Group items tagged

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.

e-learning growth in community colleges in the USA - quite a nice summary of the top five benefits of elearning

Powerful review of Kevin Carey's techno-determinist book 'The End Of College' - by Audrey Watters & Sara Goldrick-Rab

Video tool designed to give students feedback on eg their speaking, presentations, performance, etc. Designed At Baruch College NY this is now open source and has been well refined through 5 years of use,

Article wondering about the negative side of Moocs. No great insights though.

Puff piece by Anya Kamenetz on Coursera's move into the school sector. Would have expected something more in depth to critique this.

user experience honeycomb model - useful, usable, findable, valuable, credible, desirable, accessible

Guide to using Zotero

"There is a large amount of research attesting to the benefits of active learning." Muddiest Point

Article about some work by Turnitin on sources used by plagiarised submissions.  It says 'plagiarised' but in the text says 'matched sources'. The Tii report is available on a link to check out details more fully.

"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."

Thought you WCELers might be interested in this... Dean ICT Education: Australia vs NZ by Prof John Hosking, Formerly Auckland Uni, now Australia National University Auckland University's Professor John Hosking was a leading figure in New Zealand's Computer Science community. However in 2011 he followed Phar Lap, Russell Crowe and Pavlova across the ditch, in his case taking up the role as Dean of the College of Engineering and CS at the Australian National University in Canberra.

A list.