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"Published March 21, 2013 Kelly A. Lack As online courses continue to gain in popularity at colleges and universities throughout the country, knowledge about the effectiveness of this mode of instruction, relative to that of traditional, face-to-face courses, becomes increasingly important. A 2009 report by the U.S. Department of Education provides a meta-analysis of studies published up to 2008, examining the relative effectiveness of the different delivery formats in helping various populations of students learn different types of course content. This Ithaka S+R literature review complements that effort. It examines several studies that are not included in the DOE report, focusing on research that compares online or hybrid learning to face-to-face instruction in the context of semester-length, undergraduate-level, credit-bearing courses. The review yields little evidence to support broad claims that online or hybrid learning is significantly more effective or significantly less effective than courses taught in a face-to-face format, while also highlighting the need for further studies on this topic. The value of research of this kind will only grow as even more sophisticated, interactive online systems continue to be developed, and as the current budgetary constraints and enrollment pressures on postsecondary institutions strengthen the case for improving productivity."

Anki is a program which makes remembering things easy. Because it's a lot more efficient than traditional study methods, you can either greatly decrease your time spent studying, or greatly increase the amount you learn. Anyone who needs to remember things in their daily life can benefit from Anki. Since it is content-agnostic and supports images, audio, videos and scientific markup (via LaTeX), the possibilities are endless. For example: Learning a language Studying for medical and law exams Memorizing people's names and faces Brushing up on geography Mastering long poems Even practicing guitar chords!"

"Michael Goudzwaard (instructional designer): First, we explored what badges would achieve in the course that other forms of assessment would not. In short, badges would allow students to communicate their evidence-based skills they had developed in this course with an external audience.  "

"Stanford researchers found that walking boosts creative inspiration. They examined creativity levels of people while they walked versus while they sat. A person's creative output increased by an average of 60 percent when walking."

"The Center for Media & Social Impact is an innovation lab and research center that studies, designs and showcases media for social impact."

ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology, 2014

"We discuss our implementation of targeted pre-reading assignments with an associated online quiz in two science classes, one physics and one biology. Our goal was to create a pre-class assignment that helped students recognize the benefits of reading before class. Students were asked to take part in a survey about how and why they completed the pre-reading assignments. We found that 80% of students read the textbook on a regular basis, which is much higher than reported in previous studies. Also nearly 3/4 of students reported using productive strategies for completing the reading assignment and cited reading prior to class as being helpful to their learning. Student self-reports were checked against electronic logs and were found to be highly accurate. Moreover, these results were nearly identical between the physics and biology courses."

"The Faculty Engagement Strategies Survey centers on faculty engagement in terms of 'educational technology strategies' and aims to collect information about how different administrators, staff and faculty at different institutions engage faculty and course instructors on the topic of effective use of educational technologies inside and outside of the classroom. The hope is that by collecting information on different strategies and their effectiveness we may all be able to make better, more informed decisions on this topic. Data is collected by sending out short monthly questionnaires on the CCUMC mailing list and three different EDUCAUSE mailing lists where a lot of educational technology professionals can be reached. The data collected each month is summarized and shared with the mailing lists. Feel free to explore the FAQ document in the left-hand menu for more information on the survey. You may also study the results of the different survey parts, which are listed under Results. You are welcome to contact the survey administrator Jacob E. Larsen (jlarsen@iastate.edu) if you have any questions."