Group items tagged

"What do students most want from an online class? Connections. They want to develop relationships with the instructor, classmates, and the material. They want online learning to translate seamlessly from their computer to the lecture hall. In other words, to make it feel "real, like you are in the classroom." That's what instructors want, too"

"Big data, while a term that is in common use, is a bit of a misnomer: big data is not simply a matter of size. The notion of big data comprises volume, size, and velocity, and also poses the questions of how to move large data sets around and define a vision that makes sense of them.3"

Educause Review, Oct. 13,2014 - discussion of gaming in education. Controversy, benefits, real-world examples, imagining CONNECTIONS, etc.

We might ask three key questions:

What human interactions are most critical for student success?
How can technology enable better versions of those interactions?
Where can technology replace people so that human resources can be redirected to accomplish more of those interactions?

"A major affordance of video is the ability to produce multimedia elements and create dynamic learning artifacts. This may be self-evident, yet often instructional videos are produced without much design devoted to sound or imagery. Students repeatedly described the audio/visual elements of video as useful aspects of online course videos. Throughout the interviews, all participants evaluated charts, graphs, photographs, and other visuals relevant to the content area in positive terms. Conversely, a couple of students voiced their dissatisfaction with videos that they did not perceive as a value-add over text (they said videos they viewed did not include useful audio/visuals and that they could have just as easily read a transcript for the same information)."

"I had been invited out by a group of students to climb buildings-a risky endeavor in which you have to dodge campus security while doing a series of parkour moves up fire escapes, railings, ladders, and ledges to make your way to the top of campus buildings. I was amazed at how passionate and intensively these students were pursuing this goal. And I realized that if we could somehow nurture that same kind of passion in the classroom, grades would be irrelevant. The students were, in fact, testing themselves. They were testing their courage, their skill, and their determination. And they will continue to test themselves-over and over again. If we could somehow create learning outcomes worth pursuing, we might get the same kind of engagement."

"Design thinking is an approach to innovation that combines human desirability, business viability, and technical feasibility to develop solutions to society's everyday problems. By putting people at the center, designing thinking and the human-centered design process ask innovators and leaders to tackle problems from multiple perspectives, especially those of people whose needs and desires are at the core of any problem. "

Describes emergence of 'academic innovation centers' that integrate faculty development, instructional design, (and tech) for innovation and change in teaching and learning aimed at improving student success.

This is old and I certainly don't agree with all of it but I think it's one of the most sober looks at the range of issues VCU needs to consider. Besides, I needed to test out my new group membership here.

"Today, innovation is increasingly conflated with hype, disruption for disruption's sake, and outsourcing laced with a dose of austerity-driven downsizing. If any concept should be seen as an uncomplicated good thing in higher education, it's innovation. Defined by a common-sense notion of "doing things better" and burnished by the sheen of dazzling technological advances, what's not to like about innovation?"

From a VCU perspective, it is interesting that Zoom and Google Hangouts ranked at the top of the list.