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.

"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."

Great comment thread on a Feldstein post on differentiating effort from engagement.

"Booktype is a free, open source platform that produces beautiful, engaging books formatted for print, Amazon, iBooks and almost any ereader within minutes. Create books on your own or with others via an easy-to-use web interface. Build a community around your content with social tools and use the reach of mobile, tablet and ebook technology to engage new audiences."

"Blanchard's and Moore's research finds that developmental milestones are changing as a new generation of young children approach learning and literacy in ways not thought possible in the past. According to this new report, digital media is already transforming the language and cultural practices that enable early literacy development, making possible a new kind of personal and global interconnectedness. The research reveals that: * Opportunities to engage with digital media increasingly prevail through the use of mobile devices-and in developing countries access to mobile devices is more commonplace than access to other technologies * Developmental milestones are changing as young people's access to mobile and digital technology grows. * Digital media positively impacts children's opinion of learning, providing engagement opportunities not always seen with print materials."

"An innovative resource designed to cultivate 21st century fluencies,while fostering engagement and adventure in the learning experience. This resource is the collaborative effort of a group of experienced educators and entrepreneurs who have united to share their experience and ideas, and create a project geared toward making learning relevant to life in our new digital age. Our purpose is to develop exceptional resources to assist in transforming learning to be relevant to life in the 21st Century. At the core of this project are our Curriculum Integration Kits - engaging, challenge based learning modules designed to cultivate the essential 21st Century Fluencies within the context of the required curriculum."

Web2Rights is a JISC project, funded from 1st November 2007 - 31st March 2009, whose purpose was initially to develop practical, pragmatic and relevant Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) and other legal issues toolkits to support the projects funded within the JISC Users and Innovation Programme (U&I) in their engagement with next generation technologies.  The Web2Rights team, comprised of lawyers, consultants, learning technologists and pedagogic experts focussed upon the need to address cultural and practical obstacles in engaging with Web2.0, IPR and other legal issues. Working in close collaboration with JISC Legal and focussing upon the specific issues raised by the U&I community of users, they have created a number of resources to address a variety of legal issues which might arise.

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

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.

The goal of this study is to produce a report with 8-12 case studies which have used social software to support and engage learners, or have embedded the social software within the pedagogy of a course or a programme.

Lorraine Stefani short paper on student engagement

"Engaging busy healthcare providers in online continuing education interventions is challenging... We found that email reminders dramatically increased participation."

"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."