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Ted Curran

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

www.educause.edu/...209321

share faculty opensource open copyright opencourseware to

shared by Ted Curran on 11 Mar 11 - Cached
  • 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
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • 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

oer + opencontent - SWiK - 0 views

swik.net/oer+opencontent

education oer opencontent

shared by Ted Curran on 04 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • Ted Curran on 04 Apr 11
     
    Content Tagged with oer + opencontent AcrossWorld Education | Connect. Collaborate. Innovate. Monday, March 28, 2011 opensource: del.icio.us tag/opensource education opensource opencontent OER My #CCK11 Talk - Sharing to Connect, Interact and Learn! Thursday, March 17, 2011 opensource: del.icio.us tag/opensource sharing opensource opencontent OER openness cck11 elesig OPAL - The Open Educational Quality Initiative Saturday, March 12, 2011 opensource: del.icio.us tag/opensource opensource opencontent OER opened EDUCAUSE Review Magazine Thursday, February 10, 2011 Volume 45, Number 4, July/August 2010 | EDUCAUSE Article about OPEN: Open Educational Resources, Open Faculty, etc. opensource: del.icio.us tag/opensource opensource opencontent OER Content on Congress 2011 -- THE Journal Tuesday, January 04, 2011 opensource: del.icio.us tag/opensource open opensource Conference opencontent OER OpenCourseWare- Open High School of Utah Tuesday, January 04, 2011 opensource: del.icio.us tag/opensource open opensource resources opencontent opencourseware OER MERLOT - Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching Saturday, January 01, 2011 opensource: del.icio.us tag/opensource Web2.0 open education opencontent higher OER lessonplans The Cape Town Open Education Declaration Thursday, October 21, 2010 "It is at once a statement of principle, a statement of strategy and a statement of commitment. It is meant to spark dialogue, to inspire action and to help the open education movement grow. Open education is a living idea. As the movement grows, this idea will continue to evolve. There will be other visions initiatives and declarations beyond Cape Town. This is exactly the point. The Cape Town signatories have committed to developing further strategies, especially around open technology and teaching practices." opensource: del.icio.us tag/opensource education opensource openaccess opencontent OER declaration openeducation Home - OLCOS Thursday, October 21
Ted Curran

What the Best Online Teachers Should Do - 0 views

jolt.merlot.org/...brinthaupt_1211.htm

education best practices online education

shared by Ted Curran on 22 Oct 12 - No Cached
  • 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.
  • ...43 more annotations...
  • 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
  • Ted Curran on 22 Oct 12
     
    An account of a professional development project based on exemplary teacher best practices.
Ted Curran

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

pcf4.dec.uwi.edu/viewpaper.php

shared by Ted Curran on 25 Aug 10 - Cached
  • Ted Curran on 25 Aug 10
     
    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

AcademicCopyrightInformation - Keck qwiki wiki @USC - 0 views

qwiki.usc.edu/...AcademicCopyrightInformation

shared by Ted Curran on 23 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • Ted Curran on 23 Mar 11
     
    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

Previewing Microsoft's Office 365 | Microsoft - CNET News - 0 views

news.cnet.com/8301-10805_3-20023761-75.html

microsoft office technology

shared by Ted Curran on 10 Mar 11 - Cached
  • Lync's planned client for Windows Phone 7 and the iPhone.
    • Ted Curran
      Ted Curran on 10 Mar 11
       
      No Android, and not as ubiquitous as GTalk for Apps (which runs on ALL platforms).
  • It's also one of the places where Office 365 shows its strengths, since you can get into a shared group of documents and very quickly give them a read and an edit in the same place without leaving the page to go off to some other property
  • This is what a cohesive Web office experience should feel like, though like we mentioned earlier, it still feels like its on its own island instead of being more tightly knit with the Office 365 start page, and Outlook client.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • While really impressive, there are still some questions over Microsoft's vision of making Office 365 less of a jump-off point for its software and more of a one-stop solution for getting things done from any computer, anywhere.
  • it's worth looking at Office 365 for what it is, which is Microsoft continuing to move some of the very complicated pieces of its Office software ecosystem into the cloud--in part to make it easier for businesses large and small to get going. The Office software itself is a separate part of the equation--one that's well on its way in that direction.
  • Notably absent from Office 365's overall interface is Microsoft's suite of Office Web Apps, which is where many of those comparisons to Google Docs have centered
  • The first thing we should say up front is that Google Apps this is not.
  • The good news is that in our brief testing, everything worked as advertised. The bad news is that you can't get it right now, and it's still a long ways off from something that lets you every feature out of the Office ecosystem without installing software.
  • If you actually want to create something, there's still a reliance on having to have the Office software, or go off to the Office Web apps site itself, where users can save to their SharePoint.
  • The net result of all of this is that Office 365 is not yet quite the true jump to a cohesive set of all of Microsoft's services, gone online and tied together in a way where you can hop from task to task between different 365 components.
  • There is still an incredible reliance on the software itself, which is bound to change down the road, but for now makes basic workflows like creating a document and getting feedback from team members a hybrid experience, or one that involves juggling products.
  • In our preview with it, the Web client of Outlook was fast loading and had a few nice tricks up its sleeve, like letting you open up Office attachments in a pop-up Window--something that's quite useful if you're on a public computer that does not have Office installed.
  • Lync is Microsoft's an instant messaging system with presence; an audio and video conferencing tool; and a voice call service. By design this is something that users install and run locally,
  • How Lync translates to the Web experience is that users can get a slightly less capable version of it inside a browser window--all without having to install the software client
Ted Curran

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

chronicle.com/...7271

open teaching wiley education openness oer technology

shared by Ted Curran on 09 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • 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.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • 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

Open Educational Resources: New Possibilities for Change and Sustainability | Friesen |... - 0 views

www.irrodl.org/...1388

open learning resources educational education edtech teaching technology

shared by Ted Curran on 07 Mar 11 - Cached
  • The term open educational resources was first adopted at the 2002 UNESCO Forum
  • “the open provision of educational resources, enabled by information and communication technologies, for consultation, use and adaptation by a community of users for noncommercial purposes” (UNESCO, 2002, p. 24)
  • he notion of openness, for its part, has been given legal force and definition through the set of copyright licenses released by Creative Commons, also in 2002
  • ...31 more annotations...
  • A second general difference separating learning objects from their open educational counterparts is indicated by the absence of any explicit reference to the openness or the open and noncommercial character of the resource.
  • What is significant in each definition is precisely what is included and excluded: Each definition highlights (either directly or indirectly) modularity as a technological and design attribute for the object and its content, emphasizing the “self-contained,” “building block” or “object-oriented” nature of the technology.
  • Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching (MERLOT)
  • this project recently met its original ambitious goal of placing all of MIT’s course content online by 2007
  • Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
  • the funding for the operations of many of the projects is either provided by a parent institution
  • by a governmental organization
  • or by a combination of these types of sources.
  • he many projects that have fallen inactive or been discontinued
  • the nature and the enormity of the sustainability challenge online educational resource collections face.  
  • The clear sustainability lesson from both this listing of inactive projects and the earlier listing of active efforts is the importance of ongoing, operational institutional or consortial funding for educational resource collections and the difficulty of realizing alternative funding models. Online educational resource initiatives of this kind, one can conclude, need to be seen as processes or services rather than as products that persist of their own accord.
  • Only projects that are large-scale, well-funded, and able to benefit from a first-mover advantage (i.e., being one of the first of their kind) seem to have any chance of developing collections whose scope extends to all educational subjects
  • The issue of sustainability of OER projects, unsurprisingly, was one of the top concerns
  • awareness raising and promotion; communities and networking of creators and users; and capacity development, specifically as it relates to the development and pedagogical application of OERs.
  • The necessary preconditions for viability – awareness, capacity, community, cultural change – are identical with what would be the results of success.
  • a vicious circle of “chicken and egg.
  • the majority of the use of this material not only takes place outside of the USA, it also occurs outside in the context of reuse and adaptation by teachers or instructional designers.
  • it is educationally valuable without detracting from the educational value of the face-to-face activities on which the collected content is based.
  • This finding provides clear evidence of multiple areas of significant benefit accruing to MIT the institution from the open courseware project, and it provides a positive illustration of important possibilities for change.
  • “OCW use is centered on subjects for which MIT is recognized leader
  • 32% of faculty say that putting materials online has improved their teaching
  • 35 percent of freshmen who were aware of OCW prior to deciding to attend MIT indicate the site was a significant or very significant influence on their choice of school” (cited in Wiley, 2006, p. 6).
  • David Wiley presents a conclusion that may be of the utmost significance for OER: “The time will come when an OpenCourseWare or similar collection of open access educational materials will be as fully expected from every higher education institution as an informational website is now” (2006, p. 6).
  • Simply put, this is enlightened institutional self-interest.
  • student recruitment
  • the potential for improving teaching and for better supporting learning
  • a kind of viral marketing of the quality of teaching and learning in areas of strategic institutional interest
  • They need not risk financial and cultural capital on creating yet another collection or repository, but instead can invest it in the quality and accessibility of their course offerings.
  • Open CourseWare Consortium and its OCW finder
  • It only asks of its members a contribution of 12 courses to its growing collection of over 10,000 courses
  • The point, as Wiley explains, is that “this strategy of openness” holds out the promise of “catalyzing further innovations” (2006).
Ted Curran

BSP:: Bentham Science Publishers Ltd. - 0 views

www.bentham.org/quotes.htm

shared by Ted Curran on 09 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • "Open access will revolutionize 21st century knowledge work and accelerate the diffusion of ideas and evidence that support just in time learning and the evolution of thinking in a number of disciplines." Daniel Pesut (Indiana University School of Nursing, USA)
  • They are an outstanding source of medical and scientific information." Jeffrey M. Weinberg (St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital Center, USA)
  • "Open access journals are extremely useful for graduate students, investigators and all other interested persons to read important scientific articles and subscribe scientific journals. Indeed, the research articles span a wide range of area and of high quality. This is specially a must for researchers belonging to institutions with limited library facility and funding to subscribe scientific journals." Debomoy K. Lahiri (Indiana University School of Medicine, USA)
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • "Open access journals represent a major break-through in publishing. They provide easy access to the latest research on a wide variety of issues. Relevant and timely articles are made available in a fraction of the time taken by more conventional publishers. Articles are of uniformly high quality and written by the world's leading authorities." Robert Looney (Naval Postgraduate School, USA)
  • "Not only do open access journals greatly improve the access to high quality information for scientists in the developing world, it also provides extra exposure for our papers." J. Ferwerda (University of Oxford, UK)
  • "In principle, all scientific journals should have open access, as should be science itself.
  • "The widest possible diffusion of information is critical for the advancement of science. In this perspective, open access journals are instrumental in fostering researches and achievements." Alessandro Laviano (Sapienza - University of Rome, Italy)
  • "Open access journals are probably one of the most important contributions to promote and diffuse science worldwide." Jaime Sampaio (University of Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro, Portugal)
  • "Open access journals make up a new and rather revolutionary way to scientific publication. This option opens several quite interesting possibilities to disseminate openly and freely new knowledge and even to facilitate interpersonal communication among scientists." Eduardo A. Castro (INIFTA, Argentina)
  • "Open access journals are freely available online throughout the world, for you to read, download, copy, distribute, and use. The articles published in the open access journals are high quality and cover a wide range of fields." Kenji Hashimoto (Chiba University, Japan)
  • "Open Access journals offer an innovative and efficient way of publication for academics and professionals in a wide range of disciplines. The papers published are of high quality after rigorous peer review and they are Indexed in: major international databases. I read Open Access journals to keep abreast of the recent development in my field of study." Daniel Shek (Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong)
  • Ted Curran on 09 Mar 11
     
    This is a list of quotable testimonials about the value and quality of open educational journals from some respected institutions worldwide.
Ted Curran

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

www.educause.edu/...199389

lms ple higher education blackboard

shared by Ted Curran on 19 May 10 - Cached
  • 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
  • ...20 more annotations...
  • 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

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

mfeldstein.com/-community-colleges-assessment

moodle blackboard lms vs assessment

shared by Ted Curran on 23 Apr 10 - Cached
  • “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.”
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • “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

Open Education: A New Paradigm - 0 views

www.universitybusiness.com/viewarticle.aspx

open learning educational education edtech teaching technology oer web2.0 OpenEducation

shared by Ted Curran on 08 Mar 11 - Cached
  • technology has produced inconsistent results
  • Siloed institutions and enterprise applications, lack of data interoperability, escalating total cost of ownership, and absence of industry standards contribute to inefficient processes, creating barriers to collaboration and innovation.
  • more open access to education for more students, regardless of their institution, the region they live in, or any other factor
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • To address these challenges, the education industry must offer
  • more open data and processes within and across institutions to improve quality and outcomes measurements
  • a more open culture of collaboration to foster reuse and sharing, to ultimately lower costs of operation and delivery within the industry
  • Many educational institutions are taking steps to embrace open education by creating more open, flexible processes and data access to improve quality and performance outcomes, while lowering cost.
Ted Curran

http://opencontent.org/definition/ - 0 views

opencontent.org/definition

shared by Ted Curran on 17 Feb 10 - Cached
  • The word has different meanings in different contexts. Our commonsense, every day experience teaches us that "open" is a continuous (not binary) construct. A door can be wide open, mostly open, cracked slightly open, or completely closed. So can your eyes, so can a window, etc.
  • Put simply, the fewer copyright restrictions are placed on the user of a piece of content, the more open the content is.
  • Reuse - the right to reuse the content in its unaltered / verbatim form (e.g., make a backup copy of the content) Revise - the right to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself (e.g., translate the content into another language) Remix - the right to combine the original or revised content with other content to create something new (e.g., incorporate the content into a mashup) Redistribute - the right to share copies of the original content, your revisions, or your remixes with others (e.g., give a copy of the content to a friend)
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Content is open to the extent that its license allows users to engage in the 4R activities.
  • Ted Curran on 17 Feb 10
     
    .perfect description of "open content"
Ted Curran

Open Content for Private Foundations.pdf (Study by Harvard U) - 0 views

cyber.law.harvard.edu/...Foundations_survey_summary.pdf

open source open content creative commons higher education

shared by Ted Curran on 16 Apr 10 - No Cached
  • Ted Curran on 16 Apr 10
     
    Open content licensing may not be a red-hot issue in the foundation sector, but it is emerging as a salient one with consequences in many fields. It is an inherently complex issue. In an attempt to learn more about the licensing practices that are used in the world of private charitable foundations - and specifically to learn the degree to which open content licensing may or may not be appropriate in that sector and why - the Berkman Center and the Hewlett Foundation commissioned the FDR Group, a nonpartisan public opinion research firm, to conduct a qualitative research study.
Ted Curran

10 reasons why Microsoft Office 365 rocks | TechRepublic - 0 views

www.techrepublic.com/...1929

shared by Ted Curran on 10 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • IE 7/8, Firefox 3, or Safari 3.1.2 and through mobile devices including Windows Mobile 6.5.x, Windows Phone 7, Apple iPhone 2.0 and above, and Nokia E and N series.
    • Ted Curran
      Ted Curran on 10 Mar 11
       
      So SharePoint online doesn't work with Android (AKA "the most popular smartphone OS on earth")? Odd choice.
  • the most popular Web browsers. There is a Light version that supports older and alternative browsers.
    • Ted Curran
      Ted Curran on 10 Mar 11
       
      I'm interested to know how they define "the most popular web browsers". On our system, that means "IE", while Firefox, Safari, and Chrome fall into the "alternative browsers" category. 
  • Also supported is PowerPoint broadcasting, which lets you broadcast your slide shows across the Internet even to people who don’t have PowerPoint.
    • Ted Curran
      Ted Curran on 10 Mar 11
       
      does this require you to be online while you're "broadcasting"?
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • With the Lync 2010 client software
    • Ted Curran
      Ted Curran on 10 Mar 11
       
      How is this considered "cloud-based" if it requires desktop software to work? "Cloud" means "web-based" or "not dependent on desktop software". Confounding.
  • using the Lync client
    • Ted Curran
      Ted Curran on 10 Mar 11
       
      again-- client, not web. What happens if you don't have the client?
  • Lync Online directly over the Internet (without having to be on the corporate network via VPN or RAS)
    • Ted Curran
      Ted Curran on 10 Mar 11
       
      does this mean "connect to Lync Online VIA THE CLIENT or THROUGH A BROWSER"?
  • Opera Mobile 8.65
    • Ted Curran
      Ted Curran on 10 Mar 11
       
      So Android users would have to install Opera Mobile?
Ted Curran

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

ineducation.ca/...ucational-use-new-technologies

netgen generation's education educational net the learning web2.0 lms open wiki technology edtech teaching podcasts

shared by Ted Curran on 03 Sep 10 - Cached
  • 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
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • 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

www.facultyfocus.com/...-to-think-about-hybrid-courses

lecture capture lecture capture classroom2.0

shared by Ted Curran on 25 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • Ted Curran on 25 Oct 10
     
    A call to faculty to spend less time lecturing and more time mentoring students socratically.
Ted Curran

Google Releases CloudCourse, an Open Source Learning Platform - 0 views

feedproxy.google.com/~r/readwriteweb/~3/j0RbdQKBb2c/google_releases_cloudcourse_an_open_source_learnin.php?title=Google Releases CloudCourse, an Open Source Learning Platform

google open releases cloudcourse lms moodle blackboard elearning edtech

shared by Ted Curran on 26 May 10 - No Cached
  • Ted Curran on 26 May 10
     
    Google made a number of announcements in the past week that are of interest to educators: opening Google Wave to the public and extending Google Voice accounts to ...
Ted Curran

Why Bother Being Open? « iterating toward openness - 0 views

opencontent.org/...1735

openness oer education why technology open edtech web2.0

shared by Ted Curran on 09 Mar 11 - Cached
  • I’ve always been an “argue by describing the benefits” kind of guy as opposed to an “argue on grounds of moral superiority” kind of guy (which is why I end up in the open camp more often than the free camp).
  • a free-to-access, online “digital publication of high quality university-level educational materials… organized as courses, and often includ[ing] course planning materials and evaluation tools as well as thematic content” that does not use an open license is not an OpenCourseWare.
  • MIT OCW, the website says, “Each course we publish requires an investment of $10,000 to $15,000 to compile course materials from faculty, ensure proper licensing for open sharing, and format materials for global distribution.”
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • 25% of the per-course publication costs (not technology infrastructure or external outreach costs – I’m talking about costs directly related to publishing a course) derive specifically from the desire for the final publication to employ an open license.
  • what is the return on this investment? What benefit are users deriving from open licensing that they could not derive if MIT published these materials online with a default copyright statement?
  • Would users still receive this benefit if MIT OCW were posted online with a traditional, full copyright statement?
Ted Curran

How to Use Diigo for Education - YouTube - 1 views

www.youtube.com/watch

diigo youtube edtech teaching education learning Web2.0 technology

shared by Ted Curran on 17 Feb 12 - No Cached
  • Ted Curran on 17 Feb 12
     
    This is a great video to introduce you to using Diigo as a teacher for education.
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