Group items tagged

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.

"The public and college presidents differ over the educational value of online courses. Only 29% of the public says online courses offer an equal value compared with courses taken in a classroom. Half (51%) of the college presidents surveyed say online courses provide the same value."

"'Massive open online courses: Higher Education's digital moment?' tracks the development of MOOCs from a small selection of specialist courses to major online platforms, offering hundreds of courses with millions of users.  The report explores MOOCs' surge in popularity and discusses whether this signals the beginning of a significant transformation in higher education, similar to those seen in other sectors, such as the newspaper industry. It pulls together the recent trends in online education delivery and looks at how universities can respond to the changing online environment."

Account of the Google Searching course and how Google Course Builder allows a variety of interaction.

"MITx will offer a portfolio of MIT courses for free to a virtual community of learners around the world. It will also enhance the educational experience of its on-campus students, offering them online tools that supplement and enrich their classroom and laboratory experiences. The first MITx course, 6.002x (Circuits and Electronics), will be launched in an experimental prototype form. Watch this space for further upcoming courses, which will become available in Fall 2012."

LOOC = Little Open Online Course free courses with capped small numbers of enrolments

Facilitating Online is a course intended for training educators as online facilitators of fully online and mixed mode courses. The Centre for Educational Technology (CET) produced a Course Leader's Guide as an Open Educational Resource to assist educators and trainers who wish to implement a course on online facilitation within their institution or across several institutions. The guide contains the course model, week-by-week learning activities, general guidance to the course leader on how to implement and customise the course and specific guidelines on each learning activity.

Testing a gamified course against a normal course. (I think this isn't really gamification but just reward. I think for it to be gamified there has to be a challenge intrinsic to the activity not just marking activities as complete.)

Article on demise of Coursera course.

Moodle doesn't encourage good course design. Interesting post by James Clay and it gives me 2 thoughts.  Should we change the way we start people off on Moodle so course design comes first and then some mechanics.  The other thought is could we write a wizard (or some such thing) that leads people through the big picture design of their course and then helps them populate it with appropriate elements?

"Based upon the results of this study, for the advanced learner there is no significant difference in achievement whether you show the course navigation continually or not, and no significant difference in the amount of time to complete the course."

These web pages provide guidance on good practice for a 'baseline' Moodle course, and offer some ideas and suggestions for developing an 'enhanced' course. They are intended to support staff in meeting the 'minimum requirements' for a Moodle course.

"This report analyses tertiary sector e-learning provision at a system, sub-sector and course level from 2004 to 2008. The sub-sectors focused on in the report are universities and polytechnics and the course levels bachelors degrees and certificates (Levels 1-4). Participation in e-learning course at these levels over the same time period is analysed by focusing on the following learner groups: 18-19 year olds, the 40+ age group, Māori, Pasifika and European and females and males Author: Peter Guiney, Tertiary Sector Performance Analysis team (Ministry of Education) Date Published: May 2011"

"This paper describes the implementation of a quantitative cost effectiveness analyzer for Web-supported academic instruction that was developed in Tel Aviv University during a long term study. The paper presents the cost effectiveness analysis of Tel Aviv University campus. Cost and benefit of 3,453 courses were analyzed, exemplifying campus-wide analysis. These courses represent large-scale Web-supported academic instruction processes throughout the campus. The findings were described, referring to students, instructors and university from both the economical and educational perspectives. The cost effectiveness values resulting from the calculations were summarized in four "coins" (efficiency coins=$; quality coins; affective coins; and knowledge management coins) for each of the three actors (students, instructors and university). In order to examine the distribution of those values throughout the campus assessment scales were created on the basis of descriptive statistics. The described analyzer can be implemented in other institutions very easily and almost automatically. This enables us to quantify the costs and benefits of Web-supported instruction on both the single-course and the campus-wide levels. "

"That the acronym MOOCs rhymes with "nukes" seems apt. Massive open online courses, or MOOCs - led by two profit-making start-ups, Coursera and Udacity, founded by entrepreneurial Stanford professors - are a new disruptive force in education. "

27 video primers by C.J. Bonk on e-teaching and learning topics such as planning online courses, managing online courses, etc.

Interesting way of describing a course. While you're on the Coursera website check out the range of free courses. Should we be worried?

Excellent post by Michael Feldstein on course design issues to be considered in the light of MOOC developments.

OCW Finder helps people find free online courses called OpenCourseWares (OCWs). Universities and other OCW providers can register their courses with OCW Finder to help people find them.

Moodle course on 21C skills