events.blackboard.com/open?elqCampaignId=1605 Description: Motivating students and creating community within blended and online learning environments is crucial to academic achievement and success. This open course will provide both theoretical concepts and practical tools for instructors to improve motivation, retention, and engagement within blended and online courses. Course Objectives: Identify and apply relevant motivational strategies and instructional techniquesConstruct thinking skill options for different types of learners and subjectsDesign and share innovative thinking skill activities as well as unique cooperative learningMap and apply instructional models and ideas to online learning toolsCourse Duration: April 30th- June 4th ( A total of 5 weeks) Announcing a Free, Open Course With Dr. Course Title: Instructional Ideas and Technology Tools for Online Success Enrollment is Now Open
The March of the MOOCs: Monstrous Open Online Courses | Open Education MOOCs are a red herring. The MOOC didn’t appear last week, out of a void, vacuum-packed. The MOOC has been around for years, biding its time. Still, the recent furor about MOOCs, which some have called “hysteria,” opens important questions about higher education, digital pedagogy, and online learning. MOOCs are like books, good when they’re good and bad when they’re bad. Content and learning are two separate things, often at odds with one another. Too many people are drinking the MOOC Kool-aid (or dumping it out hastily) when what we need to do is look closely at the Kool-aid to see what we can learn from it. “Massive”: What happens if we take the “Massive” out of “Massive Open Online Course”? “Open”: The first “O” in “MOOC” has been dangerously misread. “Online”: The second “O” in “MOOC” is a misnomer. “Course”: Education of this sort can’t be contained tidily inside of a close-walled “course.” Learning, for Emerson, is emergent and copulative not parthenogenetic.
Data Visualization Theory & Practice In this course you will explore the question of what visualization is, and why you should use visualizations for quantitative data. In doing so, you will address theoretical concepts and examine case studies that show the importance of effective visualizations in real world settings. Image courtesy of Ryan Harris Course Description You will also look at how to interpret meanings in visualizations. In the lab portion of the course the main objective is to expose you to a variety of common and different digital visualization software tools. Technical Requirements Although software availability may change slightly, lab assignments will utilize the following software: Interested in a degree? This course was created by faculty in the Department of Instructional Technology and Learning Sciences at Utah State University .
Making Sense of MOOCs: Musings in a Maze of Myth, Paradox and Possibility | Daniel Fellow - Korea National Open University Education Master - DeTao Masters Academy, China sirjohn.ca During my time as a Fellow at the Korea National Open University (KNOU) in September 2012 media and web coverage of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) was intense. Since one of the requirements of the fellowship was a research paper, exploring the phenomenon of MOOCs seemed an appropriate topic. This essay had to be submitted to KNOU on 25 September 2012 but the MOOCs story is still evolving rapidly. I shall continue to follow it. 'What is new is not true, and what is true is not new'. This paper is published by JIME following its first release as a paper produced as part of a fellowship at the Korea National Open University (KNOU). Abstract: MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) are the educational buzzword of 2012. Keywords: MOOCs, open, openness, educational technology Introduction MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) are the educational buzzword of 2012. Methodological note What is a MOOC?
CourseWiki - CS 448B The world is awash with increasing amounts of data, and we must keep afloat with our relatively constant perceptual and cognitive abilities. Visualization provides one means of combating information overload, as a well-designed visual encoding can supplant cognitive calculations with simpler perceptual inferences and improve comprehension, memory, and decision making. Furthermore, visual representations may help engage more diverse audiences in the process of analytic thinking. In this course we will study techniques and algorithms for creating effective visualizations based on principles from graphic design, visual art, perceptual psychology, and cognitive science. The course is targeted both towards students interested in using visualization in their own work, as well as students interested in building better visualization tools and systems. There are no prerequisites for the class and the class is open to graduate students as well as advanced undergraduates. Schedule Fri Nov 2:
The race to platform education Across the full spectrum of education – primary, secondary, and higher – we are witnessing a race to develop platforms for content, learning, teaching, and evaluation. As liberating as the web is, tremendous centralization of control is occurring in numerous spaces: Google in search/advertising/Android, Amazon in books/cloud computing, Facebook in social networks, etc. I use a smaller range of tools today than I did five years ago. This post/rant on life at Amazon and Google, from the perspective of an employee (programmer?) Google+ is a knee-jerk reaction, a study in short-term thinking, predicated on the incorrect notion that Facebook is successful because they built a great product. In education, we don’t yet have that platform that enables/allows “other people to do the work”. When I was at the Strata conference in February, I was surprised at who wasn’t there in any substantial way – Yahoo, Google, Microsoft (they did present on Azure, but their presence was minimal).
Gamification About the Course Gamification is the application of digital game design techniques to non-game contexts, such as business, education, and social impact challenges. Video games are the dominant entertainment form of modern times because they powerfully motivate behavior. Game mechanics can be applied outside the immersive environments of games themselves, to create engaging experiences as well as assign rewards and recognition. Over the past few years, gamification adoption has skyrocketed. Companies use game thinking for employee motivation in human resources, team building, productivity enhancement, training, health and wellness, sustainability, and innovation. Game thinking means more than dropping in badges and leaderboards to make an activity fun or addicting. Subtitles forall video lectures available in: English, Russian (provided by Digital October), Turkish (Koc University), and Ukrainian (provided by Bionic University) Course Syllabus The course is divided into 12 units. 1. 2. 3.
Inside a MOOC: Coursera class offers peek into determination of student body By Mike Cassidy, Mercury News With the class still in the early going I was about a week behind on my assignments, nearly flunking my first quiz and seriously contemplating dropping the class. So much for the old college try.But two things made me stick with it (at least up until now, with two more weeks to go) — My Coursera class called “Developing Innovative Ideas for New Companies” comes with a promise: If I can finish the course work and score at least 70 percent on my assignments, I’ll receive a statement of accomplishment. I want that statement. But more important than that, were the classmates I’ve encountered.
Social Network Analysis About the Course Everything is connected: people, information, events and places, all the more so with the advent of online social media. A practical way of making sense of the tangle of connections is to analyze them as networks. In this course you will learn about the structure and evolution of networks, drawing on knowledge from disciplines as diverse as sociology, mathematics, computer science, economics, and physics. Online interactive demonstrations and hands-on analysis of real-world data sets will focus on a range of tasks: from identifying important nodes in the network, to detecting communities, to tracing information diffusion and opinion formation. Course Syllabus Week 1: What are networks and what use is it to study them? Concepts: nodes, edges, adjacency matrix, one and two-mode networks, node degree Activity: Upload a social network (e.g. your Facebook social network into Gephi and visualize it ). Week 2: Random network models: Erdos-Renyi and Barabasi-Albert Week 4: Community
UK Universities go virtual: Bricks to online learning clicks By Matt Lee, BBC News How university students do their studies has changed significantly in recent years with the growth in online learning. Instead of physically attending lectures or going to the library, they can download lesson plans and lecture notes to their laptop, have a Skype conversation with a lecturer and submit work online. With more universities now offering e-learning and MOOCs (massive open online courses) is there now a need for them to still have classrooms and a campus?