Group items tagged

"The existence of 'Learning Styles' is a common 'neuromyth', and their use in all forms of education has been thoroughly and repeatedly discredited in the research literature. However, anecdotal evidence suggests that their use remains widespread. This perspective article is an attempt to understand if and why the myth of Learning Styles persists. I have done this by analyzing the current research literature to capture the picture that an educator would encounter were they to search for "Learning Styles" with the intent of determining whether the research evidence supported their use. The overwhelming majority (89%) of recent research papers, listed in the ERIC and PubMed research databases, implicitly or directly endorse the use of Learning Styles in Higher Education. These papers are dominated by the VAK and Kolb Learning Styles inventories. These presence of these papers in the pedagogical literature demonstrates that an educator, attempting to take an evidence-based approach to education, would be presented with a strong yet misleading message that the use of Learning Styles is endorsed by the current research literature. This has potentially negative consequences for students and for the field of education research."

"We're often asked for detailed information on how educators are using blogs. The main reasons why we get these requests from educators are: They need information to convince school administrators to allow blogging. They are trying to work out the benefits of blogging and how blogs are used with students. They want to know more about which blogging platforms are commonly used by educators (and why). So last year we decided to conduct an annual survey on how educators are using blogs.  Our goal is to document the trends in educational blogging."

"A growing number of studies have been carried out to understand learning and teaching activities in online learning environments (OLEs) and to design effective OLEs for meaningful learning in higher education. Although there were a small number of studies to provide research trends in educational technology in regards to research topics, methods, and researchers, more research is necessary to help educators to understand new trends and issues of OLEs in higher education. This study intends to provide an overview of practical and theoretical issues pertaining to OLEs by analyzing literature recently published in peer-reviewed journals. The present study qualitatively analyzed research questions and purposes to identify themes of OLEs in higher education. The OLE research topics were grouped into three major themes: (1) participants, (2) micro-level environments, and (3) macro-level environments. The findings are followed by discussion of an ecological approach as a new theoretical framework to guide future OLE research and practice."

 Building student engagement and belonging in higher education at a time of change: final report from the What Works? Student Retention and Success programme Thomas, L. (2012) Building student engagement and belonging in higher education at a time of change: final report from the What Works? Student Retention and Success programme . Building student engagement and belonging in higher education at a time of change: final report from the What Works? Student Retention and Success programme, . (.). pp. 1-100. Abstract Analysis and evaluation on the most effective practices to ensure student retention and success in higher education, in particular for those students from disadvantaged backgrounds.

"Objective - To describe the development and implementation of two courses designed to help university students avoid plagiarism. Design - Quantitative and qualitative analysis. Setting - A university in the United Kingdom. Subjects - An unknown number of university students who took a Plagiarism Awareness Program (PAP) course between 2008 and 2011, and approximately 3,000 university students enrolled in a Plagiarism Avoidance for New Students (PANS) course delivered via a virtual learning environment (VLE) between October and December 2012. The authors attempted to collect rates of continued plagiarism among students who had taken plagiarism education courses. The authors also surveyed 702 university students about plagiarism in 2011. Methods - Data collected from PAP participants informed revision of the authors' approach to plagiarism education and led to development of the second course, PANS. At the end of the course, students completed a test of their knowledge about plagiarism. Authors compared scores from students who took a course supervised by a librarian to the scores from students who took the course independently. Main Results - Students reported that many aspects of citation and attribution are challenging (p. 149). The authors discovered that 93% of students who completed the PANS course facilitated by a librarian in-person passed the final exam with a grade of 70% or higher, while 85% of students who took the same course independently, without a librarian instructor, in an online VLE scored 70% or higher (p. 155). The authors report that referrals of students who plagiarized declined significantly (p-value < 0.001) since the implementation of a plagiarism avoidance curriculum. Conclusion - As reported by the authors, first-year university students require more extensive education about plagiarism avoidance. A university plagiarism avoidance program instructed by librarians reduces the total number of students caught plagiarizing an

"ALT comment on the Higher Education Funding Council for England's Strategy Statement "Opportunity, choice and excellence in higher education" Schmoller, Seb and Slater, John (2011) ALT comment on the Higher Education Funding Council for England's Strategy Statement "Opportunity, choice and excellence in higher education". ALT. (Unpublished)"

"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."

 Building student engagement and belonging in higher education at a time of change: final report from the What Works? Student Retention and Success programme  Thomas, L. (2012) Building student engagement and belonging in higher education at a time of change: final report from the What Works? Student Retention and Success programme . Building student engagement and belonging in higher education at a time of change: final report from the What Works? Student Retention and Success programme, . (.). pp. 1-100. Abstract Analysis and evaluation on the most effective practices to ensure student retention and success in higher education, in particular for those students from disadvantaged backgrounds.

"This document presents options for open source software for use in the education sector. Some of these may have uses outside of education, but they are presented here in the context of their specific benefits to educational establishments, or their use in the course of teaching and learning. "

"After 13 years delivering and sharing content to support teaching practitioners across higher education, further education and skills, Jisc will be retiring its Jorum service in September 2016. "

"When researchers selectively report significant positive results, and omit non-significant or negative results, the published literature skews in a particular direction. This is called 'reporting bias', and it can cause both casual readers and meta-analysts to develop an inaccurate understanding of the efficacy of an intervention. This paper identifies potential reporting bias in a recent high-profile higher education meta-analysis. It then examines a range of potential factors that may make higher education learning and teaching research particularly susceptible to reporting bias. These include the fuzzy boundaries between learning and teaching research, scholarship and teaching; the positive agendas of 'learning and teaching' funding bodies; methodological issues; and para-academic researchers in roles without tenure or academic freedom. Recommendations are provided for how researchers, journals, funders, ethics committees and universities can reduce reporting bias"

"In Higher Education Focus Groups and Nominal Group Technique are two well-established methods for obtaining student feedback about their learning experience. These methods are regularly used for the enhancement and quality assurance. Based on small-scale research of educational developers' practice in curriculum development, this study presents the use of a combined approach that potentially offers more benefits than the use of Focus Groups alone. It proposes a combined method, 'Nominal Focus Group', which includes the benefits of in-depth discussion of a Focus Group and the prioritising of results of Nominal Group Technique. These benefits include questions for further exploration, initial data analysis and increased ownership of the process by students. In practice, the method gave rise to rich data and actionable outcomes that were used to make informed curriculum enhancements for the programme teams."

"The UK Change Agents Network is pleased to announce a call for papers for the inaugural edition of the Journal of Educational Innovation, Partnership & Change. The journal will support research into partnerships between staff and students that identify, lead and deliver change in education across all disciplines. This edition will share and celebrate the outcomes of staff and students working in partnership on innovation and change projects. The project is co-funded by Jisc and the University of Greenwich."

"Over the past year, MOOCs have opened the doors of access to quality education, and have captured the attention of educational leaders and students worldwide. Today, we're excited to announce the next step in our mission to foster student learning without limits and expand the possibilities that MOOCs and online education can enable."

"The damage that Coursera, EdX, Udacity and others have done to a decade of open education progress becomes more apparent by the day. In today's installment, the kettle at SJSU comes to a full boil, with the faculty association there joining the Philosophy department in expressing opposition, not to open education, but to the badly deformed version of it that CourdacityX has produced"

Clayton R Wright has produced the latest version of his well-known and well-regarded conference list.

"The NMC Horizon Report > 2014 Higher Education Edition is a collaborative effort between the NMC and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI), an EDUCAUSE Program. This eleventh edition describes annual findings from the NMC Horizon Project, an ongoing research project designed to identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have an impact on learning, teaching, and creative inquiry in education. Six key trends, six significant challenges, and six emerging technologies are identified across three adoption horizons over the next one to five years, giving campus leaders and practitioners a valuable guide for strategic technology planning. The format of the report is new this year, providing these leaders with more in-depth insight into how the trends and challenges are accelerating and impeding the adoption of educati"

"In part 1, I looked at the shifting definition of educational (or learning) technology; in the second part, I looked at a brief history of educational technology; part 3 explored the rise of the "new professional"; the fourth part discussed the "bipolarisation" of the "new professional". This is the fifth in a series of short posts concerning the field of educational (or learning) technology and the people who are practitioners and theoreticians within the field."

"If you're interested in education, at some point someone will have sent you a link to a video by Sir Ken Robinson, knighted for services to education in England in 2003. He has over 250,000 followers on Twitter, his videos have had over 40,000,000 views online, and his 2006 lecture is the most viewed TED talk of all time. The RSA Opening Minds curriculum his ideas are associated with is taught in over 200 schools in the UK. He clearly has some influence."

"On 24 April 2015 forty educators from 19 institutions discussed key issues in MOOC design and implementation at a one-day workshop hosted and funded by the University of Reading, a leading member of the FutureLearn MOOC consortium. The workshop offered the opportunity to evaluate practical lessons from the design and delivery of MOOCs, particularly those encouraging skills development. The focus was on problem-based discussion of approaches to teaching and learning, and the extent to which MOOC learning outcomes can be defined, measured, or achieved."