Group items tagged

"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.

"Quite expectedly, faculty comments included concerns about creating electronic correspondence courses, lowering course quality, and otherwise silencing the faculty voice in the teaching and learning process. Indeed, success with this new mode would depend on acknowledging the legitimacy of that fear and creating a process to encourage, respect, and retain the faculty voice. Our method of achieving this is anchored by five essential elements and will be applied to more than 250 courses, including general education, in nearly 20 academic programs."

"Of all the challenges facing online learning, I believe the need to train faculty properly to be the most difficult. Without adequate training in teaching methods, I don't see how learning technologies can be used effectively. We cannot afford to go on creating a whole parallel industry of instructional designers to hold the hands of faculty who can't teach effectively. Higher education is costing too much to have amateurs doing the teaching."

"Drawing on her experience as a consultant for VoiceThread in which she hosts monthly Google+ Hangouts, she created the very first "Teach & Share" Google+ Hangout, an online gathering of educators who, for this installment, shared their experiences using the learning management system Canvas. "I started thinking about how much faculty learn from simply talking to one another. These are always the most powerful professional development experiences," Pacansky-Brock said of her decision to host the event. "Faculty need to connect with each other to keep innovation moving forward. [...] That's the premise of the Teach & Shares.""

"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."

"Open educational resources rate as one popular strategy, with 92 percent of faculty members and 97 percent of administrators saying instructors should assign more of them. Still, past research has suggested many faculty members haven't heard of OER or don't know where to discover open content. David Wiley, chief academic officer of Lumen Learning, said the report builds on previous findings about OER."

"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."

"The important point to remember is that the fair use guidelines that are used to determine what materials can be used on the local campus do not automatically transfer to online courses offered to the consumer public. To many faculty, these rules seem bureaucratic, but librarians can help navigate the terrain that faculty are not accustomed to dealing with. And, by becoming comfortable with copyright provisions themselves, faculty can ensure that their online students access the same level of resources that on-campus students enjoy."

"Leveraging the revolutionary potential of digital technology to provide access to the world's best faculty members, this new method of dissemination takes what were once exclusive, limited-access, high-priced resources and puts them online for anyone to learn from, freely. Despite its somewhat goofy acronym, this new model has been embraced, sometimes in the face of faculty objections, because of its democratizing, globalizing potential, as well as its effectiveness in improving an institution's reputation for innovation and excellence. I am, of course, talking about Coapi. If you haven't heard of it, the Coalition of Open Access Policy Institutions, which now comprises more than 40, began in 2011 as a way for colleges to coordinate and advocate for open-access policies, which typically require that all faculty journal publications be made available freely online, whether on a personal Web site, institutional repository, or discipline-specific public archive."

Imagine how transformative it would be if we could combine self-paced, self-directed postsecondary learning (which has been around in one form or another for millennia) with online delivery of content that has embedded in it both the sophisticated assessment of learning and the ability to diagnose learning problems, sometimes even before the learner is aware of them, and provide just-in-time interventions that keep the learner on track. Add to that the opportunity for the learner to connect to and participate in groups of other learners, and, to link directly to the faculty member and receive individualized attention and mentoring. What you would have is the 21st-century version of do-it-yourself college, grounded in but well beyond the experienced reality of the thousands of previous DIYers such as Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, and Thomas Edison.

" humans are more important than technology, but inspiring faculty should be our goal. Our organizational cultures need to embrace online learning as unique. We need to be supporting faculty by immersing them in engaging, meaningful online classes as part of their preparation to becoming great online instructors. When our organizational practices convey a hierarchy between face-to-face and online classes, that hierarchy will translate into the attitudes of the instructors who teach those classes."

"Effective immediately, the single sign-on and gradebook syncing capabilities between the two companies are available for all current and prospective Canvas users. This is especially important for the many faculty who would like to enjoy the benefits of OER but have not had adequate tools and services to support this. With panOpen, not only can faculty make use of the platform tools, but also of panOpen's editors and instructional designers to help ensure that both faculty and students have the best possible experience with open content."

Innovation in the curricula, including experimentation with technologies and learning spaces, is most likely to be effective when driven by faculty and student needs and served by integrated support structures. Surveys of IU faculty and graduate students have identified spaces for scholarly community as a critical need. Collaboration across university services (technology, undergraduate education, libraries) delivers a more cohesive and comprehensive experience. The IU Bloomington Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning provides a mix of consultation and workshop spaces, instructional technology facilities, and relaxed forums for exchanging ideas.

"In 2014, the Centre for Innovation and Excellence in Learning embarked on a research project to investigate elements of effective teaching and learning practice valued at Vancouver Island University (VIU). Our investigation resulted in conversations with faculty and students in defining the elements of teaching practice valued at VIU. Faculty from the existing Community of Scholarly Teaching Practice (CoSTP) and students from the VIU community were invited to contribute their ideas about regarding effective teaching and learning design and practice. These consultations have generated a list of themes which capture practices most valued at VIU. "

"Stanford faculty members are playing a leading role in exploring online education - and a number of them are now sharing experiences about their activities and what they are learning in a new series of videos available on the Stanford Online website."

A coalition of faculty groups has declared war against online learning, particularly massive open online courses (MOOCs), because it said it believes that the fast expansion of this form of education is being promulgated by corporations - specifically for-profit colleges and universities and education technology companies - at the expense of student education and public interest.

"The rock-star meme implies that teaching is all about performance. What happens on stage is still what matters, even if techno-hip educators supplant traditional sages. Talk of rock-star faculty members reinforces the static lecture model that MOOCs were, ironically, developed in part to destroy. The audience at a rock concert is listening, not interacting. Decades of research and a modicum of common sense confirm that students engage and learn more through active participation in the classroom. For all the talk of personalized analytics and adaptive learning, MOOCs built around faculty rock stars will just transfer the lean-back experience of the lecture hall to a screen."

"This Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education (Framework) grows out of a belief that information literacy as an educational reform movement will realize its potential only through a richer, more complex set of core ideas. During the fifteen years since the publication of the Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education,1 academic librarians and their partners in higher education associations have developed learning outcomes, tools, and resources that some institutions have deployed to infuse information literacy concepts and skills into their curricula. However, the rapidly changing higher education environment, along with the dynamic and often uncertain information ecosystem in which all of us work and live, require new attention to be focused on foundational ideas about that ecosystem. Students have a greater role and responsibility in creating new knowledge, in understanding the contours and the changing dynamics of the world of information, and in using information, data, and scholarship ethically. Teaching faculty have a greater responsibility in designing curricula and assignments that foster enhanced engagement with the core ideas about information and scholarship within their disciplines. Librarians have a greater responsibility in identifying core ideas within their own knowledge domain that can extend learning for students, in creating a new cohesive curriculum for information literacy, and in collaborating more extensively with faculty."

"One strategy for these colleges to avoid extinction is to diversify-to avoid a precarious reliance on residential students. And one way to do that is by adding online programs to the mix. The challenge for many small colleges is that they see online courses as at odds with their very identity. After all, these institutions embrace intimacy as central to their mission, with close, mentoring relationships between faculty and students, and deep, comradely connections among students-essential ingredients of highly engaged learning. For many, online fails to meet these crucial education ambitions. Instead, they reject virtual instruction as alienated learning, with isolated faculty and students coldly facing inert computer screens-not one another."