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"Coffee courses are an easy way to learn new ideas for using technology in your teaching. Each coffee course will cover a new topic in education technology, teaching online, digital tools, pedagogy, or trends in technology. It is equivalent to a one- or two-hour face-to-face training session, but is done at your own pace from your own desk. Courses are offered regularly through the blog, and take place over one week. Each day while the course runs, a short activity or video will be posted to the blog for you to do. It should take about 15 - 20 minutes, just enough time to enjoy a cup of coffee (or tea, or whatever you prefer). For more information, please see this post about coffee courses. You can do any course at any time and all are welcome to participate. If you would like recognition on your employment record for completing the course, you can register for the session on HORUS prior to the course starting (available for ANU staff only)." From Wendy: I love the blog idea! Participants from their University can review each course and post a substantive comment to the blog in order to get the certificate. We could do this with workshop. It would help ensure faculty are really learning, since their posts would be public. Thoughts? Also note that all of their content is posted with a CC-BY license in case there's something we can use. It's also a model we can follow?

"As the nonprofit tech company operating Bookshare, the largest library of accessible books in the world, Benetech believes the time is right for the publishing world to seize this era of opportunity. We believe that all content born digital can-and should-be born accessible. We understand how to navigate this new world of opportunity-both by identifying the possibilities and working to resolve the challenges. Tremendous progress has been made when it comes to retro-fitting books, especially those that are primarily text, but as digital content becomes richer and more complex, the challenge of making it born accessible will require broader partnerships and technological innovation. The resources we've provided below are meant to help publishers and the myriad of other new, digital content creators understand the basics of how to make content born accessible. These resources highlight the challenges that images, interactivity, math equations and other complex features pose, but also demonstrate how they can be addressed. Working together, we know that accessibility can become a critical component in the creation of all content"

"We evaluated student perceptions relating to the significance of producing an introductory video to introduce the instructor to students in both a fully online course and a hybrid course. From the results of this study, we concluded that introductory videos can help to establish the instructor's teaching presence with the students, regardless of the method of delivery of the course.""

he purpose of this letter is to provide guidance to address potential fraud in the Federal student aid programs at institutions of higher education that offer distance education programs. This letter provides an overview of the fraud schemes that the Department's Inspector General (IG) detected, and recommends immediate steps that institutions can take to detect and prevent fraud. In this letter, we also describe further actions that institutions can take and that the Federal government is committed to taking, including increasing technical assistance to institutions of higher education, the convening of a Department-wide task force on distance education fraud, and plans for recommending legislative and regulatory changes to address the relevant issues.

A set of tools for prototyping iPhone apps that uses HTML, CSS and Javascript. Could be a good way to work through some stuff before fully developing it or, outsourcing something if we ever wanted to make our own app.

enhance lecture learning in traditional classroom settings and in online education. This article provides a conceptual framework for thinking about attention and memory during video-recorded lectures, particularly as related to online learning, that builds on 3 key claims: (a) online learning can be conceived as a type of self-regulated learning, (b) mind wandering reflects a failure of executive control that can impair learning from lectures, and (c) providing intermittent tests or quizzes can benefit attention and learning. We then summarize recent studies based on this framework that examine the effects of interpolating brief quizzes in a video-recorded lecture. These studies reveal that interpolated quizzing during a video-recorded lecture reduces mind wandering, increases taskrelevant behaviors such as note taking, boosts learning, and also improves calibration between predicted and actual performance.

This is worth thinking about. What if we had an app where students could record their learning 'workouts' and it was social? Imagine a Brainbit similar to the Fitbit that reminded students to study for 15 minutes every hour or they could set their own goals and reply yes/no if they met the goal. They could then choose to share on FB or twitter, etc. Maybe there's a way to start thinking about the D2L Awards and the Mozilla backpack and start modeling something like this?

Wendy absolutely believes this is guaranteed to save you time and eliminate some mind numbing repetitive tasks we all do.

The University of Central Florida's (UCF) Center for Distributed Learning (CDL) offers the Teaching Online Pedagogical Repository (TOPR) as a public resource for faculty and instructional designers interested in online and blended teaching strategies. Each entry describes a strategy drawn from the pedagogical practice of online/blended teaching faculty, depicts this strategy with artifacts from actual courses, and is aligned with findings from research or professional practice literature. From Wendy - we may want to encourage our faculty to use this, but this also provides an opportunity for them to contribute their own practices.

It's no surprise that graduation rates correlate with grade performance. However, few of our members are using this reliable graduation indicator to target advising efforts and success initiatives. The chart below illustrates graduation rates, broken down by first year GPA, from one of our members (a public flagship in the Midwest).

"The Affordable Learning Exchange was created to help instructors take ownership of their courses and content. We are here to help navigate the waters of affordable resources and find creative solutions that promote students savings. This includes re-imagining the textbook, encouraging faculty innovation, and empowering our faculty through grants and training opportunities to adopt, adapt, create and share open educational resources"

the site is peddling educational material rather than time-sucking games, and that's an important distinction. As it builds profiles of learners, it starts to make recommendations for college readiness and even career choice - all the while baiting them with the promise of more Yoops. If we can use game mechanics to get kids hooked on virtual-currency powered farm fields, why not learning?

Markerless motion capture means none of those dots pasted all over your body. This is an expensive ($80,000) system, but apparently motion capture studio rental can be quite high. Not to suggest we run out and buy this, but Sports Science and Dance may be interested in utilizing such technology.

This is really clear and easy to understand. We may want to share in the workshop course.

Good information on how to get good sound when recording audio. This is something we should share with, or teach to, faculty who are recording audio for their Storyline/Narrated PPTs

Includes citations that could be helpful as we develop our retention series.