https://www.edsurge.com/news/2018-01-16-ready-player-one-science-fiction-s-vision-for-the-future-of-education
Whenever I’m doing a virtual-reality demonstration, I ask for 40 minutes to an hour to get all of the students set up with their headsets, oriented in the virtual space, and then the learning can actually begin. It is not just something where you can throw headsets in a classroom and expect everyone to immediately start the learning objectives that you’re aiming for. You do need to do a little of that work explaining how the technology functions and making sure that everyone has the vision requirements, the hearing requirements, the physical requirements.
+++++++++++
more on Ready Player One in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=ready+player+one
Online Learning’s ‘Greatest Hits’
Robert Ubell (Columnist) Feb 20, 2019
https://www.edsurge.com/news/2019-02-20-online-learning-s-greatest-hits
dean of web-based distance learning
Learning Management Systems
Neck and neck for the top spot in the LMS academic vendor race are Blackboard—the early entry and once-dominant player—and coming-up quickly from behind, the relatively new contender, Canvas, each serving about 6.5 million students . The LMS market today is valued at $9.2 billion.
Digital Authoring Systems
Faced with increasingly complex communication technologies—voice, video, multimedia, animation—university faculty, expert in their own disciplines, find themselves technically perplexed, largely unprepared to build digital courses.
instructional designers, long employed by industry, joined online academic teams, working closely with faculty to upload and integrate interactive and engaging content.
nstructional designers, as part of their skillset, turned to digital authoring systems, software introduced to stimulate engagement, encouraging virtual students to interface actively with digital materials, often by tapping at a keyboard or touching the screen as in a video game. Most authoring software also integrates assessment tools, testing learning outcomes.
With authoring software, instructional designers can steer online students through a mixtape of digital content—videos, graphs, weblinks, PDFs, drag-and-drop activities, PowerPoint slides, quizzes, survey tools and so on. Some of the systems also offer video editing, recording and screen downloading options
Adaptive Learning
As with a pinwheel set in motion, insights from many disciplines—artificial intelligence, cognitive science, linguistics, educational psychology and data analytics—have come together to form a relatively new field known as learning science, propelling advances in a new personalized practice—adaptive learning.
MOOCs
Of the top providers, Coursera, the Wall Street-financed company that grew out of the Stanford breakthrough, is the champion with 37 million learners, followed by edX, an MIT-Harvard joint venture, with 18 million. Launched in 2013, XuetangX, the Chinese platform in third place, claims 18 million.
Former Yale President Rick Levin, who served as Coursera’s CEO for a few years, speaking by phone last week, was optimistic about the role MOOCs will play in the digital economy. “The biggest surprise,” Levin argued, “is how strongly MOOCs have been accepted in the corporate world to up-skill employees, especially as the workforce is being transformed by job displacement. It’s the right time for MOOCs to play a major role.”
In virtual education, pedagogy, not technology, drives the metamorphosis from absence to presence, illusion into reality. Skilled online instruction that introduces peer-to-peer learning, virtual teamwork and other pedagogical innovations stimulate active learning. Online learning is not just another edtech product, but an innovative teaching practice. It’s a mistake to think of digital education merely as a device you switch on and off like a garage door.
++++++++++
more on online learning in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=online+learning
http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/DigitalEducation/2018/12/early_results_of_study_show_sc.html
The Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development study tested 4,500 9-10-year-olds in its first released dataset. The ABCD study is the largest long-term study of brain development in U.S.
Early data from the study, analyzed by another group of researchers from the CHEO Research Institute’s Healthy Active Living and Obesity also showed that kids who spend less than two hours a day on screens, participated in 60 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous-intensity physical activity, and received nine to 11 hours of uninterrupted sleep had higher cognitive abilities.Cognition was measured by language abilities, episodic memory, executive function, attention, working memory, and processing speed.
We define immersive scholarship as any scholarly work developed through or implemented utilizing technologies including Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, Mixed Reality, Visualization (i.e., large format displays and visualization walls, GIS, Tableau), and any related hardware, programs or software.
We are seeking survey participants who are employed in an academic library and who currently support immersive scholarship and technologies at their institution.
how your academic library has developed tools, implemented third party hardware/software, and in what barriers you have identified at your institution in supporting immersive scholarship.
Link to Online Survey
Bitmojis, Gifs, and Snaps in the Classroom? Oh My!
Tierney King JULY 29TH, 2019
https://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/effective-classroom-management/bitmojis-gifs-and-snaps-in-the-classroom/
A Bitmoji, an avatar in which you create yourself, respond to student emails with Bitmojis super-fast if it’s built into the Chrome browser
Although Snapchat can be used to create Bitmojis, Price also suggested using Snapchat to create “Snap stories” for students. “These take longer, and this method focuses on the creation of content,” she says.