Group items tagged

"Although massive open online courses (MOOCs) are seen to be, and are in fact designed to be, stand-alone online courses, their introduction to the higher education landscape has expanded the space of possibilities for blended course designs (those that combine online and face-to-face learning experiences). Instead of replacing courses at higher education institutions, could MOOCs enhance those courses? This paper reports one such exploration, in which a Stanford University Machine Learning MOOC was integrated into a graduate course in machine learning at Vanderbilt University during the Fall 2012 semester. The blended course design, which leveraged a MOOC course and platform for lecturing, grading, and discussion, enabled the Vanderbilt instructor to lead an overload course in a topic much desired by students. The study shows that while students regarded some elements of the course positively, they had concerns about the coupling of online and in-class components of this particular blended course design. Analysis of student and instructor reflections on the course suggests dimensions for characterizing blended course designs that incorporate MOOCs, either in whole or in part. Given the reported challenges in this case study of integrating a MOOC in its entirety in an on-campus course, the paper advocates for more complex forms of blended learning in which course materials are drawn from multiple MOOCs, as well as from other online sources."

csgirl * 17 days ago I would go nuts if I had to get my feedback on a paper via video. It is so much faster to read. When I get something back with feedback, I can go right to the comments and focus on them. Plus written comments can reference the problematic text directly, whereas in video, the instructor would have to laboriously describe the point in the text ("refer to the third sentence in the fifth paragraph on page 2") or hold the paper up to the screen and point, which might not be easy to see.

"Here is a collection of digital tools that are designed to help researchers explore the millions of research articles available to this date. Search engines and curators help you to quickly find the articles you are interested in and stay up to date with the literature. Article visualization tools enhance your reading experience, for instance, by helping you navigate from a paper to another. "

"Here is a collection of digital tools that are designed to help researchers explore the millions of research articles available to this date. Search engines and curators help you to quickly find the articles you are interested in and stay up to date with the literature. Article visualization tools enhance your reading experience, for instance, by helping you navigate from a paper to another. "

Imagining learning as cartography.

"The most widely read paper of Jeffrey Hancock's career was not conceived in a university laboratory. The data were collected by machines. The subjects were unwitting. The methods were not approved by an institutional review board."

"This report presents an overview of current video practice: the widespread use of video and its costs, the relevance of production value for learning, the pedagogical considerations of teaching online, and the challenges of standardizing production. Findings are based on a literature review, our observation of online courses, and the results of 12 semi-structured interviews with practitioners in the field of educational video production. "

"Giving a syllabus a profound inside-out reorganization is more than just window dressing. It involves deep thought about your course content and how a student encounters it. Marshall McLuhan said, "the medium is the message" and while the traditional medium for a syllabus is a portrait-oriented 8.5×11 text document printed on paper and handed out the first day of class… it needn't be the only possibility.

"A recent Twitter conversation that cast doubt on the conclusions of a genomics study has revived a debate about how best to publicly discuss possible errors in research. Yoav Gilad, a geneticist at the University of Chicago in Illinois, last month wrote on Twitter that fundamental errors in the design and data analysis of a December 2014 study2 led to an unfounded conclusion about the genetic similarities between mice and humans."

"After reading our classes popcorn poem I realized that a good portion of the class is amazed by how we were able to construct poetry to social media. I myself am one of those people. We've always considered poetry to be something containing a higher meaning with vocabulary words we wouldn't use on a daily basis, but as of last friday we created poetry where the stanzas were replaced with tweets by different account users, and the theme of the poem was spread through the us of a twitter timeline, and retweets. With using my new definition of a genre of poetry I see these popcorn poems as multiple authors, viewing the potential of poetry in the social media realm, were so used to seeing poem being on paper containing X amount of stanzas, but now we see people's different first impression on what poetry via internet is like. For the most part each student was surprised, and had a good feeling about what this could be going forward with the more assignments we get that involve us doing popcorn poems. "

"This past year, Davidson College introduced "A Domain of One's Own" to a portion of the student body through faculty willing to use it in their teaching. I saw two styles of 'Domains' rise out of the initiative. The first type of 'Domain' took audience into account, considering the implications of public scholarship, representation, and student agency. The second, in many ways, mirrored the traditional pedagogical structure by assigning papers or short answer assignments to be posted online through blogs. This is not necessarily bad, but also doesn't necessarily empower. The problems with the second approach can be wrapped up into two key questions beginning with: Why post an assignment online if…"

Also related to the distinction between having an eportfolio program and creating a domain of one's own; very different creatures that sometimes get discussed as if they're the same thing.

": Hansen's study comes via a nontraditional publishing decision by its authors. The study will be published in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, an open-access "discussion" journal, and will not have formal peer review prior to its appearance online later this week. [Update, July 23: The paper is now available.] The complete discussion draft circulated to journalists was 66 pages long, and included more than 300 references. The peer review will take place in real time, with responses to the work by other scientists also published online. Hansen said this publishing timeline was necessary to make the work public as soon as possible before global negotiators meet in Paris later this year. Still, the lack of traditional peer review and the fact that this study's results go far beyond what's been previously published will likely bring increased scrutiny. On Twitter, Ruth Mottram, a climate scientist whose work focuses on Greenland and the Arctic, was skeptical of such enormous rates of near-term sea level rise, though she defended Hansen's decision to publish in a nontraditional way."

This is an old paper regarding needs assessment, but may be helpful if you are designing non-credit training programs

"So give me an A-, because my dreams overshot my constraints, and my vision for the final project didn’t come in on time. But I came to class prepared for every discussion, and led it in fact. I read every assigned reading, and listened to the commentary of my classmates. I did the blogs that were required, and I wrote every paper on time and with gusto. I stopped wasting my time and I stopped wasting the classes time, of which I am also proud. And I opened myself to the possibility that I am wrong sometimes, which unbelievably only took me 22 years. I want an A, and I believe I just explained why I deserve as much. But I realize only after having done the work required to become an A thinker how little an A really means to me, and how much better I feel knowing that."

Using a design-based research approach, this paper develops an alternate theoretical framework (the BAD framework) for institutional e-learning and uses that framework to analyse the development, evolution, and very different applications of the Moodle Activity Viewer (MAV) at two separate universities. Based on this experience it is argued that the reality/rhetoric chasm is more likely to be bridged by interweaving the BAD framework into existing practice.

"If we've let the fickleness of history and public policy describe the bizarre set of standards (looking at you, Math) and therefore the metrics that we'll measure all students against, you'll end up with a system designed for those metrics. Instead, if you define your own measures, and actually study longitudinally their validity, we'll end up in a place where perhaps we'll value the emotional-intelligence development of a teenager above their ability to comply with outdated curricula. Maybe we'll come to value the nuance of entrepreneurial thought opposed to attempting to cram a line of reasoning they stole wholesale from Reddit into five paragraphs 20 minutes before the paper is due. "

"This paper describes the challenges of designing and implementing online group work. "