Group items tagged

"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. "

"Chilling Effects aims to help you understand the protections that the First Amendment and intellectual property laws give to your online activities. We are excited about the new opportunities the Internet offers individuals to express their views, parody politicians, celebrate their favorite movie stars, or criticize businesses. But we've noticed that not everyone feels the same way. Anecdotal evidence suggests that some individuals and corporations are using intellectual property and other laws to silence other online users. Chilling Effects encourages respect for intellectual property law, while frowning on its misuse to "chill" legitimate activity. The website offers background material and explanations of the law for people whose websites deal with topics such as Fan Fiction, Copyright, Domain Names and Trademarks, Anonymous Speech, and Defamation."

My Sound FX is your source for professionally recorded and edited, studio quality, free sound effects. These files may be used, without restriction, for both private and commercial use.

Interesting chart showing the negative effect "in copyright" has on book sales. Also talk by Prof Paul Heald explaining the effect.

Crotchety article challenging advocates of open publishing, about the cost of storing, managing and distributing digital goods, Annoying tone, but some useful points to consider. "Even beyond just their power requirements, digital goods have particular traits that make them difficult to store effectively, challenging to distribute well, and much more effective when handled by paid professionals."

Vince Ham from CORE Ed discussing the factors which make professional development in e-learning 'effective'. 

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 SLiDA project investigated how institutions are creating and enabling opportunities that promote the development of effective learning in a digital age. The ultimate aim is to promote strategies which support learners to develop the access, skills, strategies and attributes they need to learn effectively with technology. The main deliverables of the study are a set of institutional Case Studies which are presented on this site. Any questions about the project can be directed to Rhona Sharpe, Oxford Brookes University."

In 2008, the M3 project set out to explore the potential of the VLE, Moodle, a Microblogging tool, (Twitter) and the MUVE, Second Life, with three different groups of users within the educational community and compare integrated use of these tools and environments. A key aim was to investigate effective ways of embedding synchronous online tools, which are already establishing themselves as effective for social networking, and exploring the use of others that offer a 3-dimensional opportunity for learning. A Twitter plug-in for Moodle was to be one key deliverable of the project.

"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."

The underlying principle of the University benchmark is that all modules can adopt technology to effectively benefit some aspect of the learning, teaching and assessment experience. The University benchmark for the use of technology in modules, which you can find here, is therefore designed to help academic staff to consider new or further developed uses of technology that are appropriate for the contexts within which they teach

a short overview of selected pieces of literature about the learning effectiveness of eportfolios

"The Dunning-Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which an unskilled person makes poor decisions and reaches erroneous conclusions, but their incompetence denies them the metacognitive ability to realize their mistakes.[1] The unskilled therefore suffer from illusory superiority, rating their own ability as above average, much higher than it actually is, while the highly skilled underrate their abilities, suffering from illusory inferiority. This leads to the situation in which less competent people rate their own ability higher than more competent people. It also explains why actual competence may weaken self-confidence: because competent individuals falsely assume that others have an equivalent understanding. "Thus, the miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others."["

The #Facebook Effect: College Students' Perceptions of #Online #Discussions in the Age of #SocNet http://t.co/YzecYeoP (PDF via @hrheingold)

"This page features innovative uses of online collaboration tools (OCTs) for teaching and course management. You can browse the full list or use the search criteria to find the examples most relevant to you. Click on any title for a full description or use the Links to watch short videos of faculty describing their teaching strategies and see examples. For a summary of practical recommendations for effectively implementing OCTs in one's teaching, see CRLT's Occasional Paper No. 31: Teaching in the Cloud: Leveraging Online Collaboration Tools to Enhance Student Engagement."

"Social media is about conversation. This increasing emphasis on two way communication and conversation has transformed organisational communications and is crucial to effective online knowledge sharing. Communicators using online media use the term 'engagement' to describe the process of moving to a situation where users and producers interact online, discussing and sharing content."

Part 1 of this article looked at the history of the flipped classroom. Today we look at what it takes for someone to teach effectively in a flipped classroom.

Bates on the role of culture in our learning environment.

Some slides describing a framework for introducing blended learning at University of Glasgow.