Group items tagged

The purpose of this study was to explore group forming strategies by examining participation behaviours during whole class discussions associated with active participation in a following small group activity. Written communication data, posted in class discussion forums (843 messages/70,432 words) and small group forums (732 messages/59,394 words), were analyzed quantitatively. The result indicated that individuals' participation quantity in small groups was significantly correlated with their own participation behaviour in whole class discussions. Also, a significant portion of small group participation was explained by their group members' participation (i.e., group member effect). Based on the results, we suggest instructors use the information of participation behaviours during the initial period of whole class activities for allocating students into small groups heterogeneously.

Special issue on use of mobile and social networking

"Last year it seemed like every new LMS company was trying to position itself as the "Facebook" of online learning. Then Facebook started to make everyone angry (or bored, or both), and we saw that idea dry up pretty quick (well, for the most part). The new catch phrase battle seems to be heating up over the words "open" and "free." Both Pearson and Blackboard are racing to establish either part or all of their services as open and/or free."

Following a successful first run last year, which saw several participants produce their first published paper relating to their work in the area of technology-enhanced learning, Write-TEL (Writing for Publication in Technology-Enhanced Learning) is back!

Special issue om MOOCs

"BITE: Recipes for remarkable research is an edited field book capturing the research, learning and experiences of an international network of scholars studying effective and creative research environments. The book encapsulates what it is that enables remarkable research, and offers, as Professor Lizbeth Goodman says, "practical, evidence-based instantiations of ideas and innovations" as well as theoretical knowledge. It is set out as a recipe book, with supporting academic papers and case studies"

"During the summer of 2013, George Veletsianos approached the editors of Hybrid Pedagogy about publishing a collection of graduate student essays. The collection focused on these students' experiences in a variety of MOOCs -- from EdX, Udacity, and other xMOOCs, to improvisational MOOCs created by the students themselves using open resources on the web. Sean Michael Morris and Chris Friend assisted with the editing process, and the book was designed using GitHub by Kris Shaffer with help from Barry Peddycord III, Jesse Stommel, and Robin "

We use administrative data to estimate the effect of neighbourhood composition on teenagers' educational and behavioural outcomes in England. We exploit a unique research design based on changes over time in neighbourhood composition experienced by residentially immobile students, where these changes arise purely through residential migration among other students in our data set. The complete coverage of our data allows investigating heterogeneity and non-linearities in the effect of neighbourhood composition at an unprecedented level. Our results show that changes in neighbourhood composition have no effects on test scores but some effects on behavioural outcomes, which are heterogeneous for boys and girls

"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"

"At the ALT C conference I went to a few sessions where VLE discussion came up, most notably Lawrie Phipps and Donna Lanclos's session "Are learning technologies fit for purpose?". They asked us to reflect on the main question in groups and nearly all of the discussions came back to complaints about the VLE. Lawrie picked on me to give the first response and I mentioned that the problem was not so much the technology but the "institutional sediment" that builds up around it. "

The research obsession is both self-reinforcing and self-destructive. The eroding state of science and science education in the US today is at least partly due to that misguided and harmful attitude in our universities. It has disfigured the humanities in

A University of Oxford academic is setting up an award to recognise misrepresentations of research in the press. Dorothy Bishop, professor of developmental neuropsychology at Oxford, announced the Orwellian Prize for Journalistic Misrepresentation on her

The Guardian today launched Open Platform, a service that will allow partners to reuse guardian.co.uk content and data for free and weave it "into the fabric of the internet". Open Platform launched with two separate content-sharing services, which will

This is the best time in history to be a teacher-librarian. Major shifts in our information and communication landscapes present new opportunities for librarians to teach and lead in areas that were always considered part of their role, helping learners o

Blackboard Inc., which never met a lawsuit it didn't like, is once again taking a pre-emptive strike against a foe.

"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."