Group items tagged

"The study looked at performance in an introductory biology course and found that women performed worse on average than did men in tests in the course. But the study also found that the women outperformed men in laboratory work and written assignments, suggesting that the tests may not be capturing the knowledge of women as well as other forms of assessment."

"However, it is individual faculty, not CAOs and CIOs, who make the decisions about course materials - and by extension, the use of OER materials in their classes.   And there is evidence that faculty are far less enthusiastic about OER than CAOs and CIOs. Drawing again from the 2018 Campus Computing Survey, just two-fifths (38 percent) of CIOs report that faculty at their institution "believe that the quality of OER course materials is about the same as comparable commercial products.""

""In other words," the researchers wrote, "students who have positive attitudes about multitasking and prefer to multitask appear to better control this academically disadvantageous behavior in face-to-face courses." They attribute the students' "control" heavily to what Lepp called the "norms of the classroom" -- essentially, pressure from peers or the instructor not to multitask."

"The Center for Educational Measurement (CEM) at Excelsior College and Cengage Learning recently partnered to begin planning and development of a product called a CourXam, which combines a self-paced digital course with a proctored, college-credit-bearing examination and is powered by Learning Objects, a subsidiary of Cengage Learning. Unlike a college course, CourXams will be available directly to consumers."

Created by William Horton (2006), this model is most useful in 1) providing a lens for instructors to be intentional about the variety and balance of activities provided in a course, and 2) building scaffolded activity sequences that require progressively higher order thinking skills.

"To hold ourselves accountable for building upon this favorable impact, we made the Learner Outcomes Survey a permanent part of our platform experience: every learner, anywhere in the world, who completes a course now receives a survey a few months later. And since a lot has changed on Coursera since 2015 - we've gone from 90 active courses on our platform to 2,000, and more than doubled the size of our learner community - we decided it was time for another deep dive into the data."

"This means anyone can create and organize a class on the platform, which allows educators to set up and manage course, including both in person and online remote education courses. Classroom is available across platforms, since it's web-based, and it's pretty easy to get set up and started with, so this should be a big boon for private educational organizations, independent skills coaches, hobby instructors and many more."

"A study released last week found that students who start college less well-prepared can struggle in online courses, and that in-person courses would be better for them academically. "

""We want to bring the HigherEd course experience into the modern era," said Silagadze. "The go-to-market strategy is direct to professor and student pay model." Once they've gained a foothold on a campus they quickly expand to other departments and course with strong support from inside sales."

"Graduate programs should incorporate more courses focused explicitly on pedagogy. If teaching is 40 - 90% of most full-time faculty jobs in higher ed., pedagogical study should constitute at least 40% of the work graduate students do toward a graduate degree. I was recently laughed at by someone in a traditional academic discipline when I offered this as a provocation, but it feels hardly provocative to me. For some programs, even requiring a single graduate course in pedagogy would be a step in the right direction, but 40% of coursework seems an incredibly reasonable bar (even if also well out of current reach for many programs)."

"Presented on May 8, 2019 by Dr. Janette Isaacson and Grant Kirby form Oregon Institute of Technology It all started with the question, "Are we really sure students are learning what we think they are learning?" Hear how faculty at Oregon Institute of Technology have used Quality Matters Standards and Coursetune mapping software to strengthen course design and alignment across the courses they teach. Dr. Janette Isaacson and Grant Kirby have implemented a student-centered instructional design model that begins with three key components: QM is the foundation of quality metrics; Coursetune provides scalable modeling for alignment mapping; real-time student feedback provides an empirical measurement for quality success."

For me, the biggest reassurance of this experience is that it's OK to have off days and low points in every course. You can't possibly be always at the top of your game, week after week, and still meet all the other demands placed on college faculty members outside of the classroom. And from the standpoint of having a lasting impact on students, maybe there's no reason to try to be.

"Postsecondary students in British Columbia may get a bit of a break when it comes time to buy their textbooks this fall. In the first move of its kind in Canada, the B.C. government said it will make available up to 20 free and open online textbooks for some of the most popular first- and second-year university and college courses. There's no guarantee that faculty will choose to assign the new textbooks, but proponents of the project are hoping that rigorous quality control measures and a little nudging from students will win them over. The textbooks also will be available to institutions, faculty and students across Canada to use at no charge."

Yes, I see that it is Canada, once again, leading the way.... :) If enough faculty adopt open online textbooks a new norm will be achieved! Of course, the quality must be equivalent....or, perhaps, better.

The state of Washington did it first. The Pacific North West leads the way.

"Although not specifically designed to optimise learning, claims have been made that MOOCs are based on sound pedagogical foundations that are at the very least comparable with courses offered by universities in face-to-face mode. To validate this, we examined the literature for empirical evidence substantiating such claims. Although empirical evidence directly related to MOOCs was difficult to find, the evidence suggests that there is no reason to believe that MOOCs are any less effective a learning experience than their face-to-face counterparts. Indeed, in some aspects, they may actually improve learning outcomes."

"A five week course using asynchronous forums, blogs, wikis, mindmaps, social bookmarks, synchronous audio, video, chat, and Twitter Limited to 30 learners"

"The university's Arts & Sciences Council, the governing arm of the undergraduate faculty, voted down a proposal to join a consortium of top colleges offering for-credit online courses through 2U, a company that specializes in real-time, small-format online education."

Ms. Wirth had tried to use Google Docs to help the course's 40,000 enrolled students to organize themselves into groups. But that method soon became derailed when various authors began editing the documents. Things continued downhill from there; some students also had problems downloading certain course materials that had been added to the syllabus at the last minute. When the confusion continued, Georgia Tech decided to call a timeout.

This is an interesting article about the potential pitfalls, but no where did I see anything about the spirit of experimentation. When moving forward there are bound to be hiccups.

I really liked Ms Wirth - I was enjoying the lectures. The other students were so enthusiastic and eager to get started in the discussion groups. I guess it needed a different format? Maybe we need a course on how to design a MOOC. When the number of students start getting in the tens of thousands...small discussion groups are a little more complicated...It will be interesting to see how this moves forward.

"Connecting students, teachers and institutions, through an open, online course network."