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"Penn is strongly committed to open learning - a vital part of our mission to increase access, around the world, to the educational resources that can change people's lives. Our goals as early adopters of massively open online courses are to create and disseminate knowledge, drive teaching innovation, and expand Penn's global presence.  We invite you to learn more below about our Coursera courses and the outstanding Penn faculty members who teach them."

"Google is teaming up with EdX, an open-source online education nonprofit started by Harvard and MIT, to create a new site that EdX's president compared to a "YouTube for MOOCs." The site is called mooc.org-MOOC being the unfortunate acronym for "massive open online courses." It will use the same EdX platform through which professors at Harvard, MIT, and other EdX-partner universities now offer their online courses. But it will be open to everyone, including businesses, governments, and private individuals as well as professors at non-EdX colleges."

we'll be offering a free 4-week professional development course designed to help instructors, trainers, and instructional designers learn how to better use social media to support learning, whether in an informal networking sense or by embedding social media into more formal learning contexts. The course will be hosted on Blackboard Coursesites and is open to anyone, anywhere in the world, at no charge.

"This post is part of a series of 11 posts in which we're sharing the syllabi for all 11 courses in the Instructional Technology and Digital Media Literacy (IT&DML) program. Please keep in mind the materials we're sharing here are the documents and specifics as approved when we initially launched the program. The "real" implementation of these courses is a bit different as we embrace new digital texts and tools."

"The eTexts: Adopt, Remix, Create program supports instructors who want to find better textbook options for their students. This initiative is being piloted by DoIT Academic Technology and the UW Libraries to encourage a transition away from high cost commercial textbooks and to explore new paradigms for course readings. We encourage instructors to think broadly and creatively about what might make their course materials better."

"Writing learning outcomes is very difficult for faculty who were never trained to think about their teaching in such terms.  We are great at describing what content our course will cover; we are pretty good at knowing that we expect our students to master a certain amount of content or skill set by the end of the semester.  We are terrible at framing our expectations for student learning in terms of learning outcomes, with all of our learning activities in the course aligned to those learning outcomes.  We are even worse at measuring learning outcomes.  We conflate grades with learning outcomes on the regular."

The intersection of copyright and the scale and delivery of MOOCs highlights the enduring tensions between academic freedom, institutional autonomy, and copyright law in higher education. To gain insight into the copyright concerns of MOOC stakeholders, EDUCAUSE talked with CIOs, university general counsel, provosts, copyright experts, and other higher education associations. The consensus opinion was that intellectual property questions for MOOC content merit wide discussion because they affect multiple stakeholders and potentially carry significant consequences. Each MOOC provider, for example, establishes a proprietary claim on material included in its courses, licenses to the user the terms of access and use of that material, and establishes its ownership claim of user-generated content. This conflicts with the common institutional policy approach that grants rights to faculty who develop a course. Fair-use exceptions to traditional copyright protection face challenges as well, given a MOOC's potential for global reach. Nonetheless, fair use and MOOCs are not mutually exclusive ideas. MOOCs remain an experiment. Initiating discussions with a wide range of campus stakeholders will ensure clarity of purpose and a common understanding of copyright issues in a MOOC environment.

""we present specific approaches for adapting effective tutoring strategies and applying them to large biology lecture classes." (p. 3) Using a set of effective tutor characteristics identified by Lepper and Wolverton (a reference to their research is in the article), Wood and Tanner explore how these seven characteristics can be adapted and used in large lecture courses (and what they propose isn't applicable just in biology courses). Here are some of the suggestions offered for each tutor characteristic."

"Use of in-class concept questions with clickers can transform an instructor-centered "transmissionist" environment to a more learner-centered constructivist classroom. To compare the effectiveness of three different approaches using clickers, pairs of similar questions were used to monitor student understanding in majors' and nonmajors' genetics courses. After answering the first question individually, students participated in peer discussion only, listened to an instructor explanation only, or engaged in peer discussion followed by instructor explanation, before answering a second question individually. Our results show that the combination of peer discussion followed by instructor explanation improved average student performance substantially when compared with either alone. When gains in learning were analyzed for three ability groups of students (weak, medium, and strong, based on overall clicker performance), all groups benefited most from the combination approach, suggesting that peer discussion and instructor explanation are synergistic in helping students. However, this analysis also revealed that, for the nonmajors, the gains of weak performers using the combination approach were only slightly better than their gains using instructor explanation alone. In contrast, the strong performers in both courses were not helped by the instructor-only approach, emphasizing the importance of peer discussion, even among top-performing students."

"The massive open online course craze may have subsided, but the debate about the role of online courses in higher education persists. Even as more faculty members experiment with online education, they continue to fear that the record-high number of students taking those classes are receiving an inferior experience to what can be delivered in the classroom, Inside Higher Ed's new Survey of Faculty Attitudes on Technology suggests."

As you beginning to explore online delivery of your courses, a natural question is how do you translate what you currently are doing as you transition your course online?

The working group has heard and received suggestions across a broad range of topics. Here are a few examples: Make an institutional commitment to fostering high-quality hybrid instruction (online and face-to-face) and provide the IT infrastructure to support course development and redevelopment along those lines. Establish an experimental college with the freedom to innovate in different course formats and individualized interdisciplinary majors. Require an e-portfolio of all undergraduate students, connecting the first-year experience and co-curricular activities to their major field of study and career preparation.

"University officials say the higher tuition rates for online courses are the result of expensive infrastructure and the costs for designing the courses, which often involve partnerships or contracts with outside online education providers.   Nassirian said the infrastructure costs make it difficult to create online classes cheaply on a small scale."

"Online course design strategies from an instructor at the University of Oklahoma."

"You need to visit Laura's UnTextbook site to gain a full appreciation for the open content she has compiled for the course (and keeps compiling), and also to understand how it is representative of the future of openness, open content, and open pedagogy. While the UnTextbook certainly saves money for students, its real value is the way it opens the course structure and expands student learning networks."

"supporting teaching with technology is becoming less about offering training sessions for professors about how to use clickers and course-management systems, and more about coordinating bigger-impact projects like redesigning large introductory courses or leading the creation of a new online-degree program. "

"Now that I've completed this first course, I feel strongly that Edmundson and other critics - however well-intended - are simply misguided about online learning being too impersonal. I got to know my group of 30 online students as well as, or better, than any undergraduate course I've taught in recent years. (I should add that teaching evaluations confirmed my sense that the class achieved its goals)."

"Courses will be available in "power skills" (e.g. communication), "technical skills" (e.g. IT) and career-advancement skills" (e.g. negotiation). Learners pay $50, $100 or $150 for courses and, upon completion of an assessment, receive printable certificates or digital badges."

"Anyone who has participated in course redesign efforts likely recognizes the milestones of this progression. That's not an accident. Course redesign, particularly when properly facilitated by experts who are themselves practitioners of Empirical Education, can move the instructors who are going through the redesign process at least partway up the ladder. In fact, it often happens spontaneously."

""The study indicates that, based on two years of implementation across scores of colleges, OER can be an important tool in helping more students-and particularly low-income and underrepresented students-afford college, engage actively in their learning, persist in their studies, and ultimately complete," says Dr. Karen A Stout, ATD president. "Data show that even using the most conservative estimates, cost savings are significant and that OER content plays a role in helping strengthen instruction and learning across not just a few courses but entire degree pathways.""