mooc certs pay model

http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/coursera-announces-details-for-selling-certificates-and-verifying-identities/41519

musings on how to manage pedagogy in blended courses

The new version of Blackboard has multiple teaching style templates included. And this I think is very important. I teach many topics - computer apps, digital information literacy, art history, printmaking, faculty development workshops in pedagogy and technology, etc. Some are online, some are web enhanced, some are hybrid, some are flipped. I've been teaching online and in multiple modalities since the 90s on WebCT, Bb, Angel, proprietary home grown systems and simple web pages.

I see the branding of courses as important to the institution overall, but I see structure and pedagogical approaches as needing to be fluid and matched to the objectives of the individual course. Not just as a "preference" for the faculty, but as intrinsic to working within a given discipline, learning experience etc. I would never teach art history the way I teach computer apps. And it would be clunky to use a fixed set of buttons and navigation strategies that I had to force my teaching and learning activities into. That in fact was always the complaint about LMSs in the early days - for example Bb was CourseInfo and you had limited buttons you couldn't relabel and limited structural and navigation options. LMSs have evolved from limited environments faculty complained about to authoring systems with more tools than many faculty can fully use or understand.

Over the years I've seen various attempts to try to standardize. I have always been perplexed by the assumption that students who jump from myspace to facebook to Linkedin to phone apps to video games etc are too confused to navigate courses created by different faculty. What I have seen happening at many institutions is faculty with limited understanding of the technology tools creating courses with clunky navigation, jerry-rigged tools and outright confusing design or even non-functional activities that anyone would find overwhelming and unproductive. This is remedied not by standardized courses but by training.

What we do at my community college is train online faculty starting with a simple template that is based on best practices in the field for design and structure and pedagogy. It serves as a starting point but they can change it if they are willing to learn how to do that - and most are. Our Best Practices guidelines prioritizes interaction, accessibility, faculty presence, and appropriate use of the tools and environment. We expose faculty to Community of Inquiry, Quality Matters, and exemplary courses from multiple sources. The goal is to give them enough skills and background knowledge to build courses on their own as the products and their disciplines change in the future. Most faculty meet that challenge and develop rich courses that students can easily learn to navigate within the first week (part of the training).

My recommendation would be to review all the documented Best Practices available, make them part of a rigorous training initiative, empower faculty to make good decisions, support faculty with technical assistance and accessible tools, and consider incorporating a metric such as the Quality Matters review process. The courses will be consistent in their overall quality and not just superficially in their appearance and navigation.

Linda K. Ryder

Senior Instructional Designer

Art History Faculty, Fine Arts, Theatre Arts, Broadcast Communications

 

Best practice rubric for online courses

http://www.blackboard.com/getdoc/7deaf501-4674-41b9-b2f2-554441ba099b/2012-Blackboard-Exemplary-Course-Rubric.aspx

create-a-personal-learning-environment-

http://onlinelearninginsights.wordpress.com/2013/01/05/how-to-create-a-personal-learning-environment-to-stay-relevant-in-2013/

3 principles for OL design

http://www.learndot.com/findings/3-principles-for-great-online-courses/

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)