How did your institution decide which courses should be converted or designed to be blended and or online? Did you have a particular process, form, or department who made those decisions?
Dana Gullo, M.S.I.T. Senior Instructional Designer York College of Pennsylvania 441 Country Club Road Office: PAC 181C York, PA 17403
Hi Dana: Here at Albright College we have 2 processes. For the traditional program, faculty must get the course approved by the dept chair before it can be offered online. I just need an email from the chair before I will sign a course development agreement with them. Payment is another story. Normally there is a development stipend but if the faculty member wants to keep sole ownership of the course, no stipend is paid. If the administration feels the course would not get good enrollment, they can also decide to not give a stipend. Courses in the traditional program can only be offered online during J term or summer, not fall or spring. For now.
For the non-traditional program, the Director of the program gives approval for courses to be offered online and they can only be gen eds which are offered online here. But if they are designed for the non-traditional, they will need permission to be offered online on the traditional side.
Sounds confusing but we are only in our 3rd year of online courses. There are many more processes and procedures we have developed. If you want to chat, email me off list.
Michele Mislevy Director of Digital Learning & Innovation Information Technology Services
Albright College 610-921-7542
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At Binghamton University, academic departments decide if a course should be offered in a blended or online format. There is no process or form that I am aware of, unless individual departments have one. We do not have a separate online or distance learning office that oversees all online courses like some other universities. LMS support is provided by ITS; pedagogical support is provided by the Center for Learning and Teaching.
Most of our online courses are offered in the winter and summer terms. I believe there is only one certificate program in the social work department that is fully online, everything else is just individual courses. This is changing now, as our nursing school is deciding to create some online programs.
Andrea MacArgel Instructional Designer Center for Learning and Teaching Binghamton University LN 1324A (607) 777-5099
Bullying is not just a relation between bully and victim. It’s really a three-way relation, between bully, victim and everyone who refuses to do anything about the aggression
MVRDV just completed the Tianjin Binhai Public Library, a spectacular cultural center that’s unlike any library we’ve ever seen. Created in collaboration with local architects TUPDI, the 33,800-square-meter library features floor-to-ceiling bookcases that cascade in curves around a luminous spherical auditorium.
Antitrust laws only go so far when addressing companies that don’t produce any physical goods. It is time to negotiate a new set of rules. Otherwise, our future economy will be dominated by just a few companies.
There are still people out there who think that Amazon is nothing more than an online version of a department store. But it’s much more than that: It is a rapidly growing, global internet giant that is changing the way we shop, conquering more and more markets, using Alexa to suck up our personal data straight out of our living rooms and currently seeking access to our front door keys so it can deliver packages even when nobody’s home.
It wasn’t that long ago that EU efforts to limit the power of Google and Amazon on the European market were decried in the U.S. as protectionism, as an attempt by the Europeans to protect their own inferior digital economy. Now, though, politicians and economists in the U.S. have even begun discussing the prospect of breaking up the internet giants. The mood has shifted.
The digital economy, by contrast, is based on algorithms and its most powerful companies don’t produce any physical products. Customers receive their services free of charge, paying only with their data. The more customers a service provider attracts, the more attractive it becomes to new customers, who then deliver even more data – which is why Google and Facebook need not fear new competition.
first of all, the power of a company, and the abuse of that power, must be redefined. We cannot allow a situation in which these extremely large companies can swallow up potential rivals before they can even begin to develop. As such, company acquisitions must be monitored much more strictly than they currently are and, if need be, blocked.
Second, it must be determined who owns the data collected – whether, for example, it should also be made available to competitors or whether consumers should receive more in exchange than simply free internet search results.
Third, those disseminating content cannot be allowed to reject responsibility for that content. Demonstrably false claims and expressions of hate should not be tolerated.
And finally, those who earn lots of money must also pay lots of taxes – and not just back home but in all the countries where they do business.
Vicky Steeves (@VickySteeves) is the first Research Data Management and Reproducibility Librarian
Reproducibility is made so much more challenging because of computers, and the dominance of closed-source operating systems and analysis software researchers use. Ben Marwick wrote a great piece called ‘How computers broke science – and what we can do to fix it’ which details a bit of the problem. Basically, computational environments affect the outcome of analyses (Gronenschild et. al (2012) showed the same data and analyses gave different results between two versions of macOS), and are exceptionally hard to reproduce, especially when the license terms don’t allow it. Additionally, programs encode data incorrectly and studies make erroneous conclusions, e.g. Microsoft Excel encodes genes as dates, which affects 1/5 of published data in leading genome journals.
technology to capture computational environments, workflow, provenance, data, and code are hugely impactful for reproducibility. It’s been the focus of my work, in supporting an open source tool called ReproZip, which packages all computational dependencies, data, and applications in a single distributable package that other can reproduce across different systems. There are other tools that fix parts of this problem: Kepler and VisTrails for workflow/provenance, Packrat for saving specific R packages at the time a script is run so updates to dependencies won’t break, Pex for generating executable Python environments, and o2r for executable papers (including data, text, and code in one).
a plugin for Jupyter notebooks), and added a user interface to make it friendlier to folks not comfortable on the command line.
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Collins, J., Hoermann, S., & Regenbrecht, H. (2016). Comparing a finger dexterity assessment in virtual, video-mediated, and unmediated reality. International Journal Of Child Health And Human Development, 9(3), 333-341.
Epure, P., Gheorghe, C., Nissen, T., Toader, L. O., Macovei, A. N., Nielsen, S. M., & … Brooks, E. P. (2016). Effect of the Oculus Rift head mounted display on postural stability. International Journal Of Child Health And Human Development, 9(3), 343-350.
Sánchez, J., & Espinoza, M. (2016). Usability and redesign of a university entrance test based on audio for learners who are blind. International Journal Of Child Health And Human Development, 9(3), 379-387.
Rizzo, A. A., Bowerly, T., Shahabi, C., Buckwalter, J. G., Klimchuk, D., & Mitura, R. (2004). Diagnosing Attention Disorders in a Virtual Classroom. Computer (00189162), 37(6), 87-89.
Eden, S. (2008). The effect of 3D virtual reality on sequential time perception among deaf and hard-of-hearing children. European Journal Of Special Needs Education, 23(4), 349-363. doi:10.1080/08856250802387315
Eden, S., & Bezer, M. (2011). Three-dimensions vs. two-dimensions intervention programs: the effect on the mediation level and behavioural aspects of children with intellectual disability. European Journal Of Special Needs Education, 26(3), 337-353. doi:10.1080/08856257.2011.593827
Lorenzo, G., Lledó, A., Roig, R., Lorenzo, A., & Pomares, J. (2016). New Educational Challenges and Innovations: Students with Disability in Immersive Learning Environments. In Virtual Learning. InTech. https://doi.org/10.5772/65219
Apеster (https://app.apester.com/): can be played asynchronously (yet, restricted in time). Kahoot is a simultaneous game. EdPuzzle also lke Apester can be asynchronous, but like Kahoot requires an account, whereas Apester can be played by anyone.
