This year we’d like to involve a wider segment of the teaching and learning community to help us design the survey. Please join us online for one of two 30-minute discussion sessions:
Sept 14 at 12pm ET OR Sept 15 at 2pm ET
To join, just go to https://educause.acms.com/eliweb on the date and time of the session and join as a guest. No registration or login needed.
New Classrooms, a nonprofit geared toward personalizing education in schools, is expanding its “Teach to One: Math” model to 13,000 students at 40 schools in 10 states and the District of Columbia
According to New Classrooms, Teach to One (TTO) modernizes the predominant, century-old model of one teacher to 25 or more students teaching from one textbook to a personalized learning experience for every student
To learn more about New Classrooms and its TTO model, visit the company’s website.
three shifts in policy and leadership culture may help move these efforts forward:
New types of assessment are gaining ground. Several states are piloting performance-based assessments to replace standardized testing.
Exemplars in the business community are now promoting flat organizational structures, where employees work in smaller teams and have more voice and power over how they work.
Teachers are more networked than ever before, providing a unique opportunity to share and spread good teaching practice.
While the hybrid roles that teachers play at teacher-powered schoolsmay seem like a lot of work, they give teachers the power to decide what programs, textbooks, software, etc., should or should not be used in order to make space for the community’s vision. And when teachers decide together on the vision and strategy to reach all students, they are often more invested and excited by the change they are creating from within.
Some of the best available examples of how to improve teacher quality and promote teacher leadership lie in models offered by other high-performing places, like Finland and Singapore.
Seven qualities must be in place.
A vision and strategy for teacher leadership, “with stated goals and clear images of tasks to be done, must be in place.” Teachers must feel part of creating this vision in order to buy in.
A supportive administration. “Principals must be willing to share power with teachers and must have the skills to cultivate them as leaders,” most educational leadership programs focus on supervising teachers, not supporting them as leaders.
There need to be appropriate human and fiscal resources.
Work structures that enable authentic collaboration are crucial. While more resources help on this point, there are creative ways to stretch limited dollars.
Supportive social norms and working relationships are key to teacher leadership. “All too often, policymakers develop incentives to motivate teachers and administrators,” . “Instead, policies and programs should be in place to value teachers spreading their expertise to one another, allowing teaching to be exercised as a team sport.”
Organizational politics must allow for blurred lines between roles. Teachers can only take on leadership roles at the expense of principals and district-level administrators. This also requires teacher unions to act more as “professional guilds” and for districts to follow the example of some for-profit businesses that are flattening bureaucracies.
The school and system must be oriented toward risk-taking and inquiry. Just as students need hands-on applied learning rooted in inquiry, so, too, do teachers need powerful driving questions to push their work forward. “School systems must be able to interrogatethemselves about the extent to which they create opportunities for teachers to learn and lead in ways that spread teaching expertise and improve student outcomes.”
Like the millennials before them, Generation Z grew up as digital natives, with devices a fixture in the learning experience. According to the survey results, these students want “engaging, interactive learning experiences” and want to be “empowered to make their own decisions.” In addition, the students “expect technology to play an instrumental role in their educational experience.”
to cater to the digital appetites of tomorrow’s higher education learners, technology in education will need to play a bit of catch-up, states the New Media Consortium’s 2015 Course Apps report. According to NMC’s analysts, digital-textbook adoption was one of the leading trends helping to reinvent how higher education students learn. But publishers have not captured the innovations happening elsewhere in the digital marketplace.
The Generation Z report ranked the effectiveness of 11 education technology tools:
intelligent agent: dancing hamster
immediate gratification – certification, this is practically badges
story builder – D2L tool
D2L dropbox – look previous assignments and submissions within dropbox
time savers: 1. miss an assignment deadline – use agent. My note: how does it roll over? how much time and effort to condition it after it is rolled over?
text expanders: create codes in the browsers to evoke repetitions (;runon)
“Daylight Experience” is the D2L new look and feel put on D2L. nice clean modern looking.
Mobile First, API Access, Assessments, Advanced CBE (competency-based education programs), Predictive Analytics (recommendation system to pick right course, red flags, Dashboards,
Content:
interactive publisher material. Dates and Feeds on Mobile, Curriculum Planning
Capture: my note – how does it fit with MediaSpace
ePortfolio my note – how does it fit TK-20
Repository – open content, publishers, how to bring easier into a course
Adaptive learning
D2L purchased a module. publisher packets, adaptive textbooks. D2L looks at it as an engine where faculty feeds the idea and the engine is making the links and structuring the ideas into content. It also the engine checks what learners already know and based on results finds knowledge gaps.
need well defined learning objective, good content and ways to assess the material.
Start with creating support course delivery, test preparation.
There are only 11 education-focused firms listed on the U.S. stock market with a market cap of over $1 billion. While the market is small and fractured today, GSV Capital estimates that education will grow from 9 percent to 12 percent of America’s GDP over the next decade. This equates to a trillion-dollar opportunity.
Early childhood
FarFaria: FarFaria is a literacy tool that offers families a vast library of books that are perfect for story time. Parents can go through the books with their son or daughter, or children can have the books read to them by the app.
Tinybop: Tinybop creates iOS apps that engage children and promote curiosity in kids. Their apps break down complex subjects (like geology and anatomy) into engaging apps that are filled with stunning illustrations.
Vroom: Vroom is a new app that pushes helpful tips to parents on how to turn everyday moments in life into brain-building opportunities. Vroom sends parents actionable tips and strategies that are age-appropriate for their child.
Tinkergarten: Tinkergarten helps kids develop and grow through outdoor-play-based learning and activities. They have a technology-enabled, distributed workforce that allows them to expand their classes across the United States.
Primary/secondary school
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My Note:
“although 95 percent of schools have Internet, only 20 percent have high-speed access. For technology to disrupt our schools, we need to get them connected.”
yet, MN government is right now quarreling about fast-connection networking rural parts of Minnesota, whereas the Republicans insist on $30 Mil only, Democrats on $80Mil and the governor on $100K+.
In 2002, the U.S. created the conditions for monopoly in the Internet services providers market, which accumulates to disastrous results. The fight around net neutrality proves one more time that trend (of monopolizing connectivity and profiteering for big companies, rather then developing the US): http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2014/02/06/272480919/when-it-comes-to-high-speed-internet-u-s-falling-way-behind
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Trend: One of the major developments in primary and secondary education is the focus on personalization. Students get pushed material that meets them where they are, when they need it. Classes can now adapt to a learner’s needs and provide them with the skills, the instruction and the resources they need to master concepts.
AltSchool: AltSchool was started in 2013 and is rethinking the way school works. Their technology platform enables teachers to create weekly “learning playlists” for each student. They’ve done away with formal classes and focus on group projects and individualized instruction.
CK-12: The CK-12 Foundation serves tens of thousands of schools and millions of students by providing free customizable learning tools and content. Students can use their interactive simulations and adaptive problem sets and teachers can customize their flexbooks.
DreamBox: DreamBox powers more than 5 million math lessons every week through their adaptive K-8 math platform. The platform continually assesses a student’s strengths and weaknesses to close gaps and meet students with the right material at the right time.
Trinket: Trinket lets teachers and students write, run and share code from any device. Trinkets can be easily adapted to the classroom and shared with students to run real-time coding challenges.
University
College is expensive in America; the average cost is more than $20,000 a year for a four-year degree. At least 65 percent of the 55 million new jobs forecasted for the next decade will require a formal post-secondary credential.
In 2015, only 50 percent of college graduates were working in the field they studied, and more than one-third indicated they would have chosen a different major. Nearly 40 percent of college graduates believed their school did not prepare them well for employment.
Students are going to university because it is “the right thing to do,” often without a thought to the ROI on their education or the work opportunities after school. Only 19 percent of full-time college students graduate in four years, which dramatically increases the cost of their degree.
Trend: Online platforms are being leveraged at universities to help drive down the cost of a degree and increase access to programs. Big data platforms are being used to identify students in danger of failing and provide targeted assistance to help them graduate on time.
Rafter: Rafter is redesigning textbooks at universities by repackaging course materials. They’ve helped almost 3 million students save more than $700 million on textbooks.
2U: 2U offers schools as a service by providing universities with a platform to create online degree programs. They have more than 500 faculty, 1,000 course sections and 1,600 hours of live instruction per week.
Corporate/continuing education
Trends: The two largest sectors for investment are skill training (primarily coding and digital literacy) and English language learning.
Degreed: Degreed provides a personal knowledge portfolio that stays with learners. They’ve cataloged 250,000+ online learning courses and 3 million-plus informal learning activities. They also help large companies understand the talent and skills within their organization.
Duolingo: Duolingo is a gamified language learning app that has more than 100 million users. They offer free instruction and are helping non-native English speakers certify their skills with affordable online testing.
Pathgather: Pathgather is an enterprise LMS that motivates employees to learn and connect around professional development.
iTutorGroup: iTutorGroup is a Chinese-based English language platform that began by offering English language training to corporate executives and has expanded to offer online courses for children and younger learners. They recently raised a Series C valuing them at more than $1 billion.
One Month: One Month offers technical-skills crash courses designed to give learners functional skills in 15 minutes a day for one month. Since starting, they’ve helped more than 25,000 students develop foundational technical skills.
altMBA: altMBA is an intensive, four-week online workshop designed by Seth Godin for high-performing individuals who want to level up and lead. They are rethinking the structure of learning online and have seen a 98 percent completion rate for their program.
The college rolled textbook costs into tuition the same way costs associated with athletic fields, libraries,
and classroom equipment are rolled into tuition.
OER are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits sharing, accessing, repurposing—including for commercial purposes—and collaborating with others. They include educational materials, such as lesson plans, games, textbooks, tests, audio, and video. In addition to being free, these no-cost teaching and learning materials are available online for anyone to use, modify or share with others.This use, reuse, and remixing of instructional materials is a powerful way to gain and share knowledge. Because OER are customizable and flexible, they can be used very effectively to support students to achieve their learning goals.
OER Commons is a digital library where educators can find resources to develop, support and amplify their maker space practices. The site is searchable by subject, grade level or standard. Users can also filter results to include topics, such as activities and labs, games, videos, lesson plans, and interactive tools.
From the Blended and Online Learning discussion list:
We’re working on a grant program at my unit to improve these lec-capture courses. One of the ways is to train faculty:
We’ve seen that these courses have very little student engagement, especially for online students for whom this is the main medium of instruction. It’s challenging for the instructors to keep the online student in mind as they teach their lec-capture class. This is not surprising, since they’re essentially being asked to teach 2 different audiences simultaneously – in class and online. However, given that this is not going to change in the near future for us, we’ve begun exploring ways to train faculty to do a better job given the constraints. Below are some ideas:
We are in the process of creating a sort of “checklist” to address things that can be done before, during, and after the class and ways of streamlining the process.
BEFORE
Make faculty familiar with the technology – do tours of rooms, tutorials, short workshops, etc.
Syllabus, Schedule and instructional materials are prepared before the semester begins.
Learning objectives, outcomes, and assessments are aligned and made transparent to the students.
Design pedagogy that is inclusive – for e.g., move discussions online, create groups that include in-class and online students, use language that directly addresses online students, etc.
DURING & at the END
Review a sampling of videos at the beginning, middle, and end by ourselves and then with the faculty and provide them feedback on the good, the bad, and the ugly – very discreetly. 🙂 It’s going to be a sort of a joint reflection on the class. We believe if we do this a few times with the faculty, they’ll get the message and will make greater effort to include the online student in their instruction. And doing it 3 times will also make visible the changes and progress they make (or not)
We also plan to survey the students at the beginning, middle, and at the end of the semester and share the results with the faculty.
Chunking of videos includes preplanning and post production tasks. Faculty can be trained to script their lectures more, create lecture based on “topics” to make chunking and tagging easier. Need to focus on end user experience (online student).
These are some of the ideas. We plan to start implementing them this summer. I’ll share with you our progress. 🙂
Rema
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Rema Nilakanta, Ph.D.
Director of Design & Delivery|
Engineering-LAS Online Learning
1328 Howe Hall
515-294-9259 (office)
515-294-6184 (fax) http://www.elo.iastate.edu
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On Wed, Jan 27, 2016 at 8:48 AM, Nilakanta, Rema [ELO] <rema@iastate.edu> wrote:
Good Morning!
Thank you all for filling out the survey on the use of lecture capture in higher education. I appreciate your time and interest in this subject.
Attached are the results. I’ve also provided an overview below. The main purpose of this survey was to get an overall idea of how lecture capture is used in HE. I was just curious to see if the way we use it is pretty much similar at other institutions. The finding was inconclusive. My next step is to dig a little deeper – perhaps repurpose this survey for faculty and students. The final goal is to improve these courses – make them as pedagogically sound as possible, given that this technology is here to stay at our campus, at least for the near future. It will certainly require designing faculty training, but I would also like to explore innovative and efficient ways of chunking lecture videos pre and post production.
Let me know if you have any questions or need further information.
Rema
OVERVIEW OF “USE OF LECTURE CAPTURE IN HE” SURVEY RESULTS & FINDINGS
I’ve listed some of the findings that impressed me. They do not follow the order of the questions in the survey. For details, please view the attached report.
Just a quick note – There were 39 respondents, but not all responded to every question. The respondents included instructional and IT support staff and administrators at all levels generally from 4-year public and private universities.
FINDINGS & THEMES
Echo 365 and Panopto are the most frequently used lecture capture systems, but Adobe Connect also has several users.
The computer screen and the instructor feed are most commonly captured (89% and 79%, respectively). However, some also capture the document camera, the whiteboard, and the graphics pen tablet (53%, 39%, and 32%, respectively).
Almost every one (97%) report that they support their recordings with additional course materials in an LMS, while many also use web conferencing to deliver lectures and hold office hours. A sizeable portion of respondents also use online textbooks and publisher sites in their course delivery. Only 18% use lecture capture as the primary means of course delivery.
The majority of respondents use full class recordings of an hour or more, while around half also use short segments of 20 minutes or less.
The majority of the respondents seem to indicate a campus wide use of lecture capture for different purposes:
o review of in-class lectures
o training and advising
o student presentations (students use the technology to create their presentations/demos/assignments)
o live streaming of seminars and on-site hosting of conferences for remote students and audiences.
Size of the support units ranged from 1 person to 150+ people spread across campus.
Similarly, there was a wide range for the number of courses that used lecture capture – as few as 1-2 to a 1000 and more, if one takes into account non-traditional uses.
Although the numbers show that a majority (77%) provide full IT support for their lecture capture systems, a closer look at the comments indicates there is a general tendency toward making faculty more self reliant by providing them support when requested, or providing them with fully equipped and automated rooms, personal capture solutions and/or training.
Majority seemed satisfied with the lecture capture setup, so did the students. However, it seemed that the knowledge about student satisfaction was more anecdotal than formal. Other observations include:
o For people satisfied with the setup, there were quite a few users of Echo 360 and Panopto.
o Panopto seemed to rise above the rest for its promptness and quality of service. Mediasite got mixed response.
o There seems to be an awareness of the need to get the lectures captioned.
o Along with automated lecture capture technology, there seems to be a rise in old ways of doing things – manual (human) recording of events continues and seems preferable, especially in the face of rising costs of lecture capture technology.
The top 5 challenges concerning faculty support can be summarized as follows:
o Training faculty to use the technology – turn on the mic, no recording of white board, do not change settings, take time to learn the technology.
o Funding and support
o Ensuring best practices
o Captioning
o IP concerns
Efforts to address these challenges were related to:
OPERATIONS
– Keep mic on all the time
– Use of media asset management systems, like Kaltura (MediaSite)
– Admins trained to check settings for rooms
– Disable download of recordings as default setting (addressed IP concerns)
TRAINING
– Create user groups around technologies
– Promote communication among instructors using a particular room
– Training of faculty by instructional design teams on the use of technology and best practices
Designed by Chaim Gingold, a Ph.D. student at UC Santa Cruz, indie developer and designer of Spore’s creature creator, “Earth Primer” is a reinvention of the textbook. Unlike the all-too-familiar “interactive textbooks” that are little more than pictures and animations tacked on to traditional text, “Earth Primer” starts from the ground up. It’s elegantly presented and paced.
Money and time are the two most common barriers to using games in the classroom. “Extrasolar” solves both while also striking pedagogical gold: authentic, self-motivated learning. It’s a free alternate reality game (ARG) that mimics the day-to-day life of a rover driver exploring an alien planet for a mysterious space agency. Rather than placing players in some fantastical world, they interact with what looks like a typical desktop interface, giving their rover commands, and waiting to receive photographs and data from the alien world as well as messages from their employer. Each bit of play requires only a few minutes of activity. The wait builds tension, and when matched with the relatively mundane interface and tasks, it doesn’t feel like a game — which is kind of the point. Best of all: It’s all based in real science and, like with any good ARG, has a healthy dose of mystery to give players a reason to return.
Twine is an open-source tool for telling interactive, nonlinear stories.
You don’t need to write any code to create a simple story with Twine, but you can extend your stories with variables, conditional logic, images, CSS, and JavaScript when you’re ready.
Twine publishes directly to HTML, so you can post your work nearly anywhere. Anything you create with it is completely free to use any way you like, including for commercial purposes.
