Online Classes Get a Missing Piece: Teamwork Most online courses are a solitary experience for learners. Students lack the ability to strike up an impromptu conversation about last week’s homework or compare notes with whoever’s sitting next to them in class. The absence of social interaction could be one reason behind high dropout rates in online classes. Instead their interactions are relegated to stale chat forums, where questions go unanswered or where few students regularly visit. Students enrolled in online classes at community colleges drop out of class at a higher rate than peers in face-to-face environments, according to the Community College Research Center. Several California community colleges are hopeful that adding a way for learners to interact with each other in online classes will help them complete their coursework. MOOCs get social Carolyn Rosé, an associate professor in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, has been exploring ways to add social engagement to MOOCs since 2013.
19 Incredibly Useful Websites You Wish You Knew Earlier – The Mission – Medium We tend to think of learning a new skill or “going back to school” as something you’d do when looking to change careers, or to upgrade within your current one. But lifelong learning has incredible benefits, both personal and professional, say researchers. It makes communities more productive and innovative, and gives employees the ability to cope with constantly changing workplaces. Lifelong learning helps us stay sharp as we age, and is also important for a successful economy. It helps us communicate better, socialize more effectively, and achieve greater success. Whether you’re looking to learn how to code, build leadership skills, or otherwise improve yourself, here are 19 awesome places to learn the critical skills that will change your life: 1. This crowdsourced collection of top lectures from professionals, academia, governments, and leaders of all stripes is unique in that the resources are upvoted or downvoted by users, in typical Reddit fashion. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.
So You Want to Be an Instructional Designer? Good listener. People person. Lifelong learner. Sound like you? No, we’re not trying to arrange a first date. Colleges, K-12 schools and companies increasingly turn to instructional designers to help them improve the quality of teaching in in-person, online or blended-learning environments. Once-lonely techies who helped faculty figure out Blackboard and dwelled in university IT departments, IDs now are growing in number and gaining celebrity status at their institutions. Jobs in the industry take many shapes, but instructional designers act broadly as shamans who guide educators and institutions through the world of digital learning. You’re a good listener IDs often start the design process by talking to faculty and subject matter experts about the courses they teach. You enjoy working with diverse teams Instructional design work is unique to any given organization, but odds are it involves collaborating with people who have vastly different roles and personalities.
Grades, Courses Most Important in College Admissions, Survey Finds - High School & Beyond As college application season ramps up once again, an annual survey of college admissions officers reiterates an important message for high school students who are worried sick about their SAT or ACT scores: The classes you take and the grades you earn are far more important to us than your test scores. That's a key finding of the 13th annual "State of College Admission" survey, released Thursday by the National Association for College Admission Counseling, or NACAC. You'd never know it by the amount of cold sweat high school seniors generate nationally about admissions test scores, but that finding has stayed pretty consistent for 20 years, according to NACAC. The survey found that in the fall 2014 admissions cycle, 79.2 percent of responding colleges and universities gave "considerable importance" to grades in students' college-prep classes, while 55.7 percent assigned the same importance to admission test scores for entering freshmen.
NWeLearn: Creativity in Instructional Design | Brainstorm in Progress These are only my notes and impressions. Non-tangential ramblings are my own. Contents may settle in shipping: Creativity in Instructional Design Shannon Riggs, Director of Ecampus Course Development and Training at Oregon State University Instructional designers wear many hats in online education. She was reticent to get involved in online education but found that ALL of the online students had to be engaged because the courses were designed that way. The eCampus as 50 online programs, 3k students have earned a degree since 2002, 19k students from 50 states and 19 countries. 1k+ online courses. They are growing at 15% a year and they are proud that they have not let the quality slip – it has improved. “ECampus Essentials”: This requires the collaboration of an instructional designer. The question for the tables was “what role do instructional designers play on campus?” Instructional designers are artists.
Formal Schooling and the Death of Literacy My privilege is easily identified in my being white and male, but it is the story of my life that better reveals my enormous privilege established by my mother when I was a child. I entered formal schooling with such a relatively high level of literacy and numeracy that from those first days I was labeled “smart”—a misnomer for that privilege. From Green Eggs and Ham to Hop on Pop, from canasta to spades, from Chinese checkers to Scrabble—games with my mother and often my father were my schooling until I entered first grade. And none of that ever seemed to be a chore, and none of that involved worksheets, reading levels, or tests. Formal schooling was always easy for me because of those roots, but formal schooling was also often tedious and so much that had to be tolerated to do the things I truly enjoyed—such as collecting, reading, and drawing from thousands of comic books throughout my middle and late teens. Misreading the Importance of Third-Grade Reading The Literary Technique Hunt
NWeLearn: Limitless Education: Is Open Source an Option? | Brainstorm in Progress Bell tower at Oregon State University. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) Limitless Education: Is Open Source an Option? Tamara Mitchell, Assistant Director Career Success Center at Oregon State University / Arkansas State University Mountain Home / Western Oregon UniversityBrian Daigle, Center for Academic Innovation at Western Oregon UniversityAlexis Terell, Undergraduate Pathway Associate Program Manager at Oregon State UniversityCraig Geffre, Division of International Programs at Oregon State UniversityJennifer Kepka, Linn-Benton Community College Open Source tools are reducing barriers and encouraging innovation among higher education faculty, staff, and administrators. Some of the tools looked at: I think we should have started with a definition of Open Source.
Why Connected Learning For more than a century, educators have strived to customize education to the learner. Connected Learning leverages the advances of the digital age to make that dream a reality — connecting academics to interests, learners to inspiring peers and mentors, and educational goals to the higher order skills the new economy rewards. Six principles (below) define it and allow every young person to experience learning that is social, participatory, interest-driven and relevant to the opportunities of our time. Connected learning thrives in a socially meaningful and knowledge-rich ecology of ongoing participation, self-expression and recognition. In their everyday exchanges with peers and friends, young people fluidly contribute, share and give feedback. Interests foster the drive to gain knowledge and expertise. Connected learning recognizes the importance of academic success for intellectual growth and as an avenue towards economic and political opportunity.
Education Technology 101: From Assessments to Zombies | EdSurge Guides Why shouldn't the smartest people in the world want to go into education? One reason that comes to mind: maybe they just don't know much about how education--and for that matter, how quickly education technology has been evolving. And yep, we'd like to help. Here's a collection of stories and resources to help you begin to map the landscape of education technology. In some ways, there's nothing new about using technology in the school room. At one point, pencils seemed a tad bit revolutionary. Still it's hardly all buttercups and roses: both education broadly as well as edtech have big, hairy problems that trigger passionate debates. And as always, please share your rants, raves and reminders with us here.
We’re Trying To Do “The Wrong Thing Right” in Schools — Modern Learning We’re Trying To Do “The Wrong Thing Right” in Schools Whenever I think about the way most schools are structured today, I always come back to the same question: Do we do the things we do because they’re better for kids or because they are easier for us? For instance: separating kids by age in school. Is that something we do because kids learn better that way? Or do we do it because it’s just an easier way organizing our work? Do kids learn better when we separate out the content into different subjects, or is it just easier for us? To be sure, these are not new questions, nor are they unique to my thinking. So why bring it up yet again? A couple of weeks ago, thanks to some serendipitous surfing online, I came across this 10-minute snip of an interview with Ackoff, a pioneer in the field of systems thinking who was a professor at the Wharton School prior to his death in 2009. “Peter Drucker said ‘There’s a difference between doing things right and doing the right thing.’
Google Goes Back to School with Updates to Classroom and Expeditions It’s that time of the year—the time when companies start making back-to-school updates and announcements. First up: Google, in the form of updates to Classroom, Expeditions, and the overall Google for Education offerings, all announced on Google’s blog. Google Classroom: Email Summaries and Annotations Google Classroom, the company’s learning management system, is now getting a new feature. Teachers will now be able to share summaries of student work, classroom announcements and the like with parents (shown above), either by sending daily or weekly summaries via email or over the Google Classroom app, show below. But that’s not all for Classroom’s mobile app. And one big update specifically geared towards teachers: now, teachers can organize the class stream by adding topics to posts so that teachers and/or students can filter the stream for specific topics. Expeditions: New Virtual Adventures Google Apps for Education: Improvements to Cast and Forms