Posts Tagged ‘online teaching’

K12 online competency based

a performance- or competency-based approach to education
little evidence that personalized learning improves student learning, in part because so many different approaches are used.

proficiency-based learning

Does the future of schooling look like Candy Land?

Advocates of competency-based education say they believe public opinion is also shifting their way. They point to a recent national poll showing that 74 percent of voters think the lack of personalized learning in schools is “a problem.”

+++++++++++++
more on competency based ed in this iMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=competency+based

gamification and online teaching

Study: Gamification Techniques Can Improve Online Teaching

https://campustechnology.com/articles/2021/04/12/study-gamification-techniques-can-improve-online-teaching.aspx

A new study out of MIT‘s Sloan School of Management explores the use of ideas and tools from the gaming community to improve online teaching and student learning outcomes.

four key elements for maximizing student engagement in online learning:

  • Narrative — a specific storyline or overarching theme. For instance, study co-author Brian Stevens, senior lecturer at the University of Tennessee‘s Haslam College of Business, created a video game theme for his statistics class, incorporating “Boss Battles,” “Speed Runs” and wacky characters to spice up his lectures.
  • Continuous flow of action in sight and sound, even before class starts. For example, Lo uses a countdown timer and upbeat music on his course page about 30 minutes before the start of a synchronous lecture, to build anticipation for class. He also switches tasks and/or scenes every 15 minutes to help maintain students’ attention and interest levels.
  • Opportunities for two-way communication. To help turn students from viewers into participants, Lo uses a combination of the “Raise Hand” function in Zoom, polls, breakout sessions, surveys and the chat window.
  • High production quality. Lo built a home studio with various input devices, professional lighting, a green screen and more to create richer, more engaging presentations for students.

The full study, “The World of EdCraft: Challenges and Opportunities in Synchronous Online Teaching,” is openly available online

serious gamers and gamification experts on that panel. More here on the initiative: https://tinyurl.com/IABOL2021

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

virtual tools to remain

Will this semester forever alter college? No, but some virtual tools will stick around

Conceiving, planning, designing and developing a genuine online course or program can consume as much as a year of faculty training and collaboration with instructional designers, and often requires student orientation and support and a complex technological infrastructure.

If anything, what people are mistaking now for online education — long class meetings in videoconference rooms, professors in their bathrobes, do-it-yourself tools made of rubber bands and cardboard — appears to be making them less, not more, open to it.

against cameras on

https://higheredpraxis.substack.com/p/tip-dont-require-cameras-on

how to increase engagement without relying on “cameras on” and asks instructors to be open to different “shapes” of what engagement can look like: “Many teachers have a shape that they think attention and engagement look like, and they work very hard to get students into that shape.” She also has written about forcing students to turn on their cameras from a trauma-informed perspective.

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

online classes faculty teaching

Switching to online classes creates severe time pressures for university and college teachers

David Westwood 

https://nsadvocate.org/2020/06/11/switching-to-online-classes-creates-severe-time-pressures-for-university-and-college-teachers/

Most students do not want an online education, and many are calling for reductions in tuition fees to compensate for what they perceive might be a lower-quality education and experience. Some might choose to wait for a return to on-campus delivery.

Most professors do not want to teach in an online environment because they value engaging with students in discussions, debates, and laboratory demonstrations. There are many good pedagogical reasons why most post-secondary education continues to take place in a face-to-face, on-campus delivery mode despite the longstanding availability of technology to support online teaching.

Professor and student preferences aside, there is a more pressing problem looming.

There is precious little time for professors to change all of their courses to an online mode of delivery.

Nova Scotia Universities and Colleges need a significant and urgent infusion of funding from the provincial government to cover the increased costs of converting post-secondary education into an entirely different mode of operation over the next three months. Universities cannot be expected to cover those costs alone, and neither should students.

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

CRITICAL PEDAGOGY IN AN AGE OF ONLINE LEARNING

CRITICAL PEDAGOGY IN AN AGE OF ONLINE LEARNING

http://libjournal.uncg.edu/ijcp/article/view/1055/892?fbclid=IwAR3SHDRFlxTbj7lMAuVJ_BsO3wLQaYEcEXEukUPQVXDDOqEnHg_XT9VJ1SE

Paulo Freire and Critical Pedagogy

Freire’s pedagogical concepts, such as problem posing, dialogue, praxis, conscientiazation and the politics of education, were devel-oped in a pre-Internet era. His work in popular education was deeply interpersonal and involved spending significant time in a community becoming familiar with the culture, linguistic patterns, and lifestyle of the people before ever embarking on teaching.

struggles to employ a critical pedagogy in the increasingly assessment-oriented, outcomes-based environment

While designed to make teaching in the online environment more efficient, these systems confront the critical pedagogue with challenges to create a teaching-learning environment that promotes critical reflection not only on the content of a course but on the very way in which content is delivered.

teaching in cyberspace requires a different teaching paradigm altogether

p. 170 Feenberg (2009) developed the Critical Theory of Technology (CTT),

p. 171 As outlined by CTT, technology creates a cyber culture that redefines human identity and the meaning and means of human interaction (Gomez, 2009). When viewed through this lens, online education is not simply another tool for the promotion of learning, but rather an all-encompassing environment managing and controlling access to information, structuring relationships, and redefining individual identities.

p. 171 While masquerading as efforts to enhance student learning, these industries are clearly profit-oriented. Knowledge has become a commodity, students have become consumers, faculty have become content providers, and schools operate as businesses

p. 172 Like Feenberg (2009), Freire would be concerned with the values and principles embedded in the technology of online learning, as well as the cyber culture it has created.

p. 173 Schools did not venture into online learning because they thought it was a better way to teach, but rather because they saw it as a way to reach unreached student populations with the promise of off-site educational offerings. Only later was attention given to developing online pedagogies.

Whereas education in the United States was originally viewed as a way to prepare students for effective citizenship, now it is seen as a way to develop loyal and capable employees of their corporate overlords

p. 174 A second area of concern is the banking nature of the LMSs. One of the underlying assumptions of an LMS like Blackboard™, Moodle™, or Brightspace™ is that the online platform is a repository of resources for teaching and learning.

Freire vehemently rejected this banking approach to education because it did not recognize or encourage the student’s creative, exploratory, and critical abilities. In the banking model the teacher is regarded as the holder and transmitter of knowledge, which is then imparted to the student. The banking model assumes the student is an empty vessel and does not value or recognize the student’s experiential and cultural knowledge

By contrast Freire argued for a problem-posing, constructivist approach that invites students to critically engage their world and one another. In the critical classroom, the student at times takes on the role of teacher and the teacher becomes a learner, inviting a sharing of power and mutual learning. While this approach can be carried out to an extent online, the LMS is set up to be the primary source of information in a course, and the teacher is assigned as the expert designer of the learning experience, thus limiting the constructivist nature and mutuality of the learning process.

p. 175 A third area of concern is the limited access to online learning to large sectors of society. While e-learning advocates tout the greater access to learning provided by online learning (Goral, 2013; Kashi & Conway, 2010), the digital divide is a reality impacting millions of students.

p. 176 A final area of concern is the disembodied nature of the online learning process. One of the major attractions of online learning to potential students is the freedom from having to be in a classroom in a particular time or place.

p. 177 Embodied learning means students must not only engage the cognitive dimension (thinking and reflection), but also partake in concrete action. This action in reflection, and reflection in action, referred to as praxis, involves acting on and in the world as one is seeking to learn about and transform the world.
To limit education to the transmission and reception of text-based knowledge without action undermines the entire learning process (Escobar et al., 1994).
Freire believed dialogue begins not with what the teacher professes to know, but with the student’s experience and knowledge.

p. 179 For Freire, the building of a learning community is essential to creating meaningful dialogue; this is also true for those who seek to teach effectively online. Palloff and Pratt (2007) contend that all online teaching must begin with building community and stress that a carefully constructed online learning community provides a space for students to test ideas, get feedback, and create a collaborative learning experience.
For Freire, learning was a social and democratic event where authoritarianism and control of the learning process are minimized.
“reading the world,” or conscientization, that is, understanding the larger political context in which experience occurs and knowledge is situated. In the current era of Facebook, Twitter, instant message, and other social media, in-depth discussion and analysis is often absent in favor of brief, often innocuous statements and personal opinions.
Through online academic databases, students have easy access to far more sources of information than previous generations. Furthermore, search engines like Google, Yahoo, and the like bring students in contact with remote sources, organizations, and individuals instantly.

p. 180 the challenge is not only the accessing of information, but also encouraging students to become discerning purveyors of information—to develop “critical digital literacy,” the capacity to effectively and critically navigate the databases and myriads of potential sources (Poore, 2011, p. 15)

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

https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=online+learning

does this semester alter college

Will this semester forever alter college? No, but some virtual tools will stick around

when we talk about online education is using digital technologies to transform the learning experience,” said Vijay Govindarajan, a professor at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business. “That is not what is happening right now. What is happening now is we had eight days to put everything we do in class onto Zoom.”

Conceiving, planning, designing and developing a genuine online course or program can consume as much as a year of faculty training and collaboration with instructional designers, and often requires student orientation and support and a complex technological infrastructure.

More than 75 percent [of undergraduate students ] said they don’t think they’re receiving a quality learning experience, according to a survey of nearly 1,300 students by the online exam-prep provider OneClass. In a separate poll of 14,000 college and graduate students in early April by the website niche.com, which rates schools and colleges, 67 percent said they didn’t find online classes as effective as in-person ones.

if there’s a silver lining in this situation for residential colleges and universities, it’s that students no longer take for granted the everyday realities of campus life: low-tech face-to-face classes, cultural diversions, libraries, athletics, extracurricular activities, in-person office hours and social interaction with their classmates.

Online higher education “is a thin diet for the typical 18-year-old,” said Richard Garrett, chief research officer at Eduventures. “But today’s 18-year-olds are tomorrow’s 28-year-olds with families and jobs, who then realize that online can be useful.”

Along with their students, faculty were “thrown into the deep end of the pool for digital learning and asked to swim,” Moe said. “Some will sink, some will crawl to the edge of the pool and climb out and they’ll never go back in the pool ever again. But many will figure out what to do and how to kick and how to stay afloat.”

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

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

Faculty Learn New Teaching Methods

Survey: Emergency Move Online Forced More than Half of Faculty to Learn New Teaching Methods

Rhea Kelly 04/22/20

https://campustechnology.com/articles/2020/04/22/survey-emergency-move-online-forced-more-than-half-of-faculty-to-learn-new-teaching-methods.aspx

56 percent of faculty who moved courses online were using teaching methods they had never used before. That’s according to “Digital Learning Pulse Survey: Immediate Priorities,” a study conducted by Bay View Analytics

+++++++++++++

Free and Discounted Ed Tech Tools for Online Learning During the Coronavirus Pandemic

Dian Schaffhauser  03/16/20

https://campustechnology.com/articles/2020/03/16/free-and-discounted-ed-tech-tools-for-online-learning-during-the-coronavirus-pandemic.aspx

here some examples from a long list of free services:

Addigy, a cloud-based Apple device management platform, has announced free 60-day access for colleges and universities. The program helps organizations deploy, manage, and track new and existing Apple devices from a single console; automate IT tasks and implement IT policies related to deploying software, updating security settings, running scripts, managing groups of users, and distributing and updating software; and troubleshoot problems for users remotely and in real-time. https://addigy.com/covid-19-addigy-60/?utm_content=covid-19-addigy-60

Arizona State University’s EdPlus is working with Complexly’s Crash Course on a series of entry-level course videos, starting with English composition. (Complexly and Crash Course are an initiative of the Green brothers, hosts of a popular vlog and best-selling fiction.) The new content in “Study Hall,” won’t offer credit or replace any degree programs, but rather will serve as a supplement for high school or college learners. Each subject will be the focus of about 15 videos 15 minutes long, covering major points in the topic. Those are being hosted on YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLNrrxHpJhC8mNXjrAL3Ey1Q6iI35cymzl

Babbel is offering three months of free language learning to U.S. students through mid-June 2020 in any of its languages: Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Polish, Russian, Dutch, Turkish, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Indonesian, and English. https://welcome.babbel.com/en/student-discount/

Gale is offering educators and librarians free access to digital content and resources to enhance instruction and learning. Resources include: interdisciplinary, curriculum-aligned resources to support online learning; live and on-demand training materials; e-books on virtual learning; and more. https://www.gale.com/covid19support.

Through July 1, Google is allowing G Suite for Education customers to use the Hangouts Meet premium functionality for free. People can host virtual meetings with up to 250 people and live streams with up to 100,000 viewers. Additionally, they’ll be able to save recordings of their meetings to Google Drive. https://support.google.com/meet/answer/9760270?hl=en

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

1 2 3