Group items tagged

"Unfortunately, we had to take down your paper," the notice reads. "Academia.edu is committed to enabling a transition to a world where there is open access to scientific literature. Unfortunately, Elsevier takes a different view." It also mentions that more than 13,000 researchers so far have signed a petition "protesting Elsevier's business practices."

Educause's list of MOOC articles and resour

"Fast-forward to October 2012: OERs have failed to significantly affect the day-to-day teaching of the vast majority of higher education institutions. Traditional textbooks and readings still dominate most teaching venues even though essentially all students are online: Course management systems are used only for the dissemination of syllabi, class notes, general communications, and as a grade book. OERs are out there…somewhere. Why aren't they on campus?"

"There are many answers to that question, but here is one: Public edu-blogging is an essential element of digital age education, because a student blog acts as a launch pad for developing and leveraging student connectivity, reflexivity, and personal learning networks."

"Although Web 2.0 assists educators with guiding learners to complete tasks and supports the scaffolding of lessons to meet course objectives, there are more advanced pedagogical implications when using Web 2.0 as an instructional tool, such as fostering information literacy and metacognition."

ECAR has surveyed undergraduate students annually since 2004 about technology in higher education. In 2013, ECAR collaborated with more than 250 higher education institutions to collect responses from more than 112,000 undergraduate students about their technology experiences and expectations. The findings are distilled into four broad themes to help educators and higher education institutions better understand how students experience technology on their respective campuses and the ways in which new, better, or more technology can impact students' relationship with information technology.

As a follow-up to "Come see me at EDUCAUSE," I wanted to share out some resources from my presentations as well as some resources that I gathered at the conference.

"Instead of being an unstoppable force disrupting the faculty profession, MOOCs can be an opportunity to empower faculty to explore, create, and express themselves in new ways through open and digital education. To do this requires establishing the proper institutional context, one that allows for experimentation and grassroots, faculty-led initiatives to flourish. We have argued in this article that a focus on soft infrastructure - the resources, values, and affirmations that support faculty agency in experimenting with digital learning - has helped us create this context at Stanford. Our research suggests that this approach has given faculty the opportunity and autonomy to manifest their desires to share intellectual work more broadly, experiment and take pedagogical risks, express their unique teaching philosophies in new ways, and thoughtfully engage in the MOOC phenomenon on their own terms. As a result, a great number and variety of open and digital learning approaches have flourished at our institution."

Social presence remains the key to a successful learning experience, and understanding social presence, with its critical connection to learning and community building, allows us to better support faculty and students. Understanding a wide selection of tools, media, and reflective activities helps faculty assist students in taking responsibility for their own learning. Providing iterative feedback and mindful assessments helps faculty meet learning outcomes and guide student learning. Implementing change in small steps is the key to understanding which strategies work and which lead to frustration and discontent.

"Rather than providing information about students at risk, we aimed to develop a system that would broadly inform instructors about all their enrolled students, providing summarized institutional data about the aggregate characteristics of the students enrolled in their respective classes. We call it the Student Profile Report (SPR), a short document that summarizes student records, intended to provide a useful snapshot of information about the population of students taking a course prior to the start of a semester. "

"expect to see more colleges turn to these providers, said Michael Feldstein, a consultant and co-publisher of the popular e-Literate blog, who has long followed the OPM market. A survey released last week by The Chronicle of Higher Education and P3-EDU, a conference on public-private partnerships to be hosted by George Mason University, found that 42 percent of provosts, chief financial officers and presidents surveyed said that expanding online programs was the area they most considered turning to a private company to help with."

Stanford On-Line course

"Many institutions have invested substantial resources in diverse initiatives to deliver distance learning and/or enhance campus-based learning with online resources. To these institutional efforts, faculty and students are now adding online tools and resources from beyond the campus. Higher education institutions are confronting the need to connect these various efforts to create more powerful and integrated learning experiences for all of their students. In this interview, Brian Hughes, Director of Social Media at the Teacher's College at Columbia University, discusses the issues surrounding social media integration."

"As a former K-12 teacher and a current educator in higher education, I grappled with the idea of creating a Facebook account to communicate and become "friends" with my students. I was less concerned with using Twitter because of the difference between "following" and "friending." In my youth I was told by parents and teachers, "I'm not your friend." They said this to distinguish between the roles of friends and adults in the rearing of a child. An assumed level of respect was maintained between teacher-student and parent-teacher when such boundaries were made clear. Today's shift in learning environments to learner-centered classrooms thus raises these questions: Do educators now want to be friends with their students? Do students actually prefer not to be friends with their teachers?"

Clarity in Fair Use

Cornell has published a super summary of how you can use woks in Public Domain - January 2012

Super resource!

"Last month in a blog post titled "Better Than a Textbook?", I noted that some faculty find it easier to think about the massive open online courses (MOOCs) provided by vendors like Coursera as "super-textbooks" than as actual courses. Earlier this month, Vanderbilt computer science professor Doug Fisher wrote a guest post for the blog ProfHacker titled "Warming up to MOOCs," in which he described his experiments in using MOOCs in this fashion."

An assessment model for undergraduates