Group items tagged

The questions that are asked about every new technology - and the one word answers that are generally all that are required. An XKCD classic.

Account of the development of the Edinburgh Moocs. Required watching to get an understanding of the backstage rationale rather than the Coursera shop window view.

Does HE require minimum standards for LMS / VLE use? Post suggests students at least expect so.

"OpenStax College offers students free textbooks that meet scope and sequence requirements for most courses. These are peer-reviewed texts written by professional content developers. Adopt a book today for a turnkey classroom solution or modify it to suit your teaching approach. Free online and low-cost in print, OpenStax College books are built for today's student budgets."

This looks clean and has a good workflow and indication of what is required. Would be worth trying out.

"what is required is a radical re-conceptualizing of the teaching and learning process, where the goal becomes "helping students learn" rather than 'teaching.'"

In this article I want to reflect on the rhetoric of 'Web 2.0' and its potential versus actual impact. I want to suggest that we need to do more than look at how social networking technologies are being used generally as an indicator of their potential impact on education, arguing instead that we need to rethink what are the fundamental characteristics of learning and then see how social networking can be harnessed to maximise these characteristics to best effect. I will further argue that the current complexity of the digital environment requires us to develop 'schema' or approaches to thinking about how we can best harness the benefits these new technologies confer.

Enterprise immersive software is a collection of collaboration, communication, and productivity tools unified via a 3D or pseudo-3D visual environment. In this computer-generated environment, one or more people engage in work activities like meetings, conferences, and learning and training. The software provides a shared, interactive, multichannel experience through presence awareness, voice chat, active speaker indication, text chat, and many other features, often including avatars. The Enterprise Immersive Software Decision-Making Guide is a use case-based guide designed to aid business decision makers in the enterprise immersive software selection process. In this report, we present "if/then" scenarios and highlight good-fit vendors for common situations, with a focus on the most prevalent use cases: meetings, conferences, and learning and training. The report offers guidance on how to: 1) ask core business questions to frame the discussion, 2) choose a research-and-demo, do-it-yourself, or combination approach, 3) identify requirements based on your use case, and 4) filter your options based on important limiters.

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.

"The study has been framed under the following guiding question: What skills, supports and processes are required by learners in the new ICT distance learning environments to ensure successful learner outcomes?"

"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."

"In 2008, HIT Lab NZ released the initial version of BuildAR, which provides the basic functionality required to construct augmented reality scenes. You can load a single 3D model onto each marker, and arrange the models using the graphical editing tools or the simple user interface. This version of BuildAR has continues to be free for non-commercial use. For commercial use, or to take advantage of an updated feature set, check out BuildAR Pro."

"As students became more competent with online courses, the completion rates increased to match face-to-face completion rates. This may suggest that online courses require time for familiarisation."

Spaces for Knowledge Generation is an ALTC project which was undertaken as a partnership between La Trobe University as lead institution, Charles Sturt University, Apple and Kneeler Design Architects. The context of the learning experience necessarily changes over time, with technological, economic and social developments influencing the types of learning spaces learners and teachers require to achieve their learning outcomes, and this $220,000 project was designed to inform, guide and support sustainable development of learning and teaching spaces and practices, maximising flexibility so as to be used by as many disciplines as feasible. The project was based on the philosophy that constructivist approaches to learning, as well as to research and study, should make use of technologies and approaches that students favour, and that learning spaces should therefore be organised to accommodate learner-generated aspects of learning. Spaces for Knowledge Generation provides a model for designing student learning environments that is future-focused and sustainable for the medium term.

"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."

Town in Montana requires all job applicants for public jobs to divulge usernames and passwords for all their online log-ins!!

Quite a good overview of elements required for building an online community by Kevin Wilcoxon. Uses the Anderson, Garrison and Archer model as its core theory.

Abstract Managerialism creates burdens for academics with no evidence for its benefit. Business imperatives override educational. There is needless competition between universities. Research imperatives override education. Global inequalities in educational need are ignored, universities have not kept up with the way young people gain information and initiatives to reduce the environmental impact of higher education are 'tinkering' rather than the required total re-thinking of higher education.

Full report of IPPR on the future of HE in UK.

Steve Wheeler post on facets of digital literacy. Includes some insightful comments.