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Sick of making BORING two dimensional movies? Watch this episode to learn how to shoot and edit 3D video and even build a rig just for 3D movie making.

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

Making Assessment Count eReflect site

"Contract cheating is the process whereby students auction off the opportunity for others to complete assignments for them. It is an apparently widespread yet under-researched problem. One suggested strategy to prevent contract cheating is to shorten the turnaround time between the release of assignment details and the submission date, thus making it difficult for students to make arrangements with contractors. Here, we outline some characteristics of the current market for contract cheating and demonstrate that short turnaround times are unlikely to prevent contract cheating because requested turnaround times for university-level assignments completed via contract cheating are already short (average 5 days). In addition, for every contractor awarded a job, there are an average of 10 others offering to complete it within the specified time suggesting that there is abundant excess capacity in the market."

Dr Ben Goldacre today set out how teachers in England have the chance to make teaching a truly evidence-based profession.

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.

"teaching with eBooks to make a positive impact on teaching and learning" by Phil Gee, Plymouth University (shared by Pearson)

With Mocksup you can upload website mockups and customize their background and alignment to make them look more like real pages. You can also link mockups together to give the feel of a real working site.

Featuring four towering limestone columns and classic Flemish-bond brickwork, the century-old Mackay School of Mines Building at the University of Nevada, Reno, has long served as a bastion of Silver State history. Named after Irish immigrant and "Comstock Lode King" John Mackay, notable touches such as a cast bronze statue designed by Mount Rushmore sculptor Gutzon Borglum just outside the building helped it earn a spot in the National Register of Historic Places. Within its oak doors, however, are the makings of an intriguing experiment that's decidedly more new school. Like a mini museum, a collection of 3D-printed models are displayed within the building's sunlit, three-story atrium -- attracting a mix of students and teachers. Even more popular than the displays of plastic gears and molecule models, however, are the two 3D printers that made them: a professional-grade Stratasys uPrint SE Plus and a hobbyist 3DTouch machine by 3D Systems Corporation.

"The Institute for Global Health's Dr Jolene Skordis-Worrall and Dr Hassan Haghparast-Bidgoli explain the challenges and triumphs they encountered when turning one of their existing modules into an online-only, Moodle-based course."

Webinar Date: February 19, 2013 17:00am - 17:45am While Eastern New Mexico University (ENMU) is the third largest school in the state, it covers more ground than any other university. The entire eastern part of the state, to be exact. In the dean's quest to make education accessible to the region's traditional, non-traditional and dual-enrollment students (high school students taking college courses), she had to think outside the traditional classroom experience.

The Report identifies key challenges for effective policy making and implementation in a rapidly changing, globalised, technology-rich, and densely networked UK. It focuses on implications for: crime prevention and criminal justice; health, the environment and wellbeing; skills, employment and education; preventing radicalisation and extremism; social mobility; and social integration.

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.

"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"

"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."

"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. "

AJET 28(Special issue, 6) was published on 15 August 2012. Readers are invited to select file format, window width, font and font size to suit their personal preferences for screen reading comfort. For environmental sustainability purposes, we endeavour to make screen only reading as attractive as we can.

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.

"Politicians who want to improve the quality of teaching through increased competition may ironically simply end up with ever greater systems of centralised control. Following Hayek (the philosopher father of free market economics), I would say this is not the way to make the best of our teachers."

"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."