 views

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    Abstract Increasingly, educators are implementing course development and delivery platforms to place their distance courses online in order to expand accessibility to educational opportunities, make use of multimedia capabilities, and provide effective management of the teaching and learning experience. These platforms are also referred to as course management systems (CMS), learning management systems (LMS), learning portals, or e-learning platforms. They are integrated, comprehensive software packages that support the development, delivery, evaluation, and administration of online courses and can be used in both traditional face-to-face instruction and in an online environment. The decision to obtain such software is frequently made by administrators and computer managers. However, academics should play a significant role in this decision process, as they must create and manage an enticing, interactive learning environment that is easy for the instructors and learners to use. This paper focuses primarily on the instructor and learner perspectives of online course management systems, but also considers administrative factors such as student record keeping, technical requirements, and the cost of ownership. It is intended to meet the needs of educators who are contemplating the acquisition of this type of software or want to change from one platform to another.
Ted Curran

The Net Generation's Informal and Educational Use of New Technologies | in education - 0 views

  • undergraduates in this group are high users of new technologies in their daily lives
  • the 18-24 year olds in this group were consumers, not producers of content using new technologies – few had created blogs (47%), wikis (16%) and podcasts (8%).
  • it is also important that students be critical consumers of online content, are able to assess the value of content, and are able to put it to good use in their academic endeavors
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  • The research reviewed reported that 18-24 year olds do not transfer their expertise with technologies to academic contexts
  • students in this group use Instant Messenger when completing assignments, and Google Docs for archiving and group work, even if their professors are unfamiliar with Google Docs
  • The findings of this pilot survey, along with the research reviewed, indicate that undergraduates’ application of new technologies for academic purposes can be likened to the five stages of technology adoption – Awareness, Adoption, Adaption, Appropriation, and Invention - reported in the Apple Classrooms of Tomorrow research
  • undergraduates’ creation of online content for educational purposes was low in both this and prior research
  • a small sample of 26 undergraduates of education at an urban private university in 2008, and can therefore not be generalized to all other contexts
Ted Curran

Lecture Capture: A New Way to Think about Hybrid Courses - 0 views

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    A call to faculty to spend less time lecturing and more time mentoring students socratically.
Ted Curran

Prof. Jones's wiki / Class Notes Assignment - 0 views

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    An "out of the box" assignment for having students create class notes wiki-style.
Ted Curran

Exam Questions: Outsourcing vs. Crowdsourcing - ProfHacker - The Chronicle of Higher Ed... - 0 views

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    This outlines how (and why) to let students create the final exam questions using wikis as a constructivist learning activity.
Ted Curran

Wiki-style finals - ProfHacker - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 0 views

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    Let the students write the test, wiki-style. A great discussion of this constructivist learning activity. 
Ted Curran

Digital Typology of Learners in Gen Y - 0 views

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    Great discussion of students' ability to use tech effectively in the classroom.
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