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"More recently, this view was reiterated in the 2018 Horizon Report, showing that the issue of digital literacy is an ongoing and significant issue in educator training. Reports from both JISC (2018) and Educause (2017) also highlight a lack of digital literacy as being significant issues for higher education. The JISC report, in particular, highlights the damage to student learning that can be done when faculty lack digital competency noting that, "The report also shines a light on the digital competencies of staff, with many students reporting frustration when lecturers struggle to use digital systems correctly, saying it wastes time and restricts access to digital resources."(2018)."

"On average, faculty participants reported working 61 hours per week - more than 50 percent over the traditional 40-hour work week. They worked 10 hours per day Monday to Friday and about that much on Saturday and Sunday combined. Perhaps surprisingly, full professors reported working slightly longer hours both during the week and on weekends than associate and assistant professors, as well as chairs."

"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)."

"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."

This year's study, which was released last month, reflects well on instructors. Faculty members, contra their reputation for being change-averse, appear to be adapting well to the expectations of technology-thirsty students, according to the authors. "More students than ever gave positive marks for their instructors' use of technology," they wrote.

After completing the eight-week course, however, I am optimistic that this kind of MOOC will not eat my job because it and I are not really in the same business. At Ursinus College, where I teach, the faculty and administration work individually and collectively to help our students cultivate judgment, the capacity to decide what to think or how to act in areas, like health policy, where no formula can generate the right answer. While we cannot help our students without demanding that they take an active role in their education, we also assume that they do not come in with their judgments already cultivated. College should be a transformative experience for them, and they will need guidance.

discusses some of the politics involved in MOOCS in higher ed.

TCC Hawaii invites faculty, support staff, librarians, counselors, student affairs professionals, students, administrators, and educational consultants to submit proposals for papers and general sessions.

Sound like a super on-line conference. I won't be submitting a proposal but would love to join-in. I would not, in this case, having a on-ground session.

"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."

"In a chapter titled "What College Could Be Like," Mr. Khan conjures an image of a new campus in Silicon Valley where students would spend their days working on internships and projects with mentors, and would continue their education with self-paced learning similar to that of Khan Academy. The students would attend ungraded seminars at night on art and literature, and the faculty would consist of professionals the students would work with as well as traditional professors."

All of the issues around creating or using OER, of getting faculty towards supporting open access, of implementing inter-institutional open source software communities - all collapse before the MOOC.

"While MOOC's have attracted huge attention, and hype, for supporting massive enrollments and for being free its the pedagogical aspects of MOOC's that interest me the most. The challenge is this - How can you effectively teach thousands of students simultaneously? I'm fascinated by the contrast between post-secondary faculty and K-12 teacher contract agreements that limit class size and the current emergent MOOC aim of having as many enrollments as possible. What a dichotomy."

Of course the current big buzz in the LMS arena is analytics: over the past few years each and all of the LMS providers, on their own or in partnership with other firms, have announced an analytics strategy and analytic applications that allow faculty, departments, and institutions to leverage student transactional data extracted from the LMS for analytic purposes intended to aid student academic performance, course completion, student retention, and learning outcomes.

Amherst's Chair of Neuroscience Stephen A. George led the faculty rejection of edX. It wasn't a rejection of online learning or open resources or the idea of making entire courses available for free online that they rejected, he said. "It was just the massive, synchronous MOOC that didn't seem to fit" with the school's mission and identity.

Findings of the study indicated that faculty are more aware of textbook affordability issues than they used to be, though they see the appropriateness of materials as the most important factor when it comes to choosing resources to use in a course.

"The New York Times, Slate and Al Jazeera have recently drawn attention to the adjunctification of the professoriate in the US. Only 24 per cent of the academic workforce are now tenured or tenure-track.  Much of the coverage has focused on the sub-poverty wages of adjunct faculty, their lack of job security and the growing legions of unemployed and under-employed PhDs. Elsewhere, the focus has been on web-based learning and the massive open online courses (MOOCs), with some commentators celebrating and others lamenting their arrival. "

Please join Ivy League LMS experts, Wendy Drexler and Catherine Zabrieske of Brown University for this informative webinar during which they will discuss five lessons they learned in their search for an open access LMS, how they formed their selection committee, involved faculty and students, and why they ultimately selected Canvas as their LMS. Drexler and Zabrieske will also discuss the latest on MOOCs in general as well as specifically how using Canvas Network as a platform for their MOOC "Exploring Engineering" has allowed them to create a more interactive course that engages students and keeps participation high rather than merely providing lectures and quizzes.

I reference first the article in the Chronicle of Higher Education on the bill being proposed in the California legislature to create a "faculty-free" New University of California online (read it and scream). And yet, this should surprise no one. We are living in a plutocracy. MOOCs are becoming popular as potential money savers for universities and money makers for "education" companies. One might think these two phenomena are unrelated. They're not.

"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."

"Over half of American college students have used an eTextbook in their studies, but only around 3% of textbook sales in the United States are digital. Institutional adoption of eTextbooks is low in the United States, as only 5% are broadly deploying them. Adoption in the United States is typically limited to pilots or individual faculty."