Group items tagged

"The massive open online course on 'e-learning' will cover the most important trends in e-learning. Participants will be analysing an existing educational offering on its strengths and weaknesses regarding the use of learning technologies and designing their own blended or online course. Students can participate in several learning activities such as online masterclasses, brief video lectures, group discussions and individual assignments. Covered are themes like e-learning 101 (basic), Learning Analytics, E-learning trends, TPACK, Multimedia learning resources and Mobile technology. Participants are able to select learning activities, learning content and time they want to invest in this MOOC."

n the learning technology field there is no shortage of research questions- but there is a shortage of research funding. Learning technology researchers are increasingly being required to address issues of impact in order to attract funding. At the beginning of the project, they must anticipate the potential impact of their research on end users, beyond the realms of scholarly citations, and put in place measures to demonstrate that impact. This is a particular challenge, especially in a field that in its infancy was prone to adopt a non-critical 'evangelical' stance to learning technology. The field is maturing however, both in its methodological and theoretical approaches, and it would seem pertinent (if not imperative!) that learning technology researchers be proactive rather than reactive with regards to mapping out what impact means in the context of learning technology research.

"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."

"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."

"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"

"The use of technology to maximise the student learning experience is a vibrant area of interest across all tiers of global education. Technology enhanced learning (TEL) is often used as a synonym for e-learning but can also be used to refer to technology enhanced classrooms and learning with technology, rather than just through technology."

"CompendiumLD is a software tool for designing learning activities using a flexible visual interface. It is being developed as a tool to support lecturers, teachers and others involved in education to help them articulate their ideas and map out the design or learning sequence. Feedback from users suggests the process of visualising design makes their design ideas more explicit and highlights issues that they may not have noticed otherwise. It also provides a useful means of representing their designs so that they can be shared with others. CompendiumLD provides a set of icons to represent the components of learning activities; these icons may be dragged and dropped, then connected to form a map representing a learning activity. "

"If you're under pressure to do more for less in 2013, then Virtual Live Classroom Learning is a must. This webinar will run through the impact Virtual Classrooms can have on learning and demonstrate why perfecting your online delivery skills is essential in creating a successful online learning environment. The webinar will also show you how you can become a Certified Online Learning Facilitator."

Researchers at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) launched the Innovative Learning Environments project to turn an academic lens on the project of identifying concrete traits that mark innovative learning environments. They sifted through and categorized the research on learning science, documented case studies, and compiled policy recommendations they hope will transform the current system.

E-learning and Digital Cultures Jeremy Knox, Sian Bayne, Hamish Macleod, Jen Ross, Christine Sinclair This course will explore how digital cultures and learning cultures connect, and what this means for e-learning theory and practice. Follow this course at #edcmooc.

This site contains guidance material aimed primarily at students, teachers or doctors who wish to use a patient recording or patient data for learning and teaching. It will also be of interest and use to other clinical and healthcare workers as well as to university staff where patient recordings are made available for learning and teaching. Learn about the ethical principles that underpin the guidelines.

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.

"This report has been developed as part of our research project Flexible Pedagogies: preparing for the future. Technology-enhanced learning is one of five main focus strands embedded within the theme of flexible learning. It offers a summary and analysis of the current state of play, as well as recommendations for developing robust and appropriate flexible pedagogies with a view to influencing policy, future thinking and change within the rapidly-shifting landscape of learning and teaching in HE"

To inform the work of the Online Learning Task Force (OLTF), HEFCE commissioned the Technology-Assisted Lifelong Learning team at the University of Oxford to carry out a study of the current UK provision of higher education-level online distance learning

What is e-learning? There are many different definitions for the term 'e-learning', which can confuse those at the early stages of exploring e-learning. However, JISC uses a definition whose meaning is deemed to be most accurate

"Digital technologies are pervasive in every aspect of Higher Education, and though their use is undoubtedly common in learning development activities, this field is underreported as an area of expertise.This Special Edition of the JLDHE focuses on ways in which digital technologies are used in the work of learning developers, academic teaching staff or other practitioners seeking to improve student learning. This focus has been chosen because of the large number of technology-related submissions we receive."

"Listed below (in the right hand column) are 20 things that you, as a learning professional, will need to have done PERSONALLY in order to be adequately prepared to support new approaches to workplace learning in your organisation PROFESSIONALLY (as shown on the right-hand side)."

"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"

This blog is written by Jane Hart, Founder of the Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies and the Social Learning Centre

Students, educators and others interested in finding the best published content, events and experts for learning new things will be heartened to learn that a new metadata markup standard is in the works to make discovery of learning materials easier than ever. Perhaps more importantly, it will make those materials easier for machines to find. Once finding the right content is a solved problem, many new things could become possible