eLearning Articles, Webinars and In The News

The title says it all.  But, like we can't tell a book by its cover, don't let the title tell the whole story of this technophobe's views of online courses. 

Take a 60-minute lecture. Cut the excess verbiage, do away with most of the details, and pare
it down to key concepts and themes.
What's left? A "microlecture" over in as few as 60 seconds. A course designer for San Juan
College, a community college in Farmington, N.M., says that in online education, such tiny
bursts can teach just as well as traditional lectures when paired with assignments and
discussions. 

Instructors who are new to online teaching often fear that their courses will be impersonal and that connecting with their students will not be possible in an online environment.

Five Steps to Improve your online courses is a webinar which focuses on continuously improving approaches for online courses and programs.

When you make the move to online teaching, you may discover that some of your old nemeses follow … difficult students, in all their manifestations. You can’t ignore them, any more than you can in a traditional classroom. But the online environment creates different opportunities and challenges for dealing with difficult students. What are those differences, and how do you adapt to them?

Do learning styles really matter?

After hearing this seminar, you will be able to increase the effectiveness of eLearning design by:

• Recognizing at least three misconceptions or myths about learning styles, in general, and the implications for e-learning design.
• Identifying several popular learning style models and determining their validity and potential application based on empirical research.
• Identifying learner traits that have been shown to interact with instructional methods, and demonstrating how these traits can be addressed in the design of online courses.
• Knowing how to increase the effectiveness of e-learning design.
• Analyzing instruction examples of how different learner traits can be effectively addressed in the design of e-learning courses.
• Participating in a “dialogic” process of examining assumptions and beliefs related to learning styles and adapting instruction to address the diverse learning needs of students and the principles derived from empirical research.

A respected and successful faculty member moves a course online–and suddenly feels as if he or she has forgotten how to teach.  Student interest appears to be down. The instructor senses things aren‘t going well. And all of that is confirmed by the most dreaded of outcomes: a low evaluation.

If quality online course design is your goal, Quality Matters will help identify the strengths and areas for improvement in your online course. Quality Matters (QM), is a highly successful project that developed an inter-institutional process for recognizing quality online courses. Using your own online course (or one of a colleague’s), you will learn more about QM’s rubric and process, apply the standards to your own course, and have an opportunity to review issues around “quality” course design.

In an effort to raise student performance in a difficult course, San Jose State University has turned to a “flipped classroom” format, requiring students to watch lecture videos produced by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and using class time for discussion. And initial data show the method is leading to higher test scores, university officials announced this week.

Chronicle article from the ProfHacker Blog discussing Laptops in the Classroom best practices.

When used effectively, technology plays an important role in enhancing the learning process.

Large enrollment survey courses are common practice in undergraduate courses and many of those courses are also offered fully online...Surprising to some, preliminary research shows that results of students taking large survey courses online are equal to or slightly better than their contemporaries taking the same course with the same number of students face-to-face.

Campus official helps faculty members adjust to teaching online college courses as students clamor for web options

Motivating Students with Teaching Techniques that Establish Relevance, Promote Autonomy

The Library of Congress has issued its triennial statement of exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  The Chronicle of Higher Ed's, ProfHacker gives his interpretation to the new exemptions.  

This two-volume report, Online Learning as a Strategic Asset, contains the results of 231 interviews conducted with administrators, faculty, and students at 45 public institutions across the country and more than 10,700 responses from faculty across the spectrum of teaching positions - tenure/non-tenure track; full- and part-time; and both those who have and those who have not taught online. The report was underwritten by a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Using the internet for teaching and learning often brings up the question of cheating.   A common concern voiced by faculty is "How do I know that my students are doing the work?"

The A-P-L  U-Sloan National Commission on Online Learning was formed in May 2007 to engage the A-P-L-U Presidents and Chancellors in a discussion about the utility of online education as a means to achieve broader institutional priorities, such as diversity, retention, internationalization and accountability.

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