The Spring 2014 issue of this bi-annual e-learning journal published by the Learning and Teaching Institute at the University of Hertfordshire contains useful research on the educational use of blogs and wikis and the use of quizzes for formative assessment.

This blog post on Ebbinghaus' theory of memory and learning is one of a series by Steve Wheeler summarising influential learning theories. Each post offers a nice clear summary and provides further references if you want to dig deeper.

The paper was written for an academic conference and the proposed storytelling model is underpinned by high quality scholarship and research supporting the premise that digital storytelling can be used effectively in designing online courses.

This blog post offers a research based critique of the use of iPads in education. The central criticism made is that typing, text and data manipulation is important in learning and that the absence of physical keyboards on iPads is a significant problem.

This academic paper discusses strategies for encouraging first year undergraduate students to participate in online discussion. It looks at Salmon's five stage model to engage students and the responsibility that lecturers have to initiate purposeful activities that promote community development.

This web article looks at the question of how can we enable students to construct knowledge and demonstrate higher order thinking skills online? The authors provide a helpful critique of superficial attempts to build sustainable online communities for example where LMS's are used for the transmission of content in higher education and do not allow students to build knowledge or engage in higher order thinking.

This web article shares the results of a study exploring which types of interaction are most predictive of students' sense of community in online graduate courses at a US university. Interactions between learners which emerged as contributing the most to sense of community, in decreasing order of contribution, were (a) introductions, (b) collaborative group projects, (c) contributing personal experiences, (d) entire class online discussions, and (e) exchanging resources.

This is a practical guide to creating communities of practice. The guide is broken down into six sections: 1) Inquire 2) Design 3) Protoype 4) Launch 5) Grow 6) Sustain. It also contains a very useful table which gives practical ideas about using different technologies to create a community of practice.

This paper published by The Open University looks at how social presence can be used to engage students with online learning. It outlines the benefits and problems of online communication for learning and then looks at the pros and cons of different online communication tools.

This web article published by Faculty Focus suggests that students are more willing to ask questions and interact with their fellow students in face to face settings if they have been offered the opportunity to engage through synchronous online tools. It then outlines reasons why these tools are beneficial for learning.

This web article provides a concise discussion of the revisions of Bloom's classic cognitive taxonomy by Anderson and Krathwohl. The differences between Bloom's original taxonomy and the revised one are shown clearly in a well laid out table.

Robert Gagné proposed a model of nine events which follow a systematic instructional design process. Each of the nine events of instruction is highlighted in a series of infographics. The How to Stimulate Recall of Prior Learning Infographic refers to Gagné's 3rd event of instruction and presents ways teachers can determine students' prior knowledge.

This blog post discusses the required learning conditions for effective online discussions, and include excerpts from peer-reviewed papers that describe how asynchronous online discussions can promote deep, rich learning.

This recording of a webinar organised by The eLearning Guild looks at the common reasons learners disengage in synchronous virtual environments, and which factors you can influence to change this. There are also five pdf resources including a helpful checklist on the features of an engaging online classroom.

This blog post by an educational technologist at the University of Liverpool discusses VLE minimum standards. The author includes a very useful comparison of specific criteria used by 20 different UK universities.

The Blackboard Exemplary Course Program began in 2000 with the goal of identifying and disseminating best practices for designing engaging online courses. Blackboard have created an exemplary Course Rubric, which they suggest instructors and course designers use to evaluate how well their course conforms to best practices outlined in the rubric.

This presentation on slideshare was put together by Glasgow City College and shares the work they have done on making their Moodle user friendly. It is interesting that more often than not FE colleges are more advanced than HE institutions in the design and development of Moodle.

Queen Mary carried out a useful survey on their students' experience of their Moodle VLE in 2012/13. This report is very detailed and thorough. It covers many similar issues to those we have faced at City University and many of the learning points and recommendations are relevant to us.

Useful video resource on making use of the underused workshop module.