Group items tagged

"While I am not a huge fan of MOOCs (See, "MOOCs - The Opium of the Masses," I think that there is one area in which they might actually be extremely useful - ongoing teacher professional development (PD). They are a good fit to help meet a very specific need, which they could do quite well given teachers' experience with education."

Tony Bates on why the current PD model is broken (and how to fix it). Note the paragraph on PD depts? Sound familiar?

Notes for a 15 minute presentation about research in social software and teacher professional development

"Prestridge identifies three professional learning activities vital for meaningful ICT teacher PD; collegial dialogue;investigation; and reflection. She chooses to investigate the role of collegial dialogue in developing learning communities and enabling pedagogical change. This is intended to inform a model for ICT professional development, using online discussion forums to facilitate discussion."

"Here's a look at over 30 content curation tools (mostly free, but some paid/professional tools as well) that will help you cut through the clutter of your information stream to find the gems."

 DeFrosting Professional Development: Reconceptualising Teaching using Social Learning Technologies Thomas Cochrane, Vickel NarayanIn this paper we discuss the impact of redesigning a lecturer professional development course with the aim of embedding a community of practice model supported by the use of mobile web 2.0 technologies.

"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."

Site to support this JISC project on implementing eportfolios. The ePI study is exploring large-scale implementations of e-portfolio use in Higher and Further Education and professional organisations in the UK . It is JISC funded and led by the University of  Nottingham. The study seeks to:Identify a range of examples of wide scale e-portfolio implementations within HE/FE institutions and professional bodies that will inform practice/strategy;Gather a range of case studies to support the articulation of models of implementation;Develop an appropriate means of disseminating the outcomes that enables a potential user to understand the implementation issues and identify the cases that are most relevant to their own contexts.

"Funded by The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, College Open Textbooks is a collection of colleges, governmental agencies, education non-profits, and other education-related organizations that are focused on the mission of driving the awareness and advocacy for open textbooks. This includes providing training for instructors adopting open resources, peer reviews of open textbooks, and mentoring online professional networks that provide support to authors who open their resources. Through our community outreach, we have found that open textbooks should be: easy to use, get and pass around, editable so instructors can customize content, cross-platform compatible, printable, and accessible so they work with adaptive technology."

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

"Often, the word competency and skill are used interchangeably. While they are related, they are not the same. A competency is a demonstrated ability to perform a particular job or task. A competency includes skills, but also behaviors and the ability to apply those skills in order to perform a job or task. For example, a teacher may know how to use a computer and productivity software (skill), but may not know how to use those skills to increase collaboration and critical thinking in their students (competency)."

For the second consecutive year, the eLearning Guild survey, which measures use of over 100 professionally-developed LMS products and excludes in-house created sys­tems, shows that Moodle™ is ranked as the #1 LMS product among eLearning Guild members with over 24% of respondents selecting it as their primary LMS.

For the second consecutive year, the eLearning Guild survey, which measures use of over 100 professionally-developed LMS products and excludes in-house created sys­tems, shows that Moodle™ is ranked as the #1 LMS product among eLearning Guild members with over 24% of respondents selecting it as their primary LMS.

"Massive Online Open Course for Educators, or MOOC-Eds, are professional development experiences that will engage you in new technology-enabled learning opportunities that are becoming widely used for both adults and students"

Contents 1 Context 2 Improving data and research to create an evidence base 3 21st century school buildings and learning hubs 4 Training and professional development 5 Improving access to New Zealand content online 6 Development of 21st century skills 7 Equity issues 8 Improving device access 9 Ultra-Fast Broadband and the School Network Upgrade Programme 10 Network for Learning 11 Institutional arrangements for ICT and 21st century learning 12 Changes to legislation, regulation, and government agency operations 13 Minority views

Describing a flipped approach to PD

"Many eLearning professionals are locked into creating SCORM compliant courses for their customers and that has been limiting in regards to new user-generated content on services such as YouTube.  It's nice to see tools addressing these concerns moving the industry forward."

In growing numbers, scholars are integrating social media tools like blogs, Twitter, and Mendeley into their professional communications. The online, public nature of these tools exposes and reifies scholarly processes once hidden and ephemeral. Metrics based on this activities could inform broader, faster measures of impact, complementing traditional citation metrics. This study explores the properties of these social media-based metrics or "altmetrics," sampling 24,331 articles published by the Public Library of Science.

Set of links to SoMe resources for HE.