coursera profit models

http://www.gilfuseducationgroup.com/coursera-will-profit-from-free-courses

free teaching tools - open source educational software

I'm putting together a list of open source educational software, that

*may* become part of a future projects, or to give to interns to play with.

The list, of course could be endless, so just considering things that are ready for production, a real 'market leader' or a project that shows real promise.

It's just a brain storm at the moment.  Anything obvious missing from this list?

*** LMS Tools (besides the obvious Moodle, Sakai, Canvas etc)

Chamilo     http://www.chamilo.org

Google Course Builder   https://code.google.com/p/course-builder/

*** Discipline Specific

WebWork http://webwork.maa.org (Mathematics)

*** Lecture Capture

Opencast Matterhorn http://opencast.org/matterhorn/

*** Web Conference/Collaboration

Big Blue Button http://www.bigbluebutton.org

*** Portfolio

Mahara https://mahara.org

*** Repositories

Dspace http://www.dspace.org

cheating in tradtional courses

http://etcjournal.com/2012/10/05/remote-proctoring-services-may-not-be-necessary/

free and paid attendance apps for teaching

For Android there is a simple free one called 'Attendance' that links with a Google Doc Spreadsheet so you can just grab the data from there once you're done. It's nice and easy.

The students can be added from an Excel spreadsheet or just pasted across directly to the Google doc.

For iOS there is one also called 'Attendance' for $5.49. It pulls info from a CSV or Excel spreadsheet but has a few additional features for writing notes etc.

lecturing for SCIENCE

http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/tomorrows-college/lectures/problem-with-lecturing.html

The Force Concept Inventory- tests the fundamental understanding of the three laws of newton. Relatively simple questions that cannot be answered by physics students, they are jargon-free, the test was given before and after a term and the fundamental understanding of physics was unchanged (5000 students have taken the tests), the results of the tests were unchanged regardless of the how the students were taught,

http://modelinginstruction.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/FCI-TPT.pdf test created by David Hestenes,

To read more about research on how people learn and to see a video of Harvard professor Eric Mazur giving a talk called "Confessions of a Converted Lecturer” - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwslBPj8GgI

Eric Mazure – Research Group, the Mazure Group, mostly in optical research but also in science research and teaching, findings at http://mazur.harvard.edu/education/educationmenu.php - not sure what was published/peer reviewed. He was influenced by the Force Concept Inventory (his you tube video is a great story about coming to terms with his inability to teach fundamental concepts through lecture). He is an advocate of peer to peer learning.

Julie Schell. She works with Eric Mazur and wrote her dissertation about why more professors don't adopt interactive teaching techniques.( http://scholar.harvard.edu/julieschell)

Her dissertation, Venturing Toward Better Teaching: S.T.E.M. Professors’ Efforts to Improve Their Introductory Undergraduate Pedagogy at Major Research Universities was selected as the 2009 Dissertation of the Year from the American Educational Research Association, Postsecondary Education Division.

Carl Wieman summary: he says the problem with the traditional lecture is that it reinforces novice-like ways of thinking by focusing on facts and information rather than helping students develop conceptual understanding. He says the traditional lecture makes an assumption about learning that turns. What Wieman learned watching the graduate students in his lab is that they became experts by doing physics, day after day, year after year. Developing expertise requires extended, focused mental effort. It's like exercise. If you want to get fit, you can't sit and watch someone exercise. You have to do it yourself. In 2001 he won a Nobel Prize for "the achievement of Bose-Einstein condensation in dilute gases of alkali atoms, and for early fundamental studies of the properties of the condensates." Lecture on educational research called Science Education in the 21st Century: Using the Tools of Science to Teach Science. Is at http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/tomorrows-college/lectures/notebook.html

Some articles he wrote:

Why Not Try A Scientific Approach to Science Education (Change; September/October 2007, Vol. 39 Issue 5, p9-15, 7p)

Making On-Line Science Course Materials Easily Translatable and Accessible Worldwide: Challenges and Solutions (Journal of Science Education and Technology, v21 n1 p1-10 Feb 2012. 10 pp.)

A Thoughtful Approach to Instruction: Course Transformation for the Rest of Us. (Journal of College Science Teaching; March/April 2011, Vol. 40 Issue 4, p24-30, 7p)

cheating online

http://www.iddblog.org/?p=1194

strategies-for-online-instructors

http://onlinelearninginsights.wordpress.com/2012/08/20/strategies-for-online-instructors-understanding-the-needs-of-the-online-learner/

how NOT to design an online course

http://onlinelearninginsights.wordpress.com/2012/08/06/how-not-to-design-an-online-course/

a-z cool tools

http://issuu.com/jrenner1/docs/cooltools3

online videos in courses are they effective

http://onlinelearninginsights.wordpress.com/2012/07/13/are-video-lectures-effective-in-online-courses/

bb world 2012 best sites

http://www.blackboard.com/Platforms/Learn/Resources/Community-Programs/Meet-Your-Peers/Catalyst-Awards/2012-Winners.aspx

great reports on online learning for 2012

http://moblearn.blogspot.com/2012/06/top-m-learning-reports-of-2012.html

BrainShark - online audio dubbing for PPT

http://e-learning.brainshark.com/content/brskpresentation?elq=e5165c856e814b1cbc8e6f9253e0562c

business plans for MOOCS

http://chronicle.com/blogs/next/2012/05/19/as-elite-colleges-open-to-the-world-online-questions-remain-on-business-plan/

Lecture capture - matterhorn

Just to clarify, a "lecture capture system" is a heck of a lot more than just a camtasia movie of someone's lecture.

Check out the Matterhorn web site at http://opencast.org/matterhorn/ and check out the tour and demo buttons.

In an normal setup, an instructor using a lecture capture enabled classroom just says "I want my lectures  which are taught at this time each week to be recorded".  From that point on, the lectures are automatically recorded, published, and integrated into Blackboard or other systems without the instructor having to lift a finger (through special building blocks or rss feeds). It includes separate recordings of the lecture and computer screen, automatic support for searching the lecture (through OCR done on the text on the computer screen), automatic generation of a table of contents for the video (break points when slides on the computer change for example), etc.

Check out the Matterhorn features page at http://opencast.org/matterhorn/features for an idea of how much it is different than just a camtasia recording.

And remember, Matterhorn is open-source.  You can download it at http://opencast.org/matterhorn/download

The trickiest part is setting up the lecture capture equipment, especially the software to record the computer screen image and process it.  It's also runs on Linux or OSX, so requires someone experienced with Linux to set it up along with experience in MySQL, etc. So the initial setup requires an experienced System Administrator and some money for the equipment, not normally something a lone instructor would do on his own.

On the other hand, to simplify things, last year a member of the project has set up a Matterhorn version 1.1 Virtual Machine based on an Ubuntu 10.10 server which takes care of most of the setup.  See http://opencast.3480289.n2.nabble.com/Matterhorn-1-1-VM-feel-free-to-test-td6070195.html

I personally haven't used Matterhorn. I do know it is still under development so has some rough edges here and there. But still may be useful to investigate.