According to both Apple and App Annie, a website that tracks the popularity of mobile apps by number of new downloads, Remind, a school communications platform, took the #1 spot on the chart of free iOS apps.
Remind’s app allows educators, parents and students to send and receive text and voice messages, as well as share attachments and links to digital educational resources. The company was founded in 2011 with a straightforward value proposition: to provide teachers with a safe and secure way to send homework or study reminders to students and their parents on mobile devices without using personal phone numbers.
Those features may seem simple by today’s standards. But it’s amassed a growing footprint, claiming users in more than 70 percent of U.S. public schools. Grey adds that Remind today has 27 million monthly active users (which breaks down to approximately 2 million teachers, 13 million students and 12 million parents). Across them, Remind says 17 billion messages have been sent since its launch.
Along with simplicity, Remind’s timing may have also helped the product find a receptive market. The company’s launch in 2011 coincided with the start of a period that saw smartphone adoption among U.S. adults steadily grow from 35 percent in 2011 to 77 percent in 2018, according to the Pew Research Center.
At its core, Remind remains very much a school communications tool, says Grey. But his grander vision is to evolve the app into what he calls an “educational platform” that allow users to share content from other providers. For instance, when Remind users compose a message, they can currently connect to their accounts on Google Classroom, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, Quizlet and other tools to directly share documents, Powerpoint slides, flashcard sets and other kinds of files.
The Best Learning Management Systems based on Customer Experience
This Top 20 LMS list has been created using a holistic approach and is based on input from actual LMS users.
The order of appearance depends on Customer Satisfaction (CSAT Score), Customer Effort (CEF Score) & Customer Expectation (CEX Score).
What: Overview of new D2L Brightspace features
When: Monday, April 9 at 10:00 AM
Please join us to learn about the new features that will be available in D2L Brightspace as of June 2, 2018. The session will be recorded.
D2L cloud is the big news. stcloudstate.learn.minnstate.edu will be the link to log into the cloud.
Quiz/Question Library – The ability to search the text of quiz questions. See video (7:00)
Quizzes – Add a quiz due date, in addition to a start and end date.
Quiz Taking – Students start and submit a quiz with fewer clicks.
Manage Dates Tool – ‘Due Dates’ are now included.
Additional features will be rolled out to the QA cloud on April 10 (version 10.8.0) and May 7 (version 10.8.1)
ePortfolio -“A digital showcase for the learning journey. It helps you document the experience, reflect on it, and share ideas and achievements as they happen.” D2L has provided an overview video and a video to help you navigate this new tool for Minnesota State campuses. Look for an invitation to an overview session on April 18.
IP restriction, which is supposed to alleviate proctoring issues. But this will work only for oncampus quizzes. not for online classes.
The Quiz library being moved to the cloud. Does this mean that the Quiz Library can be shared across institutions? E.g. if faculty from one university is teaching biology and has developed a quiz library content, it can be shared with the content of a faculty from another university? All bells and whistles so far are only secondary to the fact that content generation remains most important for faculty and if faculty can share their test banks, I see this as the most advantageous of moving to a cloud.
eportfolio – new D2L tool. April 18 overview scheduled. so, isn’t in collision with TK20? I, personally, think that LInkedIn is the way to go. I will not mention eFolio MN, since it is a losing bet. So, how we reconcile the existence of several platforms for eportofolio?
SSO. single sign on. Adobe Connect, Mediaspace and service desk are already on SSO. signing in one application allows to move to D2L without having to sign on again.
ECAR collaborated with 157 institutions to collect responses from 13,451 faculty respondents across 7 countries about their technology experiences. ECAR also collaborated with 124 institutions to collect responses from 43,559 undergraduate students across 10 countries about their technology experiences. Please see the 2017 student and faculty studies hub for more about this year’s research.
When it comes to meeting technological support needs, students’ default modality is DIY. Students are more than twice as likely to figure out solutions to technology problems on their own, to search online sources, or to ask a friend than they are to use their campus help desk. Contacting the vendor or company to fix a technology problem is the last resort.
Laptops are king, smartphones are queen, and tablets are on the way out.
Students’ experiences with their instructors’ use of and approach to technology in the classroom are a mixed bag. A majority of students said most of their instructors have adequate technology skills, use technology to enhance learning, and encourage the use of collaborative technology tools. However, students said fewer faculty use technology for sophisticated learning tasks (e.g., engagement, creative and critical thinking), and relatively few faculty ask students to use their own devices for in-class work.
Students are choosing sides in the online versus face-to-face debate. For the fourth year in a row, the number of students preferring a blended learning environment that includes some to mostly online components has increased. The number of students preferring completely face-to-face or completely online courses continues to dwindle. The number of students expressing no preference has been cut by more than half since 2014.
Students are satisfied with features of their LMS…except when they aren’t.Students have favorable opinions about the basic features and functionalities of their LMS. But, the more sophisticated the task and the more engagement required of students, the less happy they tend to be. This may be a function of the tools, the instructors who use them, or both.
Students would like their instructors to use more technology in their classes.Technologies that provide students with something (e.g., lecture capture, early-alert systems, LMS, search tools) are more desired than those that require students to give something (e.g., social media, use of their own devices, in-class polling tools). We speculate that sound pedagogy and technology use tied to specific learning outcomes and goals may improve the desirability of the latter.
Students reported that faculty are banning or discouraging the use of laptops, tablets, and (especially) smartphones more often than in previous years. Some students reported using their devices (especially their smartphones) for nonclass activities, which might explain the instructor policies they are experiencing. However, they also reported using their devices for productive classroom activities (e.g., taking notes, researching additional sources of information, and instructor-directed activities).
95 percent of larger programs (those with 2,500 or more online program students) are “wholly asynchronous” while 1.5 percent are mainly or completely synchronous. About three-quarters (73 percent) of mid-sized programs (schools with between 500 and 2,499 online program students) and 62 percent of smaller programs are fully asynchronous.
The asynchronous nature of this kind of education may explain why threaded discussions turned up as the most commonly named teaching and learning technique, mentioned by 27.4 percent of respondents, closely followed by practice-based learning, listed by 27.3 percent of survey participants.
While the LMS plays a significant role in online programming, the report pointed to a distinct lack of references to “much-hyped innovations,” such as adaptive learning, competency-based education systems, simulation or game-based learning tools. (my note: my mouth run dry of repeating every time people start becoming orgasmic about LMS, D2L in particular)
four in 10 require the use of instructional design support, three in 10 use a team approach for online course design and one in 10 outsources the work. Overall, some 80 percent of larger programs use instructional design expertise.
In the smallest programs, instructional design support is treated as a “faculty option” for 53 percent of institutions. Another 18 percent expect faculty to develop their online courses independently. For 13 percent of mid-sized programs, the faculty do their development work independently; another 64 percent may choose whether or not to bring in instructional design help. (my note: this is the SCSU ‘case’)
Measuring Quality
Among the many possible quality metrics suggested by the researchers, the five adopted most frequently for internal monitoring were:
Student achievement of program objectives (83 percent);
Student retention and graduation rates (77 percent);
Attend this webinar to learn how instructors can instantly schedule, customize and launch Shindig sessions directly from within the Canvas LMS, as well as automatically add the video chat sessions to students’ schedules.
Learn about the positive impact of collaborative and interactive learning environments on student success first-hand from educators and instructional technologists from leading universities. This session will highlight different use cases Shindig can be utilized for, including course delivery, office hours, guest speakers, workshops and more.
Early adopters of the Shindig platform will also be sharing highlight videos of their use of the platform and answering questions attendees may have.
Shindig Early Adopter Guest Speakers:
Michael Angilletta, Professor & Senior Sustainability Scholar, Associate Director of Undergraduate Programs, Arizona State University
Patrice Torcivia Prusko: Production and Support MOOCs, SPCOs and Digital Initiatives at Cornell University
The Shindig Canvas plugin is available for free on a public GitHub Repo. Once the plugin is installed in the university’s LMS, IT administrators can contact Shindig for an API key to enable the creation of on-demand Shindig sessions in Canvas. The company is offering each Canvas client institution 10 free Shindig sessions of up to 1,000 attendees.
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First-time users: upon entering the room, click “Allow” to the Flash prompt requesting access to your webcam. (Chrome users may need to click Allow a second time).
Note: The Shindig app currently only supports interacting with the featured speakers through text. To fully enjoy the Shindig experience and be enabled to ask video chat questions of the speaker or video chat privately with other participants, please log in from a computer with webcam and microphone capabilities.
