Swansea Academy of Learning and Teaching

"The Learning to Teach Online (LTTO) MOOC is based upon the multi award winning open educational resource of the same name, developed by Simon McIntyre and Karin Watson. We have built upon these resources in this MOOC, supporting them with a course structure that puts them into a supportive framework for you all to help you find and connect with each other to share your own experiences in the Discussion Forums. This course is not intended as a comprehensive manual for online teaching. Rather, it is intended as a starting point to help you develop your understanding of the principles involved; a place where you can get advice about strategies you might try; and a means from which you can begin to build your confidence and capacity to continue the learning journey in your own contexts and practice"

"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)."

"This screencast captures a research presentation given by the Assistant Director of Rice's Center for Teaching Excellence, Betsy Barre. As Co-Chair of the Committee on Teaching's Subcommittee on Teaching and Course Evaluations, she performed a review of the research literature on student ratings of instruction, and this presentation is a summary of that literature review. Please feel free to jump ahead to the portions of the presentation that are of most interest to you, using the time indices below. If you have further questions, please consult the selected bibliography on the CTE website here: http://cte.rice.edu/studentevaluations"

"As Co-Chair of the Committee on Teaching's Subcommittee on Teaching and Course Evaluations, I performed a review of the research literature on student ratings of instruction"

"It's been a bad year for student evaluations." by Betsy Barre of RICE CTE

Useful podcast introduction to a research project on student evaluation being carried out by Betsy Barre of the Rice Centre for Teaching Excellence

"Many organizations, from government agencies to philanthropic institutions and aid organizations, now require that programs and policies be "evidence-based." It makes sense to demand that policies be based on evidence and that such evidence be as good as possible, within reasonable time and budgetary limits. But the way this approach is being implemented may be doing a lot of harm, impairing our ability to learn and improve on what we do. "

"This interdisciplinary journal aims to focus on the exchange of relevant trends and research results as well as the presentation of practical experiences gained while developing and testing elements of technology enhanced learning. So it aims to bridge the gape between pure academic research journals and more practical publications. So it covers the full range from research, application development to experience reports and product descriptions."

"Pindex is a pinboard for learning. - Collect and discover the best material. "

"Unhangout is an open source platform for running large-scale, unconferences online. We use Google Hangouts to create as many small breakout sessions as needed, and help users find others with shared interests"

"he MOOC space essentially doubled this year. More people signed up for MOOCs in 2015 than they did in the first three years of the "modern" MOOC movement (which started in late 2011-when the first Stanford MOOCs took off). According to data collected by Class Central, the total number of students who signed up for at least one course has crossed 35 million-up from an estimated 16-18 million last year."

"You might not want to pin your hopes on nanotechnology, genetic engineering, or miracle drugs, says Michael Huesemann, author of Techno-Fix: Why Technology Won't Save Us Or the Environment. As much as we'd like to believe that technological innovation will let us magically continue our lifestyle and prevent social, economic, and environmental collapse, Huesemann shows that most technological solutions are ineffective-and, in the presence of continued economic growth, modern technology does not promote sustainability, but hastens collapse."