"Higher education institutions face a number of opportunities and challenges as the result of the digital revolution. The institutions perform a number of scholarship functions which can be affected by new technologies, and the desire is to retain these functions where appropriate, whilst the form they take may change. Much of the reaction to technological change comes from those with a vested interest in either wholesale change or maintaining the status quo. Taking the resilience metaphor from ecology, the authors propose a framework for analysing an institution's ability to adapt to digital challenges. This framework is examined at two institutions (the UK Open University and Canada's Athabasca University) using two current digital challenges, namely Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and Open Access publishing."
"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."
Interesting tool I came across after following a discussion about people changing their CC licence and then end users struggling to prove that they had fairly used under an earlier license.
"mageStamper is a free tool for keeping dated, independently verified copies of license conditions associated with creative commons images. You can use it to safeguard your use of free images from license changes, or to prove you are the original image creator."
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?
Interesting research by @Waikato researchers showing the impact of the new file sharing law change on internet traffic. Conclusion: little net-change in traffic, users have simply shifted to more secure protocols.
I wonder how much the wifi is driven by the cost difference for 3g? Also, how many only really use at home and then how many people are disappointed that they can't get wifi when they are out?
"The OERu anchor partners have shortlisted eight university- and college-level courses to be developed as prototypes for refining the OERu delivery system". I wonder whether the psychology course might be of interest to us?