WSUonline

This presentation shows how to embedd a pencast in a pdf, what it looks like and also provides good ideas for using pencasts in the classroom.

This tutorial tells how to embed a livescribe pencast into a pdf.

"Adobe announced yesterday that it would stop developing Flash plugins for mobile browsers, which ultimately signals the end of Flash." As we move into mobile resources, what does this mean for us?

Asking questions of the professors The course will offer a forum in which you can pose your questions directly to the instructors. You can also see the questions of other students in this class and vote on them. The instructors will answer the top-voted questions. So for your question to make it to the top of the list, you will have to ask a question that appeals to many other students. Discussions There will also be a general discussion forum, in which you can discuss questions and interact with other students. You are not allowed to post solutions to active homework assignment and exams here, but you are allowed to discuss the material covered in class; and you can of course pose questions. Once the answers to a homework assignment have been posted you are free to discuss them, as well as sharing any code you may have written. Video Lessons Video lectures are the primary method for communicating content in this class. They are posted weekly, and are composed of many small chunks of 1 to 15 minutes in length. Professors Thrun and Norvig will cover key concepts of AI in these lectures. Lectures will be posted weekly for each topic, and you can view lectures at your own pace once they have been posted until the end of the course. Quizzes There will be online quizzes as well, which enable you to demonstrate your knowledge of the AI topics you just learned about. If you get a question wrong, no problem. Quizzes don't count towards your score. But you may find that you will be asked to watch specific videos that discuss certain mistakes you may have made. Homework assignments These are just like quizzes, but now your submission counts towards the score. Homework assignments will be available all week, and you must complete all the questions during the week they are available; otherwise they count for 0. We plan for a total of 8 homework assignments, of which your two lowest scores will not be counted towards your score. The remaining 6 assignments taken together

Report: Measuring Completion at Two-Year Colleges (pdf link) The Department of Education's Committee on Measures of Student Success has issued its final report on measuring student completion rates at community colleges. Among the committee's suggestions: a combined "graduation and transfer" rate that would count students who graduate along with those who transfer to a four-year institution before graduating.

An interesting rubric for the assessment of online courses. What would ours look like?

A huge collection of rubrics!

Catchy title.

"Rethinking the Way College Students Learn College students spend a lot of time listening to lectures. But research shows there are better ways to learn. And experts say students need to learn better because the 21st century economy demands more well-educated workers."

Another good overview of diigo. Watch this if you are just getting started.

"To a limited extent, research directly influences classroom practce when teachers and researchers collaborate in design experiments, or when interested teachers incorporate ideas from research into their classroom practice. This appears as the only line directly linking research and practice in Figure 11.1. More typically, ideas from research are filtered through the development of education materials; through pre-service and in-service teacher and administrator education programs; through public policies at the national, state, and school district levels; and through the public's beliefs about learning and teaching, often gleaned from the popular media and from their own experiences in school. These are the four arenas that mediate the link between research and practice in Figure 11.1 The public includes teachers, whose beliefs may be influenced by popular presentations of research, and parents, whose beliefs about learning and teaching affect classroom practice as well. Several aspects of Figure 11.1 are worth noting. First, the influence of research on the four mediating arenas-education materials, pre-service and in-service teacher and administrator education programs, public policy, and public opinion and the media-has typically been weak for a variety of reasons. Educators generally do not look to research for guidance. The concern of researchers for the validity and robustness of their work, as well as their focus on underlying constructs that explain learning, often differ from the focus of educators on the applicability of htose constructs in real classroom settings with many students, restricted time, and a variety of demands. Even the language used by researchers is very different from that familiar to teachers. And the full schedules of many teachers leaves them with little time to identify and read relevant research. These factors contribute to the feeling voiced by many teachers that research has largely been irrelevant to their work (Fleming,

a nice tutorial for syncing webpage events with embedded youtube videos.

Debates continue in the public sphere over the quality and efficacy of online instruction, with research studies citing quite different outcomes confusing the issue. The heart of the matter is that not all online instruction is equal -- institutions still differ widely in the level of planning that goes into the online instruction they provide and in the level of preparation and training provided for online instructors.

"The LEARNING, DESIGN & TECHNOLOGY Program prepares professionals to design and evaluate educationally informed and empirically grounded learning environments, products, and programs that effectively employ emergent technologies in a variety of settings."

As institutions invest in outreach to students deemed academically "at risk," software technologies to assist in early alert are proliferating on the market. Jennifer Jones, who previously managed a comprehensive program for identifying at-risk students at the University of Alabama, offers checklists of the questions you need to ask up front, prior to procuring new software

After seeing low success and persistence rates in introductory STEM classes, UMBC began using unconventional teaching approaches to help students with the transition to rigorous college courses; in at least one area of study, the approach worked: the number of students failing chemistry has been cut in half and the number of chemistry majors has doubled since the changes.

This is in Beta but it looks like it could be interesting. "PresentationTube provides a video presentation desktop recorder and sharing network to help instructors, students, virtual presenters, and business professionals record, publish and share quality, accessible, and interactive video presentations from the comfort of home or office. PresentationTube integrates a variety of presentation aids and synchronizes presenter's audio and video, PowerPoint slides, whiteboard, drawing board, and Web content. PresentationTube provides a slide scrollable thumbnail allowing the user to move to the respective video content and control both the time and progress of video presentation. A PresentationTube presentation allows interactivity via scrollable thumbnail, discussion board, and self-assessment quiz, allowing participants to be heard and involved. No need for new or third-party software or hardware. It is free, with no ads, no banners, and unlimited bandwidth and storage space. "

With its recently debuted project "Toda la UNAM en Línea" (All of UNAM Online), the university will go beyond providing lecture notes and classroom handouts by giving users digital access to libraries, special collections, conferences, and the research of students and professors.

"Lee Rainie discusses Pew Internet's most recent findings about Americans use the internet and their mobile devices to learn, share, and create information. He explores how the changed media environment is affecting learners' expectations about the availability of information and the ways in which learning takes place. In this new environment, the traditional boundaries between home and school, teacher and pupil, public and private are breaking down and that is affecting the way learning occurs. Lee also describes how Pew Internet has looked at these subjects and the ways in which schools and families are responding to them."

College graduates who showed paltry gains in critical thinking and little academic engagement while in college have a harder time than their more accomplished peers as they start their careers, according to a report released today. The report, "Documenting Uncertain Times: Postgraduate Transitions of the Academically Adrift Cohort," follows up on the highly influential and controversial book Academically Adrift, which was published one year ago. The report is being released at the annual meeting of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, and it expands upon many of the themes that the book explored by following a subset of students from the book into early adulthood.