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"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."

"I've called educational technology issues the "academic freedom crisis of the twenty-first century" because I think how faculty present information to students is just as important as what information they present. If administrators force us to use tools that prevent faculty from teaching what we want to teach as well as we can teach it, they don't need to tell us what to teach in order to prevent us from getting our message out. If those tools can be used to replace faculty entirely, then even our content choices will become irrelevant because we won't have anyone around to hear our message. So what bothers me most about this message is its very limited definition of what academic freedom is."

"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."

"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."

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.

"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."

"the report also says that students prefer that faculty themselves provide instruction in how to use technology, rather than rely on the help desk or online-only documentation, which suggests that for the foreseeable future, faculty who incorporate technology in interesting or significant ways will need to continue to budget class time to cover how to use the tech."

" 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."

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.

"Penn State researchers have been piloting a technology that allows faculty (and students) to build e-textbooks algorithmically using keywords to gather together materials from open resources."

" You can throw all kinds of software and data at a problem, but if faculty aren't brought in early to the process in a collaborative way, effective change is unlikely to happen. Unfortunately, demands from outside actors like legislators and federal bureaucrats can often lead to friction between groups on campuses and thwart their ability to collaborate. I found that external mandates and the need to focus on compliance issues related to accreditation have stymied innovation."

The college, with the cooperation of faculty and students, made a move toward using OERs. The two-year project began in April 2012 and is supported by student technology fees. The goal was to embed OERs into the 10 classes with the highest enrollments and to save students $250,000. A year later, 39 sections of 19 individual classes-from biology, to English, to computer courses-use digital materials rather than traditional textbooks. Faculty isn't required to participate, but the number of teachers using OERs is growing. To date, the college has saved students $266,000.

"The Academic Senate is expected to vote on Monday on a proposed policy that would forbid the university to sign contracts with outside technology providers without the approval of tenured and tenure-track faculty members in whatever department would be affected."

"instructors and a large share of academic technology administrators say the efforts are mainly designed to satisfy accreditors and politicians -- not to increase degree completion rates."

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.

Last week marked the second time the Office of IT Academic Technology Services organized webinars focused on teaching professors about different resources they can use in their classroom as part of a week-long event called Open Education Week. Though eight events were held last week, Educational Technologist Mathieu Plourde said few professors participated.

"OER provides a relevant example of how pedagogy can point toward a richer way to integrate technology into our courses and our teaching philosophies. Surely many faculty are doing marvelous things with drones in the curricula. But the cutting edge in ed tech shouldn't align as much with the flashy new trick as with technology's ability to help us more richly collaborate with our students and more effectively share the fruit of those collaborations with the wider publics that our universities serve."

"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."

"First, it has strategically developed its own resources-through satellite campuses, online instruction, and rigorous faculty development-to extend its internal instructional capacity. For the past twenty years, UCF has supplemented its network of physical campuses with a vast, virtual extension of its instructional reach through technology. Now, nearly 78 percent of all UCF students take online or hybrid courses and 38 percent of all credits are earned online."

"By outsourcing digital education services -- by partnering with a massive open online course provider, for example -- Hilton and Wheeler argue that universities "shift control and economic power to entities outside of academia that develop and own technologies and services at scale." As a result, "long held faculty and student rights regarding control of intellectual property and privacy might no longer be decided in the academy.""