Archive of ‘online learning’ category

Online HE about learning

Why online HE should be about learning, not teaching

https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20210126142422302

The gate is now wide open

Teachers used to be the gatekeepers to information, to knowledge. The successive inventions of writing and reading, print, the library, and then the World Wide Web, mean that we teachers are no longer the gatekeepers.

Schools, universities and teachers to some extent remain the gatekeepers to knowledge, the definers of what comprises valid knowledge. We do this, of course, through holding the ultimate educational power – the power to assess.

But it is not clear how long we teachers will, or should, hold this power. Increasingly, students, and employers, nations, cultures, many groups in our societies, rightly want a say in defining what is valid knowledge, a valid curriculum.

Knowledge isn’t enough

Each year, vast amounts of new knowledge are produced. Also, each year, vast amounts of current knowledge become wrong, or redundant, or both. Knowledge dies. In some subjects, a significant proportion of what was taught in the first year will have died by the time the students who learned it graduate. So, what is education for?

Machines are doing more and more of the work

The bad news is, we are getting squeezed out of work. The good news is, we are getting squeezed up, into ever more interesting work. We will be able to stay ahead for a long time; because there are always still more difficult and important and exciting things for us to do, increasingly with the support of our increasingly capable machines.

Employers want graduates to be job-ready. They also want graduates to be fluent in the five Cs: Creativity, Communication, Collaboration and Criticality as well as Competence. Not all university education currently develops the first four Cs. Very little university education currently gives high priority to their development. Rarely are they formally assessed.

Changing outcomes, changing pedagogies

The architecture of a university expresses its views about pedagogy. This remains true with the great leap online. The old pedagogic architecture – of teaching as (mainly) telling, of learning as (mainly) listening and reading, of access in and through the library to specified stored knowledge, and of assessment as (mainly) recalling, repeating back what has been learned, perhaps with some application or interpretation – has for the most part been recreated in digital form, with varying degrees of success

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more on online education in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=online+education

The Zoom Gaze

https://reallifemag.com/the-zoom-gaze/

In May 2020 the company removed the “unmute all” setting for hosts due to privacy concerns but now has brought it back as a nuanced “unmute with consent,” which allows a host to unmute an individual participant’s microphone at any time in any of the host’s meetings once given permission. But this framing of consent is problematic to say the least. Can you refuse if the host is your boss? What if they not only have authority over you but abusive intent?

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more on Zoom in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=zoom

online education is the future

Colorado State U. Global’s provost says online education is the future

 

In the U.S., the percentage of undergraduate students taking at least one course online grew from 15% in 2004 to 43% in 2016, a 2018 study from the National Center for Education Statistics found.

CSU Global last week launched Direct Path Education, a new program centered on industry-specific education that allows students to transfer their credits toward a degree or earn certificates and professional certifications. The six-week courses add to a growing trend in the U.S. as many workers who lost their jobs following the pandemic search for new opportunities.

My note: this article in conjunction with the “global upskilling”: https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2021/02/11/global-upskilling-and-universities/

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more on online ed in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=online+education

measuring learning outcomes

https://www.facebook.com/groups/onlinelearningcollective/permalink/746716582625709/

a discussion from the Higher Ed Learning Collective:

In my teaching career I worked at two colleges in Wisconsin. One public and one private. Both have Learning outcomes for each course, program/major outcomes for each major, and Institutional outcomes for the college (aka Employable skills, Career essentials, or Abilities).
Recently a friend of mine started teaching an online class at the University in a different state, and she kept asking them to give her learning outcomes for the course. After some back and forth emails it turned out that this other state university doesn’t have them.
It blew my mind 🤯, how do they know what the scope and depth of teaching should be in that course? How do they get their accreditation?
I am curious to know if it is just in Wisconsin or selected states/countries that it is a common practice to have outcomes? Also how do you teach without them?

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Go to the AACU Value Rubric website and adopt several of the outcomes for the course.
https://www.aacu.org/value-rubrics

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We have LOs over here in MN.
My guess is that they’re buried deep in some filing cabinet in your friend’s university and most folks just ignore them.
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Usually the instructor is required to create the outcomes for the class, but they are usually based on meta-outcomes from the department. That’s how it has been at all institutions I have worked at. With that said, I have worked with colleagues, full professors with Ph.D.s that didn’t understand the principle of learning outcomes, and unless forced to put them in the syllabus, they either would not do it on their own or when having them, would not follow them. And forgot about triangulation of LO to activities and assessments.
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Accreditors look for program LOs but not at course level. (We learned this after a faculty member was fired for pushing back on LOs on the syllabus, and when the Uni said “SACS requirements”, SACS responded w/“um no, not really…”) Since then, we’ve collected data as part of our assessment plan & can say w/confidence that students don’t read them…

college after discruption

https://www.statesmanjournal.com/story/opinion/2020/12/19/guest-opinion-online-education-improve-2021/3947676001/

Online learning is here to stay

Greater focus on equitable access

Employers will partner with universities to develop talent

Increased demand for nondegree credentials 

In 2021, we will see individuals supplement their current or past postsecondary degrees with nondegree credentials and in-demand skills.

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more on microcredentials in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=microcredential

Red Cross and Immersive Learning

Virtual Reality & Innovation

https://www.icrc.org/en/what-we-do/virtual-reality

mounting research suggests that gaming in immersive virtual environments can directly affect and impact regions of the brain responsible for memory, spatial orientation, information organizations, and fine motor skills.

the ICRC officially established its Virtual Reality Unit (VRU) to delve further into computer-generated environments as a way to educate, communicate and advocate respect for IHL.

By 2017, the VRU had amassed a library of virtual environments for FAS’ IHL training sessions but there was a desire within the VRU, as well as in FAS and ICRC’s Learning & Development, to develop more advanced VR opportunities for a wider audience.

2018 report researched global financial investment in XR and a 2019 meta-analysis consolidated global academic findings that used VR to measure behaviour.

December 2019 … the production of an XR Quick Start Guide in April 2020 which introduces ICRC staff to lessons learned and best practices for initiative development.

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more on gaming in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=gaming
and immersive learning
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=immersive+learning

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