"Clickers and Classroom Dynamics By Derek Bruff, Vanderbilt University
Classroom response systems create new opportunities for managing student discussions and assessing student learning"
"EdX, a nonprofit enterprise founded by Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will release automated software that uses artificial intelligence to grade student essays and short written answers."
PeerWise supports students in the creation, sharing, evaluation and discussion of assessment questions.
From Twitter: "@busynessgirl Have you seen Peerwise? http://peerwise.cs.auckland.ac.nz/ #socrait (via @polarisdotca)"
The series of reports explores new forms of teaching, learning and assessment for an interactive world, to guide teachers and policy makers in productive innovation.
"Academics often treat students' discipline-specific literacy as unproblematic. In doing so they may underestimate the difficulties for university students as they move between subjects of study that may involve different disciplines, language genres and academic practices. This paper describes an initiative aimed at supporting students in reading academic articles in preparation for completing an essay for an assessment task. This initiative involved a structured and collaborative two-week tutorial exercise that provided students with practice in using a framework to extract the main ideas from academic readings. Students were surveyed after this exercise, and their reflections of its value are described in this paper. The findings of this study will inform further stages of the project which aim to develop and investigate practical ways to develop student's academic literacy across several business disciplines."
"The purpose of this team-led course is to help you build and improve your skill in online teaching. Basic strategies for sharing your expertise, facilitating deep discussion, and designing experiential assessments will be covered. Both small and large-scale teaching models will be presented - including MOOCs, Massive Open Online Courses. This course will be of particular benefit to adult educators with some classroom teaching experience. Whether you are a corporate training and development facilitator, community educator, or a higher education faculty member, this introduction to teaching online will be an opportunity to explore the possibilities of open education, and network with a diverse, global community of practitioners."
"The present research assessed the potential effects of expecting to teach on learning. In two experiments, participants studied passages either in preparation for a later test or in preparation for teaching the passage to another student who would then be tested. In reality, all participants were tested, and no one actually engaged in teaching. Participants expecting to teach produced more complete and better organized free recall of the passage (Experiment 1) and, in general, correctly answered more questions about the passage than did participants expecting a test (Experiment 1), particularly questions covering main points (Experiment 2), consistent with their having engaged in more effective learning strategies. Instilling an expectation to teach thus seems to be a simple, inexpensive intervention with the potential to increase learning efficiency at home and in the classroom"
"In partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, EDUCAUSE explored the gaps between current learning management tools and a digital learning environment that could meet the changing needs of higher education . Consultations with more than 70 community thought leaders brought into relief the contours of a next generation digital learning environment (NGDLE). Its principal functional domains are interoperability;
personalization; analytics ,advising, and learning assessment; collaboration; and accessibility and universal design. Since no single application can deliver in all those domains, we recommend a "
Lego" approach to realizing the NGDLE, where NGDLE-
conforming components are built that allow individuals and
institutions the opportunity to construct learning environments tailored to their requirements and goals"
"Routine and inertia too often rule the way that departments and institutions devise their curricula; the same goes for the ways individual faculty members teach and assess student learning."
A collection of case studies on initiatives from institutions in Wales around two different themes - innovation in first-year assessment and enabling employability through the first-year curriculum. This publication follows the success of the 2009 "First-
Academics cannot agree on what constitutes plagiarism, according to new research. A study by Diane Pecorari, senior lecturer in the School of Education at Malardalen University, Sweden, asked a sample of scholars to assess five plagiarised texts. It ident
JISC have created this mockup of an idea for a funding platform to get feedback from JIF10 attendees to help us assess whether we should pursue the idea any further. JISC are thinking that we would use the platform to fund short projects costing between
The article offers information on the benefits of peer review. According to the University of Kansas, peer review is an assessment of an instructor's effectiveness by another library staff member who is also involved in providing library instruction. It i
Oxbridge is near the top in university rankings, but it's a different story on the web, reports John Gill
They have illustrious histories, multibillion-pound endowments and are likely to clean up in next week's research assessment exercise. But do the un
"We're becoming increasingly used to dealing with the routine business of our daily lives online - from paying bills to buying groceries - so we might imagine that the days of students trudging to campus to hand in assignments, or trying to decipher a tutor's scrawled comments are long gone."
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