Searching for "teaching and learning"

Selecting LMS

A Guide to Picking a Learning Management System: The Right Questions to Ask

By Mary Jo Madda (Columnist)     Feb 14, 2017

https://www.edsurge.com/news/2017-02-14-a-guide-to-learning-management-systems-the-right-questions-to-ask

Over the past 10 years, new learning management systems (LMSs) have sprung on the scene to rival the Blackboards and Moodles of old. On the EdSurge Product Index alone, 56 products self-identify and fall into the LMS category. And with certain established companies like Pearson pulling out of the LMS ranks, where do you start?

As University of Central Florida’s Associate Vice President of Distributed Learning, Tom Cavanagh, wrote in an article for EDUCAUSE, “every institute has a unique set of instructional and infrastructure circumstances to consider when deciding on an LMS,” but at the same time, “all institutions face certain common requirements”—whether a small charter school, a private university or a large public school district.

The LMS Checklist

#1: Is the platform straightforward and user-friendly?

#2: Who do we want to have access to this platform, and can we adjust what they can see?

#3: Can the instructor and student(s) talk to and communicate with each other easily?

“Students and faculty live a significant portion of their daily lives online in social media spaces,” writes University of Central Florida’s Tom Cavanagh in his article on the LMS selection process. “Are your students and faculty interested in these sorts of interplatform connections?”

#5: Does this platform plug in with all of the other platforms we have?

“Given the pace of change and the plethora of options with educational technology, it’s very difficult for any LMS vendor to keep up with stand-alone tools that will always outperform built-in tools,” explains Michael Truong, executive director of innovative teaching and technology at Azusa Pacific University. According to Truong, “no LMS will be able to compete directly with tools like Piazza (discussion forum), Socrative (quizzing), EdPuzzle (video annotation), etc.” 

As a result, Truong says, “The best way to ‘prepare’ for future technological changes is to go with an LMS that plays well with external tools.

#6: Is the price worth the product?

A reality check: There is no perfect LMS.

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more on LMS in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=learning+management+systems

condensed semesters

Austin, A., & Gustafson, L. (2006). Impact of Course Length on Student Learning. JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS AND FINANCE EDUCATION, 5(1), 26–37.
Condensed or time shortened semesters are becoming more common as more non-traditional students seek higher education. Many universities now offer full semester courses over two or three weekends. Also, inter semester courses of one to three weeks are also becoming popular as university administrators seek to find ways to increase student enrollments. While there is much anecdotal evidence that grades during summer semesters tend to be higher than during the fall semester, we must ask if condensed semester courses actually provide students with the same learning experience as a traditional 16-week semester?
Overall we find that there is a significant improvement from taking shorter courses that cannot be explained solely by student characteristics. Using a very large database and by using more robust models this study provides more definitive results than have been achieved in past studies. Compared to a sixteen week semester, there is an improvement at 8 weeks, 4 weeks, and 3 weeks. We also find that those benefits differ, peaking at four weeks. 10 This complements the results of Scott (2003) who finds that classroom relationships and classroom atmosphere are two important factors that explain why performance is better in intensive courses than the traditional format i.e. there is a better bond between teacher and student when they meet every day than just two or three times a week. While 4 week and 3 week sessions both meet daily, the three week session, with just 11 teaching days, may be to short a time span for that bond to fully develop. More importantly, we also find that the improved grades are not meaningless – they do reflect greater learning.11 We find that the grades given for a shortened intensive course have the same significantexplanatory power for future performance as those earned during a traditional 16 week semester. This combats the popular perception (among students anyway) that the bar is lowered in some manner during the shortened sessions. This is clearly not the case as we find no evidence of any correction for those grades. There are some obvious policy implications from this study. Universities wishing to maximize learning with limited resources might consider changing their course structure from predominately sixteen week to four week semesters, a more modular system. A full semester load (12 hours) can be taken in the same time (16 weeks) by taking a traditional semester, or 4 four weeks sessions. Both cases would involve the same amount of class time per week, and so the modular structure would place no additional burden on a student.
Jaschik, S. (2008, March 28). Students Prefer Intensive Courses. Retrieved February 22, 2018, from https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/03/28/intensive

second IMS podcast on technology in education

Second IMS podcast on technology in education: Constructivism

Today’s vocast will be broadcasted live at:

Adobe Connect      |     Facebook Live   |       Twitter (#IMSvodcast) |

and will be archived at:

SCSU MediaSpaceYouTube   (subscribe for the channel for future conversations)

Constructivism.
Student-centered learning theory and practice are based on the constructivist learning theory that emphasizes the learner’s critical role in constructing meaning from new information and prior experience.

  • What is it?
  • Why do we have to know about it
  • Can we just disagree and stick to behaviorism?
  • Is it about student engagement?
  • Is it about the use of technology?
  • Resources
    • https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2014/06/28/constructivism-lecture-versus-project-based-learning/
      https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2013/12/03/translating-constructivism-into-instructional-design-potential-and-limitations/
      https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2016/03/28/student-centered-learning-literature-review/
      https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2015/11/05/online-discussion-with-plovdiv-university/
      https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2015/05/27/handbook-of-mobile-learning/
      Crompton, Muilenburg and Berge’s definition for m-learning is “learning across multiple contexts, through social and content interactions, using personal electronic devices.”
    • The “context”in this definition encompasses m-learnng that is formalself-directed, and spontaneous learning, as well as learning that is context aware and context neutral.
    • therefore, m-learning can occur inside or outside the classroom, participating in a formal lesson on a mobile device; it can be self-directed, as a person determines his or her own approach to satisfy a learning goal; or spontaneous learning, as a person can use the devices to look up something that has just prompted an interest (Crompton, 2013, p. 83). (Gaming article Tallinn)Constructivist Learnings in the 1980s – Following Piage’s (1929), Brunner’s (1996) and Jonassen’s (1999) educational philosophies, constructivists proffer that knowledge acquisition develops through interactions with the environment. (p. 85). The computer was no longer a conduit for the presentation of information: it was a tool for the active manipulation of that information” (Naismith, Lonsdale, Vavoula, & Sharples, 2004, p. 12)Constructionist Learning in the 1980s – Constructionism differed from constructivism as Papert (1980) posited an additional component to constructivism: students learned best when they were actively involved in constructing social objects. The tutee position. Teaching the computer to perform tasks.Problem-Based learning in the 1990s – In the PBL, students often worked in small groups of five or six to pool knowledge and resources to solve problems. Launched the sociocultural revolution, focusing on learning in out of school contexts and the acquisition of knowledge through social interaction
    • Socio-Constructivist Learning in the 1990s. SCL believe that social and individual processes are independent in the co-construction of knowledge (Sullivan-Palinscar, 1998; Vygotsky, 1978).
    • 96-97). Keegan (2002) believed that e-learning was distance learning, which has been converted to e-learning through the use of technologies such as the WWW. Which electronic media and tools constituted e-learning: e.g., did it matter if the learning took place through a networked technology, or was it simply learning with an electronic device?
  • Discussion
    • Share with us practical examples of applying constructivist approach in your class
    • Would one hour workshop on turning existing class assignments into constructivist-based class assignments be of interest for you?

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https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2018/02/12/first-ims-podcast-on-technology-in-education/

challenges ed leaders technology

The Greatest Challenge Facing School Leaders in a Digital World

By Scott McLeod     Oct 29, 2017

https://www.edsurge.com/news/2017-10-29-the-greatest-challenge-facing-school-leaders-in-a-digital-world

the Center for the Advanced Study of Tech­nology Leadership in Education – CASTLE

Vision

If a school’s reputation and pride are built on decades or centuries of “this is how we’ve always done things here,” resistance from staff, parents, and alumni to significant changes may be fierce. In such institutions, heads of school may have to steer carefully between deeply ingrained habits and the need to modernize the information tools with which students and faculty work

Too often, when navigating faculty or parental resistance, school leaders and technology staff make reassurances that things will not have to change much in the classroom or that slow baby steps are OK. Unfortunately, this results in a different problem, which is that schools have now invested significant money, time, and energy into digital technologies but are using them sparingly and seeing little impact. In such schools, replicative uses of technology are quite common, but transformative uses that leverage the unique affordances of technology are quite rare.

many schools fail to proceed further because they don’t have a collective vision of what more transformative uses of technology might look like, nor do they have a shared understanding of and commitment to what it will take to get to such a place. As a result, faculty instruction and the learning experiences of students change little or not at all.

These schools have taken the time to involve all stakeholders—including students—in substantive conversations about what digital tools will allow them to do differently compared with previous analog practices. Their visions promote the potential of computing devices to facilitate all of those elements we now think of as essential 21st-century capacities: confidence, curiosity, enthusiasm, passion, critical thinking, problem-solving, and self-direction. Technology doesn’t simply support traditional teaching—it transforms it for deeper thinking and gives students more agency over their own learning.

Fear

Another prevalent issue preventing technology change in schools is fear—fear of change, of the unknown, of letting go of what we know best, of being learners again. But it’s also a fear of letting kids have wide access to the Internet with the possibility of cyberbullying, access to inappropriate material, and exposure to online predators or even excessive advertising. Fears, of course, need to be surfaced and addressed.

The fear drives some schools to ban cellphones, disallow students and faculty from using Facebook, and lock down Internet filters so tightly that useful websites are inaccessible. They prohibit the use of Twitter and YouTube, and they block blogs. Some educators see these types of responses as principled stands against the shortcomings and hassles of digital technologies. Others see them as rejections of the dehumanization of the education process by soulless machines. Often, however, it’s just schools clinging to the past and elevating what is comfortable or familiar over the potential of technology to help them better deliver on their school missions.

Heads of school don’t have to be skilled users themselves to be effective technology leaders, but they do have to exercise appropriate oversight and convey the message—repeatedly—that frequent, meaningful technology use in school is both important and expected. Nostalgia aside, there is no foreseeable future in which the primacy of printed text is not superseded by electronic text and multimedia. When nearly all information is digital or online, multi-modal and multi­media, accessed by mobile devices that fit in our pockets, the question should not be whether schools prepare students for a digital learning landscape, but rather how.

Control

Many educators aren’t necessarily afraid of technology, but they are so accustomed to heavily teacher-directed classrooms that they are leery about giving up control—and can’t see the value in doing so.

Although most of us recognize that mobile computers connected to the Internet may be the most powerful learning devices yet invented—and that youth are learning in powerful ways at home with these technologies—allowing students to have greater autonomy and ownership of the learning process can still seem daunting and questionable.

The “beyond” is particularly important. When we give students some voice in and choice about what and how they learn, we honor basic human needs for autonomy, we enhance students’ interest and engagement, and we truly actualize our missions of preparing lifelong learners.

The goal of instructional transformation is to empower students, not to disempower teachers. While instructor unfamiliarity with digital technologies, inquiry- or problem-based teaching techniques, or deeper learning strategies may result in some initial discomfort, these challenges can be overcome with robust support.

Support

A few workshops here and there rarely result in large-scale changes in implementation.

teacher-driven “unconferences” or “edcamps,” at which educators propose and facilitate discussion topics, can be powerful mechanisms for fostering professional dialogue and learning. Similarly, some schools offer voluntary “Tech Tuesdays” or “appy hours” to foster digital learning among interested faculty.

In addition to existing IT support, technology integration staff, or librarians/media specialists, some schools have student technology teams that are on call for assistance when needed.

A few middle schools and high schools go even further and assign teachers their own individual student technology mentors. These student-teacher pairings last all school year and comprise the first line of support for educators’ technology questions.

As teachers, heads of school, counselors, coaches, and librarians, we all now have the ability to participate in ongoing, virtual, global communities of practice.

Whether formal or informal, the focus of technology-related professional learning should be on student learning, not on the tools or devices. Independent school educators should always ask, “Technology for the purpose of what?” when considering the inclusion of digital technologies into learning activities. Technology never should be implemented just for technology’s sake.

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more on digital literacy for EDAD in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=digital+literacy+edad

STAR Symposium 2018

https://softchalkcloud.com/lesson/serve/tAyfSOjZTkVW05/html

Keynote: Dr. Todd Zakrajsek, University of North Carolina School of Medicine

“Teaching for Brain-based Learning”

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Effective Online Engagement
Camille Brandt, Bemidji State University

student is a boxed term. but there are flavors; undergrad vs grad, what takeaways they are looking for, categories of students

ask for expectations, outcomes, and keep touching bases during class.

Vocaroo.com

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Grading Participation in an Online Course

Kerry Marrer, St. Cloud State University

Kate Mooney, St. Cloud State University

Kris Portz, St. Cloud State University

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What’s a FIG? Inquiring Minds Want to Know!

Miki Huntington, Minneapolis Community and Technical College

COP Community of Practice. Stipends – may be or not. May be only a book.

topics: online learning, academic technologies etc

offering support: to one another in a collaborative environment. Commenting to each other notes.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1ijco6s9bNBuD5_fYmrRTgKzubCXFM6GX

online program evaluation

company or group who is doing online program evaluation?

this information is extracted from the Blend-Online discussion list

Colleagues,

Do you know any company or group who is doing online program evaluation? Our school is seeking a consulting group to come to review our online programs and identify areas relate to online learning that we need to improve.

Thanks,

Carrie Halpin, Ph.D. Professor/Instructional Designer & Technologist eLearning & Instructional Technology (eLIT) Virginia Western Community College 3095 Colonial Ave. SW, Roanoke, VA 24015 Office: Brown Library 102 Phone: 540-857-6636 Fax: 540-857-6138 Email: chalpin@virginiawestern.edu

Quality Matters will do course reviews.  iDesign
iDesign will do both of those things using a fee-for-service model versus a revenue-sharing model like Academic Partnerships or 2U. I have no personal experience with any OPM, but iDesign is the only one I know of that offers that ala carte type service.
Andrea MacArgel
 Instructional Designer Center for Learning and Teaching
 Binghamton University LN 1324A (607) 777-5099 Schedule a meeting with me at http://doodle.com/macargel  http://www.binghamton.edu/clt

Damon Osborne, Ph.D. Associate Vice President for Online and Alternative Delivery Programs Shafer Library | Findlay, OH 45840 419-434-5978 Office dosborne@findlay.edu

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

Digital Stories Across The Curriculum

Digital Stories Across The Curriculum

use storytelling to shape students’ learning experience, create connections across content areas

brain research suggests when students have an opportunity to retrieve information, rehearse, interleave concepts,  and make connections, this promotes memory making and forgetting is less likely to occur.

digital tools such as: imovieadobe sparkchatterpixwritereader and shadowpuppet

share your tools:

http://web.stcloudstate.edu/pmiltenoff/lib490/tools.html

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

digital humanities

7 Things You Should Know About Digital Humanities

Published:   Briefs, Case Studies, Papers, Reports  

https://library.educause.edu/resources/2017/11/7-things-you-should-know-about-digital-humanities

Lippincott, J., Spiro, L., Rugg, A., Sipher, J., & Well, C. (2017). Seven Things You Should Know About Digital Humanities (ELI 7 Things You Should Know). Retrieved from https://library.educause.edu/~/media/files/library/2017/11/eli7150.pdf

definition

The term “digital humanities” can refer to research and instruction that is about information technology or that uses IT. By applying technologies in new ways, the tools and methodologies of digital humanities open new avenues of inquiry and scholarly production. Digital humanities applies computational capabilities to humanistic questions, offering new pathways for scholars to conduct research and to create and publish scholarship. Digital humanities provides promising new channels for learners and will continue to influence the ways in which we think about and evolve technology toward better and more humanistic ends.

As defined by Johanna Drucker and colleagues at UCLA, the digital humanities is “work at the intersection of digital technology and humanities disciplines.” An EDUCAUSE/CNI working group framed the digital humanities as “the application and/or development of digital tools and resources to enable researchers to address questions and perform new types of analyses in the humanities disciplines,” and the NEH Office of Digital Humanities says digital humanities “explore how to harness new technology for thumanities research as well as those that study digital culture from a humanistic perspective.” Beyond blending the digital with the humanities, there is an intentionality about combining the two that defines it.

digital humanities can include

  • creating digital texts or data sets;
  • cleaning, organizing, and tagging those data sets;
  • applying computer-based methodologies to analyze them;
  • and making claims and creating visualizations that explain new findings from those analyses.

Scholars might reflect on

  • how the digital form of the data is organized,
  • how analysis is conducted/reproduced, and
  • how claims visualized in digital form may embody assumptions or biases.

Digital humanities can enrich pedagogy as well, such as when a student uses visualized data to study voter patterns or conducts data-driven analyses of works of literature.

Digital humanities usually involves work by teams in collaborative spaces or centers. Team members might include

  • researchers and faculty from multiple disciplines,
  • graduate students,
  • librarians,
  • instructional technologists,
  • data scientists and preservation experts,
  • technologists with expertise in critical computing and computing methods, and undergraduates

projects:

downsides

  • some disciplinary associations, including the Modern Language Association and the American Historical Association, have developed guidelines for evaluating digital proj- ects, many institutions have yet to define how work in digital humanities fits into considerations for tenure and promotion
  • Because large projects are often developed with external funding that is not readily replaced by institutional funds when the grant ends sustainability is a concern. Doing digital humanities well requires access to expertise in methodologies and tools such as GIS, mod- eling, programming, and data visualization that can be expensive for a single institution to obtain
  • Resistance to learning new tech- nologies can be another roadblock, as can the propensity of many humanists to resist working in teams. While some institutions have recognized the need for institutional infrastructure (computation and storage, equipment, software, and expertise), many have not yet incorporated such support into ongoing budgets.

Opportunities for undergraduate involvement in research, provid ing students with workplace skills such as data management, visualization, coding, and modeling. Digital humanities provides new insights into policy-making in areas such as social media, demo- graphics, and new means of engaging with popular culture and understanding past cultures. Evolution in this area will continue to build connections between the humanities and other disci- plines, cross-pollinating research and education in areas like med- icine and environmental studies. Insights about digital humanities itself will drive innovation in pedagogy and expand our conceptualization of classrooms and labs

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

media literacy part of digital citizenship

Making Media Literacy Central to Digital Citizenship

that kind of tech — expensive, bleeding-edge tools — makes headlines but doesn’t make it into many classrooms, especially the most needy ones. What does, however, is video.

68 percent of teachers are using video in their classrooms, and 74 percent of middle schoolers are watching videos for learning.

Video is a key aspect of our always-online attention economy that’s impacting votingbehavior, and fueling hate speech and trolling. Put simply: Video is a contested civic space.

We need to move from a conflation of digital citizenship with internet safety and protectionism to a view of digital citizenship that’s pro-active and prioritizes media literacy and savvy.

equip students with some essential questions they can use to unpack the intentions of anything they encounter. One way to facilitate this thinking is by using a tool like EdPuzzle

We need new ways of thinking that are web-specific. Mike Caulfield’s e-book is a great deep dive into this topic, but as an introduction to web literacy you might first dig into the notion of reading “around” as well as “down” media — that is, encouraging students to not just analyze the specific video or site they’re looking at but related content (e.g., where else an image appears using a reverse Google image search).

Active viewing — engaging more thoughtfully and deeply with what you watch — is a tried-and-true teaching strategy for making sure you don’t just watch media but retain information.

For this content, students shouldn’t just be working toward comprehension but critique; they need to not just understand what they watch, but also have something to say about it. One of my favorite techniques for facilitating this more dialogic and critical mode of video viewing is by using aclassroom backchannel, like TodaysMeet, during video viewings

only 3 percent of the time tweens and teens spend using social media is focused on creation

There are a ton of options out there for facilitating video creation and remix, but two of my favorites are MediaBreaker and Vidcode.

The Anti-Defamation League and Teaching Tolerance have lesson plans that connect to both past and present struggles, and one can also look to the co-created syllabi that have sprung up around Black Lives MatterCharlottesville, and beyond. Pair these resources with video creation tools,

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

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

policies online program

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

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