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Negatively-Marked MCQ Assessments That Reward Partial Knowledge Do Not Introduce Gender Bias Yet Increase Student Performance and Satisfaction and Reduce Anxiety

Training (and that includes e-learning) is a costly and inefficient way for knowledge workers to acquire knowledge and skills in today's workplace; in fact the real learning takes place continuously as people do their jobs. Now reports show that individuals and teams are increasingly using their social media tools and devices to by-pass L&D to solve their own learning and performance problems themselves.

Open access publishing is rapidly growing in popularity, while materials for re-use in education and training are increasingly being sourced free from the web.  This workshop will equip participants to use open licensing with confidence when they make knowledge available on the Internet, and to understand the key issues for reusing open licensed materials published by others.

This paper investigates the similarities and differences between two important ideas in information processing and knowledge utilisation. Those ideas are [critical thinking] and [information literacy]. The two phrases are shown in brackets to indicate that the two words involved in each idea are not arbitrarily combined but have been coupled by authors to represent a single entity or a focus for development of concepts describing the characteristics involved. By exploring terms related to this couplet from the same sentence, the meaning of each of the central ideas can be expanded. The education, library science, and health science literature were used in this study, which analysed 8745 articles dealing with [critical thinking] and 8201 reports dealing with [information literacy] included in either ERIC or PubMed from 2000-2009.

For those of you that were unable to make it to our inaugural UK User Conference, the videos below should help you play catch up. From Professor Mazur's excellent keynote on Peer Instruction to Paul Burt's practical tips for the deployment of ResponseWare, you'll end up furnished with masses of knowledge.

Abstract - Staff and students in the UK often dismiss MCQs (Multiple Choice Questions) as being associated with rote learning, but not understanding. However one of the biggest results ever published in education shows how mistaken this attitude is. The most important aspect of deep learning is probably being concerned with reasons rather than only with conclusions. If you want to test for knowledge of reasons then you can easily design MCQs to give the facts and ask about reasons. More interestingly, you can use MCQs that ask about facts to provoke learners to search for reasons. One method is to have students design MCQs (together with automatic feedback explaining why each response is right or wrong): the PeerWise software can organise this as an assignment in large classes. Another method is to use questions delivered by EVS (electronic voting systems) to catalyse peer discussion, even in huge classes. This talk will discuss some of the big educational results, and also psychological research that partially illuminates the mechanism. Supporting website for a SALT seminar presented by Steve Draper of Glasgow University at Swansea on 23rd November 2011.

"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

"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"

A one-stop knowledge resource, Emerging Technologies in Distance Education showcases the international work of research scholars and innovative distance education practitioners, who use emerging interactive technologies for teaching and learning at a dist

"Whether you're a student looking for supplemental learning or you're in the workforce but thirsty for knowledge, you don't have to drop thousands of dollars in tuition to enjoy a top-notch education from some of the best schools in the world."

The aim of TEL research is to improve the quality of formal and informal learning, and to make accessible forms of knowledge that were simply inaccessible before.

"Never before in history has it been easier to glean from the knowledge of others who will give it away to you for free. It's equivalent to getting higher education." Lon S Cohen

"The e-Assessment Toolkit exists to provide clear, current, practical information to e-assessment practitioners, or those thinking of adopting e-assessment. The toolkit offers useful tools and resources, helping users to develop and share their knowledge of e-assessment for effective implementation."

"In this paper, we explore the benefits of using social media in an online educational setting, with a particular focus on the use of Facebook and Twitter by participants in a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) developed to enable educators to learn about the Carpe Diem learning design process. We define social media as digital social tools and environments located outside of the provision of a formal university-provided Learning Management System. We use data collected via interviews and surveys with the MOOC participants as well as social media postings made by the participants throughout the MOOC to offer insights into how participants' usage and perception of social media in their online learning experiences differed and why. We identified that, although some participants benefitted from social media by crediting it, for example, with networking and knowledge-sharing opportunities, others objected or refused to engage with social media, perceiving it as a waste of their time. We make recommendations for the usage of social media for educational purposes within MOOCs and formal digital learning environments."

Presentation on bite-sized-development includes an exercise

In the last several years, many observers of education and learning have been stunned by the abundance of information online, the ever-faster findability of answers, and the productivity of online "crowds," which have created information resources like Wi

More free content,this time from Slovenia. How far behind are we? If iTunesU is a risk for some, will we get left behind?

"A knol is an authoritative article about a specific topic." Not content with taking on Microsoft, Google are now going after Wikipedia. Resistance is futile?

A list of e-Learning and ICT related events taking place in the UK and abroad.