Group items tagged

"Following my 8th grade block of social studies, students left arguing whether or not they should include Mao Zedong as a major person in the "birth of communism, China or Korean War" section of their virtual museum.  Less specifically, students left my class in an argument which reflected not only an interest in the lesson and activity but also a deep understanding of the content.  Isn't that what we want our students to do?"

"Prior Learning Assessment, or PLA, is a little-discussed strategy to facilitate time-to-degree, particularly for non-traditional students. The concept is to set up the structure and processes to evaluate corporate training from employment, military training, civic responsibilities, travel, and independent study and award academic credit from these out-of-the-classroom learning situations. As the higher education population diversifies with much higher percentages of working adults, PLA can be an important factor in reducing total cost and time-to-degree."

Open education is about sharing, reducing barriers and increasing access in education. It includes free and open access to platforms, tools and resources in education (such as learning materials, course materials, videos of lectures, assessment tools, research, study groups, textbooks, etc.). Open education seeks to create a world in which the desire to learn is fully met by the opportunity to do so, where everyone, everywhere is able to access affordable, educationally and culturally appropriate opportunities to gain whatever knowledge or training they desire.

"We feel the pernicious practical effects of lengthy copyright terms every day. For example, a study last year of books on Amazon showed that books published after the critical public domain cut-off date of 1923 are available at a dramatically lower rate than books from even an entire century before. The result is a "missing 20th century" in the history of books."

"Our team is excited to be working closely with Michel Benard, Google's Director of University Relations for Europe, based in the Zurich office, on a qualitative market study about the future of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs)."

"For online learners who took the first session of "Circuits & Electronics," the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's hallmark MOOC, those who worked on course material offline with a classmate or "someone who teaches or has expertise" in the subject did better than those who did not, according to a new paper by researchers at MIT and Harvard University."

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.

In October 2011, the Washington State Board of Community and Technical Colleges launched the Open Course Library, a collection of high-quality, low-cost educational materials to correspond with the 81 largest-enrollment courses in the state. The first 42 courses are available immediately, and the remaining 39 are slated for development in 2012 and release in 2013. In conjunction with the release of the first 42 courses, the Student PIRGs conducted this informal study to evaluate just how much the Open Course Library could reduce costs for students. Based on a survey of 22 of the program's 42 course authors, all of whom had agreed to adopt the materials in their own teaching, we have preliminary estimates for the impact of these courses.

"There is substantial overlap between the last two years of high school and the first two years of college. If you've already mastered this content, there's no reason to start all over again taking Composition 101 your freshman year. Testing out of elementary college classes lets you take more interesting, engaging classes beginning with your very first semester. It lets you graduate sooner, it gives you more flexibility if you want to study abroad or do a double major or take a year off, and it can potentially save you thousands of dollars."

"Game-based learning is still little understood and underutilized within the Scottish Educational system. Minecraft is a sandbox game similar to Lego that allows the user to create a world using blocks. Minecraft is being used in America and around the world to enhance pupils learning[i]. This study will aim to show that Minecraft corresponds to many of the learning outcomes within the Scottish national performance framework Curriculum for Excellence"

"All large-scale, multi-user communities and online social networks that rely on users to contribute content or build services share one property: most users don't participate very much. Often, they simply lurk in the background. In contrast, a tiny minority of users usually accounts for a disproportionately large amount of the content and other system activity. This phenomenon of participation inequality was first studied in depth by Will Hill in the early '90s, when he worked down the hall from me at Bell Communications Research"

"Good practice is made up of work, and thought, and mistakes, and time. Things that look easy in the hands of a skilled professional are often the end result of years of practice and experience: According to Peter Sims's Little Bets, Chris Rock spends as much as a year polishing a new joke in small venues, publicly failing more often than not.   Finding an interesting eLearning treatment for dry content often comes not from a stroke of brilliance but from years of learning to sift through stakeholder requests and experts' war stories and performance issues and case studies."

"Christina Greenhow, an assistant professor of education at Michigan State University, discovered that students using the microblogging service as part of their education are more engaged and have higher grades. In fact, she considers it "a new literary practice," as she explains in her study "Twitteracy: Tweeting as a New form of Literary Practice.""

"Results from the 2016 Mobile/eTextbook survey report are shared and compared against the 2012 and 2014 surveys."

"I think that's what electracy instruction might look like as an evolution of the literacy instruction that was once, in a past century, primarily the domain of English Studies."

"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."

"While eTextbook use is increasingly common, the reasons appear logistical (lower cost and convenience) rather than for pedagogical. The pedagogical side cannot be ignored. Publishers and providers of digital content need to increase the interactivity of the content in order to go beyond simple digital facsimiles of print versions. Additionally, instructors need to select eTextbooks with high quality features, as well as model the use of the eTextbook to show how to read and study effectively from the digital resource."

"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."

""Relate" videos get the student to feel connected to the instructor. They seek to establish instructor presence. They also prompt students to reflect on their own prior experiences with the topic and reasons for taking the course. "Narrate" videos share stories, anecdotes, or case studies that illustrate a concept or put the learning in context. They tap into the power of narrative to make learning sticky. "Demonstrate" videos illustrate how to do something in a step-by-step way. They pull back the curtain on invisible phenomena or procedures. They visually demonstrate how students will complete assignments and apply learning in the real world. "Debate" videos are perhaps the most important if you want students to actually change the way they think. These videos explicitly surface and address the misconceptions that students have about a domain and showcase competing points of view."

"From the first week of school, the six year olds in my classroom begin to create an online presence in the form of a digital portfolio.  We use a blogging platform to do this, and include artifacts that show their progress in writing, reading, math, social studies and science."

This is what I LOVE about this article: "Students relish the feedback a comment gives, whether it is from a classmate, a parent, or someone they have never met. The audience becomes part of the student's learning." Now, I still have privacy concerns, but from reading her comments to others who were skeptical she says that she has not received inappriopriate comments in the 8 years she has been doing this. OK- Matt, my eyes are opening...a little bit. ;)