Group items tagged

"Evidence shows that engaged students perform better academically than disinterested students. Measurement of engagement with education is difficult and imprecise, especially in large student cohorts. Traditional measurements such as summary statistics derived from assessment are crude secondary measures of engagement at best and do not provide much support for educators to work with students and curate engagement during teaching periods. We have used academic-related student contributions to a public social network as a proxy for engagement. Statistical summaries and novel data visualisation tools provide subtle and powerful insights into online student peer networks. Analysis of data collected shows that network visualisation can be an important curation tool for educators interested in cultivating student engagement."

"A total of 125 students taking a first year seminar course for pre-health professional majors participated in this study (70 in the experimental group and 55 in the control group). With the experimental group, Twitter was used for various types of academic and co-curricular discussions. Engagement was quantified by using a 19-item scale based on the National Survey of Student Engagement. To assess differences in engagement and grades, we used mixed effects analysis of variance (ANOVA) models, with class sections nested within treatment groups. We also conducted content analyses of samples of Twitter exchanges. The ANOVA results showed that the experimental group had a significantly greater increase in engagement than the control group, as well as higher semester grade point averages. Analyses of Twitter communications showed that students and faculty were both highly engaged in the learning process in ways that transcended traditional classroom activities."

Good examples of social media engagement. Not using social channels as a news feed but engaging with students.

Student as Producer is a development of the University of Lincoln's policy of research-informed teaching to research-engaged teaching. Research-engaged teaching involves more research and research-like activities at the core of the undergraduate curriculum

New publication from the UK HEA on student - teacher partnerships for learning & teaching.

"Tweeting students were found to have a GPA (grade point average) half a point higher than other students."

"Adding audio instructions or commentary helps you meet the needs of auditory learners, and often adds interest to the content. Schiefelbein said she often creates an audio recording of housekeeping tasks, such as deadline reminders, as well as to review what was covered the previous session. She also uses the Wimba Voice Board to create an audio-based discussion board which students use to discuss topics and reply to posts."

Just in time, personalised feedback - using Twitter

Queen's University Belfast have a website which is provided for students to show evidence of learning and skills learnt from extra-curricular activities and achievements. "Many activities you participate in - whether you serve as a Course Rep or have a part-time job or are engaged in voluntary work - may be allowing you to acquire important employability skills such as teamwork, leadership, communication and commercial awareness.  The Degree Plus Award allows these skills and this experience to be formally recognised" The Award is awarded by the University and is a 'value added' item which students can get in addition to their formal qualification. 

This duplicates quite a lot of the functionality of Panopto, but the student Moodle video assignment (starts @3:25) looks nice. Kaltura is fundamentally an open source streaming server.

How to disengage students before they are even engaged - and this is just in the library. Students taught arcane searching skills that don't even work in the library search engine.

Article refutes five commom myths about MOOCs 1. Fail to engage students in effective pedagogical practices 2. Deny students mentoring experiences with scholars passionate about their research 3. Lack the rigor of an on-campus curriculum 4.Provide, at best, superficial and narrowly defined training rather than deep understanding 5.Are an attempt to replace faculty"

"Which of the following two assignments is more likely to engage high school students and inspire them to learn something? 1.  Write a paper about contemporary US war veterans. 2.  Create a multimedia resource of news feeds, archival video, student interviews with veterans, document how you accomplished it, and share your findings with the world."

Paper on understanding student emotional responses to online learning

Post on using Moodle conditions to unlock badges and Easter Eggs in a course.

HERE Project Toolkit - A resource for teams responsible for improving student engagement and retention.

This study is an exploratory case study aimed at analysing one academic's teaching in terms of conceptions of teaching and its effect on student involvement or engagement. The research has been done by drawing on Gonzalez' dimensions of online teaching and data generated by the LMS and data analytics in general. There is growing interest in the use of academic analytics. However, most of the reported work is being done at the level of institutions/groupings of courses. Improving teaching can only be done through changing the conceptions of teaching/learning held by the academics. Can individual teaching staff, reflecting on their courses, learn anything important from examining their courses through analytics? How can this be done effectively? What do they find? This study uses an academic's approach to teaching + use as an indicator of involvement, therefore, an improvement of teaching.

Lorraine Stefani short paper on student engagement