October 2014 archive

electronic portfolio: resources

ePortfolio for the Assessment of Learning 

http://www.futured.com/documents/FuturEdePortfolioforAssessmentWhitePaper.pdf

http://www.myefolio.com/
http://chalkandwire.com/index.php/product

A Survey of the Electronic Portfolio Market Sector: Analysis and Surprising Trends

http://campustechnology.com/articles/2011/10/12/a-survey-of-the-electronic-portfolio-market-sector.aspx

FolioTek, Columbia, Missouri, ePortfolio launch in 2001. Sells in U.S. with interest in expanding globally.

Livetext, LaGrange, IL, founded in 1998. New product: Field Experience Module. Smart phone app: iPad, iPhone, Android. Mostly U.S., but expanding in South America and the Middle East. Easy tie-in to accreditation agencies and their standards. Individual accounts. New release start of 2012. Started in K-12, moved focus to higher education, now exploring K-12 once again, starting with teacher education.

RCampus, produced by Reazon Systems, Santa Ana, CA. Software development started in 1999,

Desire2Learn, Kitchener, Ontario also Baltimore, MD, with offices around the world, founded in 1999. Sells worldwide, latest release for the electronic portfolio (ver. 3.5) was in August 2011. Electronic portfolio and the D2L LMS are bundled; each leverages functionalities from the other. ePortfolio moving to hosting service and individual accounts soon.

Digication, Providence, RI and Palo Alto, CA, founded 2002. Is in partnership with Google Apps. Individual accounts; institution keeps assessment data; individual keeps ePortfolio functionality. Through Google Apps: free digital accounts with Digication (no assessment management functions with these accounts). “Three or four clicks and Digication is enabled.” Almost daily updates. Smart phone app: IOS and Android. Contact jyan@digication.com.

Learning Objects, producers of Campus Pack, in Washington, DC, with employees around the world, founded in 2003.

TaskStream, New York City, organized 1998, founded 2000, markets internationally, versions available in a variety of languages. Offers separate platforms, AMS (Accountability Management System) and LAT (Learning Achievement Tools); each is multi-component.

Longsight, based in Ohio with offices in NY, IN, OH, WI, and CA, founded in 1978, a service provider for open source solutions. Supports both the Open Source Portfolio (OSP) and Sakai, within which OSP is embedded.

Chalk & Wire, Ridgeway, Ontario, Canada;

NobleHour, produced by TreeTop Software, in Lakeland, FL, founded in 2011

Sherston, Tag Developments, the assessment division of Sherston Software, Ltd., providers of Red Pen Tool: http://www.maps-ict.com/redpentool.mov, of LiveAssess: http://www.maps-ict.com/liveassess.mov, and of MAPS 3: http://www.maps-ict.com/maps3.mov.

PebblePad from PebbleLearning, in Telford, UK, with office in Australia, founded in 2003. Most popular ePortfolio in the U.K. and Australia,

Symplicity, in Arlington, VA, offers an electronic portfolio (http://www.symplicity.com/reflection) but it is only one among dozens of products that Symplicity offers–all of them are management tools for higher education (see http://www.symplicity.com/products). Good example of separating products to support a single function.

Blackboard

eFolioWorld, technology from Avenet, the Minnesota Colleges and Universities portfolio system,

iWebFolio, from Nuventive. Also known for TracDat, marketed since the 1990s, Nuventive founded 2000.

Epsilen,

Mahara,

eLumen,

A survey of e-pdp and e-portfolio practice in UK Higher Education

http://www.islamicstudiesnetwork.ac.uk/assets/documents/pdp/survey_of_epdp_and_eportfolio_practice_in_uk_higher_education.pdf

p. 10 and p. 18 offer questionnaires for assessment

Exploring Faculty Perceptions of ePortfolio Use and Its Relationship to Faculty Teaching Beliefs

http://ncepr.org/finalreports/WSUfinalreport.pdf

p. 3 questionnaire  p. 5

Five Apps To Test Your Physics Skills

Beyond Angry Birds, Five Apps That Test Your Physics Skills

http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/2014/01/beyond-angry-birds-five-apps-that-test-your-physics-skills/

1. Crayon Physics Deluxe worldofgoo

2.  World of Goo                  coaster_crafter

3. Coaster Crafter               602196_434936999916746_2105602860_n-1

4. Amazing Alex                  tinkerbox

5. Tinkerbox

All the above games have physics in common but they’re also all in 2D. If students love these games, consider challenging them with 3D and even 4D games that put physics knowledge to the test. Valve’s Portal series is a great choice, or look into the equally mind-bending first-person games Antichamber or Quantum Conundrum, both of which go beyond the boundaries of Newtonian physics and Euclidean geometry.

competency-based education

The Real Revolution in Online Education Isn’t MOOCs

http://blogs.hbr.org/2014/10/the-real-revolution-in-online-education-isnt-moocs/

Say a newly minted graduate with a degree in history realizes that in order to attain her dream job at Facebook, she needs some experience with social media marketing. Going back to school is not a desirable option, and many schools don’t even offer relevant courses in social media. Where is the affordable, accessible, targeted, and high-quality program that she needs to skill-up?

A Problem-Solving Game For Teachers and Administrators

A Problem-Solving Game For Teachers and Administrators

http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/2014/10/a-problem-solving-game-for-teachers-and-administrators/

This activity empowers all stakeholders. It gives everyone an opportunity to share pain points and observations and to brainstorm solutions. By building a card deck of context-specific pain points and observations, there’s buy-in from the start. All participants have a vested interest in the cards they create. Likewise, the activity has enough structure built in to drive toward solutions.

mobile learning at schools

Mobile Learning: Resource Roundup

http://www.edutopia.org/article/mobile-learning-resources
Smartphones, tablets, e-readers — today’s students have a variety of mobile technologies at their fingertips. Here’s a look at some mobile-learning resources from Edutopia and around the web.

the education of tomorrow

Teaching and the University of Tomorrow

https://chroniclevitae.com/news/768-teaching-and-the-university-of-tomorrow

MOOC promoters continually claim that their products provide technologies that have never appeared in face-to-face classrooms. While I don’t disagree that my courses have lacked fun ways to draw molecules (because I teach in the humanities), I do find their insistence that traditional higher ed lacks technological advances to be odd. If you took the MOOC prophets seriously, it would seem that all real-time professors do is lecture to bored students. – See more at: https://chroniclevitae.com/news/768-teaching-and-the-university-of-tomorrow#sthash.RuCJxbAU.dpuf

What I believe Kelly Backer [intentionally?] misses to say is that MOOC claims to be progressive, meaning “a new mode/model” of teaching, but it relays on the old (from medieval times) values: the attempt to put “skin in the game” or pay for certificates, fails, since, according to Backer, the employers don’t care about those certificates. It is not sufficient to “move” the teaching process in the “future,” if the evaluation process remains in the medieval terms. 

online course design

From the LinkedIn discussion group Higher Education Teaching and Learning

STUCK IN THE 90S: ONLINE COURSE DESIGN IN TRADITIONAL HIGHER EDUCATION

http://higheredmanagement.net/2014/10/22/stuck-in-the-90s-online-course-design-in-traditional-higher-education/

Of course, not all aspects of online course design require a team of specialists, a longer development time, and more funding. Some things can be done quickly, cheaply and by individuals with focused skill sets.

But technology can, when built with a deep understanding of how students learn, meet both of these needs. We can build online courses that provide students with hundreds of opportunities to test their knowledge. Using scientifically-based learning analytics, we can provide each learner with immediate, context-specific feedback. We can build software that constantly responds to each student’s cognitive and educational differences and serves up activities that address these differences.

  • Michael Berta, Ed.D.Michael

    Michael Berta, Ed.D.

    Educator, technologist, researcher, and innovator in edtech, distance education, and faculty development

    “Placing the burden on lone educators with minuscule (or non-existent) funding and who are not hired for their strengths in instructional media development is neither logical, nor fair. But more to the point, it’s a lost opportunity to leverage high-quality course design to drive improvements in learning outcomes.”

    I could not agree more with this statement and the remainder of the article. I’ve long supported an instructional design partnership model where faculty occupy a leading role along with other professionals capable of making the interactions, activities, and rich-media meet the quality needs of an increasingly complex learning environment (and world).

  • Judith

    Judith Killion

    Editor at Individual Basis

    We need to start imagining new models for building, acquiring and sharing instructional media.

    This has always been an issue. My students love activities that provide them with immediate feedback. I spend extra hours building a wide variety of different activities into each Learning module. It takes time and effort and if I am going to address different learning styles that is an entirely different issue. To create effective interactive learning tools that will not waste my students time and will challenge their skill level consumes more time than planning for a face to face class with different activities. I would love to talk to someone-be able to explain what I want my students to learn, suggest a few interactive choices, and come back later to find age related learning activities that fit different learning styles.

  • Alex TolleyAlex

    Alex Tolley

    Owner, MyMeemz

    There is going to be a fight because this model is more like a business product that educators contribute to, rather than own. Perhaps this is the true industrialization of education, replacing the craft model of individual teaching with standardized, high quality product?

  • Maria LaverghettaMaria

    Maria Laverghetta

    Enrollment Advisor – Pearson Embanet

    I have forwarded this article on to members of the course development team within Pearson for their feedback. I am curious to see their impression of the article versus mine, considering I predominantly am a part of recruitment services for Pearson specifically. Within our academic partnerships platform, we do contend with faculty, should they employ our course development team, to this vein because the ownership usually rests with the instructor solely. Editing course content or abridging related material so that it could be received potentially as more either user-friendly or technologically savvy can be a source of major contention with faculty members. I do agree that this is an industrialization of education to an extent, but it also pushes the ownership of traditional education past the instructor, a predominantly sole proprietorship environment, to an completely different team effort. The natural technological growing pains coupled with role expansion and differentiation are also issues needing to be addressed as well.

  • Alex TolleyAlex

    Alex Tolley

    Owner, MyMeemz

    Suppose one was to take this seriously. What might such a course look like – for a subject like Biology? Could it be built on existing LMS platforms, or is a new platform required?

  • Judith

    Judith Killion

    Editor at Individual Basis

    I think that both individual ownership and team collaboration are important to the development of successful online learning. We (hopefully) use the concepts of group and team learning in our classroom environments. We should not be afraid to open ourselves up to some of the positive opportunities that could develop from participating in these practices. It does not mean giving up our ownership of content and presentation. I see it as a marketplace of choice where instructors can decide what kinds of activities, helps, prompts, extra materials, and resources they want to add to their class content. The choices could be categorized by learning styles or how they fit into learning paradigms. I think we must face the reality that some parts of education will have to be more industrialized than others just because of the delivery method. This does not have to be a negative issue if there are enough choices to help instructors develop the rigorous content they want to deliver without sacrificing their entire life to the project.

digital games in the classroom

Report Finds Teachers Underutilize Resources for Digital Games in the Classroom

http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/2014/10/survey-finds-teachers-underutilize-resources-for-digital-games-in-the-classroom/

Certain types of games are favored over others, and that duration plays a key part. “Teachers tend to use shorter form games that could be finished in a class period or just a few minutes. Because developers realize that teachers can fit a shorter form game into a classroom period, they’re going to make those games.”

games used in the classroom

http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/2014/06/surprising-insights-how-teachers-use-games-in-the-classroom/

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