One of the big challenges of teaching an online course is managing workload while providing the support and feedback that is essential to student success. A good way to become more efficient is to build an archive of grading comments to reduce the time it takes to provide feedback on assignments. By creating an archive, an instructor could insert a comment such as the following with a single keystroke:
The Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education (WICHE) and its partners have been awarded a $2.3 million grant from Lumina Foundation for a national initiative that will make distance education courses more accessible to students across state lines, as well as making it easier for states to regulate and institutions to participate in interstate distance education. WICHE and its regional partners – the Midwestern Higher Education Compact (MHEC), the New England Board of Higher Education (NEBHE), and the Southern Regional Education Board (SREB) – along with the Presidents’ Forum, the Council of State Governments (CSG), and the Commission on Regulation of Postsecondary Distance Education, created by the State Higher Education Executive Officers (SHEEO) and the Association of Public Land-grant Universities (APLU), worked together to forge a national initiative, the State Authorization Reciprocity Agreement (SARA), that will create interstate reciprocity in the regulation of postsecondary distance education.
During the final meeting with one of my speech classes, I asked each student to give a few parting words to the class. I found a similar message resonating from many who spoke. Soon after, I received an email from an advisor at our school asking me to share some tips on fostering learning in the classroom. Since I had recorded that final speech class, I decided to use my students’ comments as the basis for my advice.
A sociology professor in an undergraduate introductory social problems course used a blog to “enhance student participation, engagement and skill building.” (p. 207) In the article referenced below, this professor shares her experiences of using this assignment with 263 students across four semesters.
MediaCore, the cloud-based video education platform, is announcing at Campus Technology 2013 a new plug-in for Moodle the most widely-used Learning Management System in the world. Visit MediaCore at Booth 1211 to see how universities and colleges are using video to engage students, encourage peer-to-peer learning and support learning beyond the lecture hall.
The State University of New York (SUNY) Information Technology Exchange Center (ITEC) today announced its acquisition of the Ensemble Video platform. Ensemble Video will provide streamlined video content management and publishing capabilities throughout the nation’s largest comprehensive system of higher education.
Critical thinking is defined as a reflective and reasonable thought process embodying depth, accuracy, and astute judgment to determine the merit of a decision, an object, or a theory (Alwehaibi, 2012). Creative thinking involves analysis, evaluation, and a synthesizing of facts, ideas, opinions, and theories. Possessing the capacity to logically and creatively exercise in-depth judgment and reflection to work effectively in the realm of complex ideas exemplifies a critical thinker (Carmichael & Farrell, 2012).
Blended learning does not simply involve shifting portions of face-to-face instruction online. Ultimately, a blended course will require reconceptualization of the entire learning process. That’s where ADDIE comes in. The ADDIE method is an acronym that stands for analysis, design, development, implementation, and evaluation. It is a critically important tool for designing blended courses.
AcademicPub(TM), the world's largest provider of copyright-cleared content for digital and printed course packs in higher education, today announced the launch of Express Books(TM), enabling professors to self- publish. The announcement was made by Caroline Vanderlip, CEO, of AcademicPub parent SharedBook Inc.
The Internet flipped learning before instructors did. Want to find out something? Google it. Wikipedia it. Use your laptop or smartphone or iPad. That’s where the “answers” are. Some of us initially reacted to this cyber-democratization of information asserting, “This isn’t right! The Internet is full of incomplete and simply wrong information.” But the challenge to the classroom was more profound. It has raised questions among students and even administrators about the need for face-to-face classrooms at all, as if correct information and unchallenged “opinions” were all that was needed.