Group items tagged

"While $199 might cover just a single credit (or much less) at a typical college, the same fee buys a month of unlimited classes at New Charter University, one of two online schools by startup firm UniversityNow. The pricing structure is similar to online college course provider StraighterLine's model, launched in 2008, which charges $99 per month of enrollment, plus $49 per class."

Apparently, no one really wants to talk about MOOCs anymore, the panel included. In one of my last posts for Edcetera, I wrote about how MOOCs changed higher ed in 2012, and I think we all agree to the fact that MOOCs have been hyped a lot over the past months. The panelists agreed that MOOCs are nothing really that new or exciting. There have been online courses available for quite a while, so why all that buzz all of a sudden?

"An open online course, Current/Future State of Higher Education, offering in fall 2012 will evaluate the change pressures that face universities and help universities prepare for the future state of higher education."

What happens when 250-300 amazing, creative, forward-thinking people converge for one wild weekend in exotic Wilmington, Del.? Well, Podcamp East, of course! #pceast #netde

"I truly believe that most of my full-time, tenure-track colleagues would rather quit their jobs than teach an online course. And that's a shame, since they are exactly the people who should be helping to set standards for meaningful online education."

I was excited and honoured to be invited by BC Campus to be a graphic facilitator at their Open Educational Resources Forum (#OERforum) last week. When they first asked for me to be a graphic facilitator, of course I immediately said yes but I also felt a bit of trepidation as I have never done graphic facilitation before.

"It is a conversation occurring on campuses across the country: If more and more students are buying and renting their course books online, why do they need a bookstore?"

"early MOOCs failed to incorporate active learning approaches or any of the other innovations in teaching and learning common in other online courses. The three principal MOOC providers-Coursera, Udacity, and edX-wandered into a territory they thought was uninhabited. Yet it was a place that was already well occupied by accomplished practitioners who had thought deeply and productively over the last couple of decades about how students learn online. Like poor, baffled Columbus, MOOC makers believed they had "discovered" a new world. It's telling that in their latest offerings, these vendors have introduced a number of active-learning innovations."

"In 2014 the UCISA Digital Capabilities Group (then the User Skills Group) launched the inaugural Digital Capabilities survey of the UK higher education sector. The survey focussed on what has been variously referred to as digital capabilities, digital literacies or digital competencies. The need to improve the country's digital capabilities has been highlighted in a House of Lords committee report published in February 2015. Make or break: the UK's digital future notes that the higher education sector "has not responded to the urgent need for reskilling" and calls for institutions to develop courses to give students the skills they need."

"the reports really show that the shift to a contingent academic work force was motivated by economic (and, I would argue, political) concerns -- disempowering the faculty by making them economically precarious of course reduces their influence and weakens shared governance, giving administrators more power."

"The course was the last eight weeks of the first semester, and the last eight weeks of the spring semester.  It was a good experience, and I'll be continuing next year, especially now because I've done it once (though it is tough teaching for three hours in the evening after being at high school all day!)"

"We met with the most obvious first: the textbook managers at the campus bookstore, where only 1% of book sales were in digital form. We received a demonstration of the digital platform and are now doing informal testing. This led to the creation of a Digital Course Materials page, to share the university's materials ordering policy, information about the digital platform, and textbook alternatives."

"First, it has strategically developed its own resources-through satellite campuses, online instruction, and rigorous faculty development-to extend its internal instructional capacity. For the past twenty years, UCF has supplemented its network of physical campuses with a vast, virtual extension of its instructional reach through technology. Now, nearly 78 percent of all UCF students take online or hybrid courses and 38 percent of all credits are earned online."

"That's from The Onion, of course-just one of the many sneakily corrosive, sadly spot-on pieces the satirical outlet has published in its 20-year online history, which also includes the likes of "Nation Celebrates Full Week Without Deadly Mass Shooting" and "God Angrily Clarifies 'Don't Kill' Rule.""

"So what makes an online class feel less like it's taught by a bot and more like it's a human-centered experience? The following three principles and related strategies will help faculty keep humans front-and-center of their online courses:"

""Relate" videos get the student to feel connected to the instructor. They seek to establish instructor presence. They also prompt students to reflect on their own prior experiences with the topic and reasons for taking the course. "Narrate" videos share stories, anecdotes, or case studies that illustrate a concept or put the learning in context. They tap into the power of narrative to make learning sticky. "Demonstrate" videos illustrate how to do something in a step-by-step way. They pull back the curtain on invisible phenomena or procedures. They visually demonstrate how students will complete assignments and apply learning in the real world. "Debate" videos are perhaps the most important if you want students to actually change the way they think. These videos explicitly surface and address the misconceptions that students have about a domain and showcase competing points of view."

This site contains assignments for and created by participants in the most kick butt online open course anywhere, ds106, Digital Storytelling.

"Skitch lets you save what you capture to your desktop, of course, but the program also connects with Evernote, WordPress, and Flickr. If you have an Evernote account, you can save images online and share them in FaceBook, Twitter, or anywhere else you like. One of the best features, though, is annotation. You can add text, arrows, et cetera - and even edit them later on."

The bills would create an online library of digital textbooks for the 50 most widely-taken lower division courses at the University of California, California State University and the state's community colleges. The project would get under way when state or private funding becomes available. The digital texts would be "open-source," which means they are not copyrighted the same way traditional texts are, making them much less expensive. The texts are primarily available online; students can typically buy a print-out for around $20, about one-tenth the cost of many traditional textbooks.

"In recent posts I've written about how course instructors can support online learners, how to consider the needs of the learner and guide them through phases of dependency to independence. Yet what is the responsibility of the learner? What role does the online student play in his or her learning? And how can this be communicated to him or her? In this post I discuss learning models that assign responsibility to the learner, how these principles can be applied to online learning, and finally describe how instructors and institutions can hand over responsibility to the student."