Group items tagged

european site with info and resources on benchmarking.

"To gain the full educational benefits of the major new investments in corporate technologies supporting online teaching and learning it is argued that a strategic, systems based approach to academic professional development (APD) is required. Such an approach requires a clear view of the key areas of potential and enduring teaching and learning benefit which can be realised from online developments, including an understanding of the changing role of the academic teacher in higher education, the identification of the desired professional capacities to educate online, and the implementation of a number of coordinated initiatives to develop these professional capacities in order to engage constructively with the learning and technology opportunities. Based on previous work, we propose a 6three model of Academic Professional Capacities Development for effective APD of online teaching and learning. The model can help inform the actions of policy makers, executives and practitioners in ways that promote an authentic learning organisation."

This review of collaborative benchmarking in higher education is aimed at people who have a responsibility for evaluating institutional policies, practices and performance. It is intended to provide an overview of benchmarking as a tool for self-evaluation and self-improvement. The overview is published with permission of the journal Quality Assurance in Education 2001.

Brand new journal with some elearning stuff. Open access too.

Effective Practice in a Digital Age is designed for those in further and higher education whose focus is on designing and supporting learning: academic staff, lecturers, tutors and learning support staff, facilitators, learning technologists and staff developers, and others with an interest in enhancing the quality of learning and teaching, and a curiosity about how technology can assist them.

"This web site has been designed for teachers and instructors in higher education to access a rich set of resources that support the development of flexibly delivered high quality learning experiences for students."

3 Case studies on the value of Open Educational Resources citing MIT, Yale and Stanford as sites students are using to support their learning elsewhere.

Long list of case studies of using Apps at university. Most just with students but some eg Boise are with staff. Useful for the email project.

Article on the difficulty of getting academics to use lecture recording - so much so that Purdue has set up automatic recording!

"My "video-book," Learning From YouTube (LFYT), was "published" by the MIT Press in February. With support from the press and many others, I have pushed the media studies monograph, kicking and screaming, fully onto the Internet. "This is not your typical scholarly book..."

Interesting description of using Google Docs in a writing class and then using Forms to support a peer review process.

"How do we get from free and open courseware (and informal learning on sites like YouTube) to a free (or extremely affordable) open-access university?...The future of learning is open--and it's in your hands."

"Universities are run for the benefit of the adult establishment, both politically and financially, not students."--hard-hitting analysis of the US College system by PIMCO hedge fund manager Bill Gross.

HEFCE report from the Online Learning Task Force which aims to address how UK HE can extend its position as a leader in online learning.

"[Blackboard] announced plans to add a 'Share' button that will let professors make those learning materials free and open online."<--stealing the march on Moodle? #irony

Rob Torrens is using McGraw-Hill's Create service to customise his ENGG180 textbook.

THE ACADEMICPUB APPLICATION GIVES EDUCATORS THE ABILITY TO CREATE THEIR OWN CUSTOM BOOKS - IN PRINT AND E-BOOK FORMAT. Our application provides real-time copyright clearance and an ever-expanding content library along with the ability to add your own materials and articles from the web. And - peer recommendations from colleagues in your discipline can present new possibilities to enrich your courses.

In a move that could shake the e-learning industry, Pearson today unveiled a new learning management system that colleges will be able to use for free, without having to pay any of the licensing or maintenance costs normally associated with the technology. Pearson's new platform, called OpenClass, is only in beta phase.  By providing complimentary customer support and cloud-based hosting, OpenClass purports to underprice even the nominally free open-source platforms that recently have been gaining ground in the LMS market. "I think that the announcement really marks another, and important, nail in the coffin of the proprietary last-generation learning management system," says Lev Gonick, CIO of Case Western Reserve University.

I think that this is useful to help inform senior leadership. We might 'know' or agree with a lot of this stuff but getting engagement at higher levels may well be helped by Tony's well laid out post.