Change is Hard, but Flipping is Worth the Effort

Flipped classrooms are all the buzz in education, but what does it mean, exactly? And why should you flip your classroom and perhaps more importantly, how does an instructor flip the classroom? There are numerous definitions of the flipped or inverted class, but typically an instructor ‘flips’ by replacing lecture with hands-on activities that enhance student engagement in the classroom. Flipping a classroom (or any change, for that matter) seems daunting to many instructors. Most of us that have been teaching for several years have found a nice, comfortable method of teaching that we worked hard to achieve. While the research is still rather sparse on the effects on students, a case study I completed for an Introduction to Business course I flipped in 2014, indicated that flipping the classroom increased my attendance in classes by 12% and increased student success by 16% (exams and final grades).

By Sarah Shepler

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http://www.pearsoned.com/education-blog

How Software Helps Keep Online Learners Honest

People often express worry that the relative anonymity of online learning environments and the disconnected nature of being in a MOOC (massive online open course) leads to more opportunities for academic dishonesty and outright cheating.

However, emerging and improving technologies may prove to offer more — not less — protection from would-be cheaters.

By Beth Porter

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http://techcrunch.com

Many Colleges Now See Centers for Teaching With Technology as Part of ‘Innovation Infrastructure’

In the past few years, many colleges have expanded the scale and scope of centers that support teaching and learning with technology, as part of an effort to build a new “innovation infrastructure” for instruction.

That’s according to the results of a new survey of directors of academic-technology centers at 163 colleges and universities, released last week at the annual conference of Educause, an organization that supports technology on campuses.

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http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus

Readers’ Definitions of Ed-Tech Buzzwords: Confusion and Skepticism Continue

Professors, administrators, and ed-tech vendors don’t always speak the same language when it comes to talking about experimental approaches to teaching and research. Terms like “flipped classroom” and “digital humanities” get thrown around a lot these days, but different people often mean different things by them. And some people still don’t know what they mean, despite their buzzword status.

To get a sense of the buzzword landscape, we asked Chronicle readers to give their definitions of four ed-tech terms. We emphasized that we weren’t looking for the perfect definitions, just a sense of what comes to mind immediately. Though the responses were anonymous, we asked people to give a sense of their role in higher education to put their answer in context.

By Jeffrey R. Young
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/readers-defintions-of-ed-tech-buzzwords-confusion-and-skepticism-continue/57301?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/

Penn State Starts Network for Entrepreneurs With Focus on Online Learning

Education-technology companies are hot these days. So are online programs by universities. Pennsylvania State University hopes to tap into both trends with a new effort to turn its campus into an innovation hub for ed-tech companies.

The effort is called the EdTech Network, and officials hope it will spark entrepreneurship around the campus geared toward improving services for online students, said Craig D. Weidemann, the university’s vice provost for online education. That could help Penn State reach its 10-year goal of increasing enrollments in its online World Campus to 45,000 students.

By Mary Ellen McIntire

http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/?p=57321?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/

When Your Online Course Is Put Up for Adoption

Jennifer V. Ebbeler always knew that somebody else would end up teaching her online Roman-history course. But that didn’t make giving it up any easier.

Ms. Ebbeler spent nearly two years building an online version of “Introduction to Ancient Rome” with a team of designers at the University of Texas at Austin, where she is an associate professor of classics. Most of the heavy lifting came during the last academic year, when one of her colleagues taught the course to hundreds of undergraduates while she coordinated behind the scenes.

By Steve Kolowich

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http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/

What Is Being Learned From MOOCs? New Report Takes Stock

The hype around the free online courses called MOOCs has drawn millions of students, who are all essentially part of a teaching experiment of unprecedented scale. These days, researchers are increasingly checking in on that experiment.

A new report, released on Thursday, seeks to answer the question “Where is research on massive open online courses headed?”

The report is the work of the MOOC Research Initiative, funded with more than $800,000 in grant support by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The group put out a call for research submissions and used much of the grant money to fund 28 of them, which were then analyzed for the report.

By Casey Fabris

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http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus

Wearable Teaching? College to Experiment With Apple Watch as Learning Tool

Even before the Apple Watch was released, professors and pundits began speculating on whether it and other wearable devices might play a role in college classrooms. On Monday researchers at Pennsylvania State University’s main campus announced that they would be among the first to test the device’s usefulness in the classroom.

The experiment will begin this summer, with eight Apple Watches the university purchased for the project. Penn State plans to expand the research to more students in the fall. We caught up with Kyle Bowen, director of education-technology services at Penn State, to hear more about the project, and his thoughts on the possible role of wearables in teaching and learning. Following is an edited version of the conversation.

By Jeffrey R. Young

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http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus

Tools That Limit Distraction May Raise Student Performance in Online Classes

For students taking courses online, the endless distractions of the Internet can be a hindrance to success. But using software to limit those diversions can make a big difference.

That’s the takeaway from a new study, which found that limiting distractions can help students perform better and also improve course completion.

A paper describing the study, “Can Behavioral Tools Improve Online Student Outcomes? Experimental Evidence From a Massive Open Online Course,” was published by the Cornell Higher Education Research Institute this month.

By Casey Fabris

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http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus

Digital storytelling - Attention Grabbers

I'm currently reading Bryan Alexander's The New Digital Storytelling book. Bryan writes about engagement and attention grabbers.

This 1948 “Knock” book by Fredric Brown has a fantastic attention grabber.

"The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door..."

How ‘Elite’ Universities Are Using Online Education

After years of skepticism, higher education’s upper class has finally decided that online learning is going to play an important role in its future. But what will that role be?

Recently, conversations about "elite" online education has revolved around the free online courses, aka MOOCs, which Stanford, MIT, Harvard, and dozens of other top universities started offering several years ago. But it soon became clear that high marks in those courses would not translate to academic credit at the institutions offering them (or anywhere else).

By Steve Kolowich 

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http://chronicle.com

LinkedIn Will Buy Online-Learning Company For $1.5 Billion

LinkedIn announced Thursday it has agreed to acquire the online-learning company lynda.com for $1.5 billion, The Wall Street Journal reports. It is the social-networking giant’s largest acquisition to date, and signals its continued expansion into the education realm. lynda.com offers more than 2,900 courses online, which include video tutorials for various skills.

By Andy Thomason

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New Offering From Noodle Will Help Colleges Build Online Programs

The education site Noodle is putting a new twist on helping colleges create online degree and certificate programs with its creation of Noodle Partners, announced on Wednesday.

Noodle Partners, the brainchild of the Princeton Review founder John Katzman, is an enabler — a company that helps colleges build online-education programs. Several other companies provide similar services, one of them being 2U, also founded by Mr. Katzman.

But Noodle Partners is different from other enablers, said Jodi Rothstein, the company’s chief product officer . It helps colleges to assemble, rather than build, platforms, collaborating with a variety of vendors to develop online-education programs, Ms. Rothstein said.  

By Casey Fabris

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http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus

Why My MOOC is Not Built on Video

The participants of #NumericalMOOC will have noticed that we made only one video for the course. I thought that maybe I would do a handful more. But in the end I didn’t and I don’t think it matters too much.

Why didn’t we have more video? The short answer is budget and time: making good-quality videos is expensive & making simple yet effective educational videos is time consuming, if not necessarily costly. #NumericalMOOC was created on-the-fly, with little budget. But here’s my point: expensive, high-production-value videos are not necessary to achieve a quality learning experience.

By Lorena A. Barba

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https://www.class-central.com

The digital divide: laptop equity at the University

College is expensive: tuition, rent and social expenses can add up to tens of thousands of dollars per year. Smaller expenses, including the cost of buying a laptop, can get lost in this grand total.

News outlets often write broadly about the effects of socioeconomic status on success in school, but more specifically, how does restricted access to technology impact a student at the University?

Students are not required to own laptops in the majority of schools and programs at the University. According to the University’s Computer Showcase website, the University maintains computing sites on both Central and North Campuses equipped with both Macs and PCs for student use. However, the site also advises students “to consider a laptop computer.”

By SAMANTHA WINTNER

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http://www.michigandaily.com

Who’s Taking MOOCs? Teachers

In free online courses offered by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, teachers are increasingly the students. A study by the two universities has found that teachers are enrolling in their MOOCs in high numbers.

The study examines data from some one million MOOC students who enrolled in courses at edX, the nonprofit learning platform started by Harvard and MIT. Some one-fifth of participants answered a survey about their background in teaching, and 39 percent of them said they were current or former teachers.

By Casey Fabris

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http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus

Digital and Analogue Writing with LiveScribe

I still love to write thing by hand, on paper, in a notebook. Call it a holdover from my days (and nights) spent writing in journals and diaries and notebooks. I always had a notebook and pen with me. I was always writing.

Now I have my iPhone with me, and I tweet a whole lot.

But writing out drafts, or brainstorming, or jotting down ideas, those are activities that I miss doing. What I don’t miss doing in transcribing them, or not having access to them if I don’t happen to have the right notebook (or, more often than not these days, post-it note) with me when I needed it.

By Lee Skallerup Bessette

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http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker

edX to Improve Access to MOOCs for People With Disabilities

Under a settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice announced on Thursday, edX, the nonprofit MOOC provider created by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has agreed to make its offerings more accessible to people with disabilities.

The settlement agreement, which marks the department’s first effort to challenge the accessibility of massive open online courses, affects the colleges that are members of edX as well as the nonprofit consortium itself.

By Casey Fabris 

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http://chronicle.com

The 3 Essential Functions of Your Syllabus, Part 2

I have the mixed fortune of living in a city that, as of this writing, had the highest total snowfall in the United States this year (woohoo Worcester, Massachusetts!). As a skier, I welcome snow; as a homeowner, I have been both lamenting the massive drifts blocking the streets and driveways of our city and cringing at the thought of the water that will inundate our basements in the coming thaw.

In anticipation of that flood, I recently pulled a trunk of old books and papers out of the most vulnerable part of my basement, only to discover a lost trove of documents from my college years. I saved much more from my undergraduate and graduate courses than I realized: notebooks, handouts, papers I wrote, and even some syllabi.

By James M. Lang 
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http://chronicle.com

The 3 Essential Functions of Your Syllabus, Part 1

Our campus teaching center recently invited a brave group of student tutors to share their views on effective teaching with our faculty. The four tutors reported what they had heard from students about course designs and teaching practices that seemed to help, and ones that seemed to interfere with learning. Three recurrent themes in the tutors’ remarks caught my attention.

First, they suggested that students needed more help in seeing the large organizational sweep of a course. Undergraduates who came to the tutoring center often had no idea how the first week of the semester in a class connected to the last, or even how different units related to one another. For many students, courses appear less as logical progressions than as, to quote the American writer Elbert Hubbard, "one damn thing after another." So course designs that might seem so clear and elegant to us as faculty members, apparently, do not always appear so lucid to our students.

By James M. Lang 
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http://chronicle.com

MOOCs for Wisconsin and the World

Imagine a massive open online course (MOOC) that doesn't feel so massive; one that's intimately tied to a region, with opportunities for meaningful face-to-face encounters in community settings. The University of Wisconsin–Madison will offer six such courses in its latest round of massive open online courses for 2015–16. One course will invite those interested in climate change to attend discussions throughout Wisconsin, thanks to partnerships with 21 public libraries. Another course, focused on hunting and conservation, features an event with hunters and chefs in the southern Wisconsin city of Baraboo.

UW–Madison began its experiment with massive open online courses in 2013. Hosted on Coursera, the four courses in our first phase reached about 135,000 learners from 141 countries and all 50 states.1 Despite reservations about MOOCs in academic circles,2 university leaders believe these courses have a part to play in our future, tying them to a larger push for institutional change called Educational Innovation: an attempt to prepare students and communities for the 21st century. In launching a second phase of MOOCs, we're thinking more carefully about our audiences so we can use the platform to engage with people in both Wisconsin and the world.

By Sarah C. Mangelsdorf, Jeffrey Russell, Linda A. Jorn, and Joshua Morrill

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http://www.educause.edu/

Online or In-Person? One College Lets Students Switch Back and Forth

When you register for a course, you often have a choice: in-person or online. But at Peirce College, you don’t have to pick one or the other. All students will soon get access to both formats in the same course.

Peirce, a college in Philadelphia that caters specifically to adult learners, plans to allow its students to switch back and forth between attending class in person or online, based on which is more convenient for them on a given week. The flexible delivery model will be offered in certain programs this fall and it will be extended to the college’s entire curriculum by September of 2016. The initiative is part of the college’s 2015-2018 strategic plan.

By Casey Fabris

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http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus

Engaging Faculty in Online Education

The initial resistance to online learning by many institutional leaders has given way to urgency about engaging faculty in online instruction. Even at traditional residential universities and colleges with well-established excellence in seminar, lecture, and lab instruction, experimentation with online learning is rampant as institutions rush to adopt educational technology and online pedagogy. Administrators may urge action, and some faculty view exploring online teaching and learning as an inviting and even invigorating challenge, but others still decline to participate. Many faculty have yet to use technology in their instruction — even something as basic as the campus learning management system — much less experiment with flipped or hybrid classes. This leaves many IT, ed tech, and online learning professionals challenged to move their institutions and faculty online and into the 21st century of education.

By Karen H. Sibley and Ren Whitaker

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Videos Find Their Place In and Out of the Classroom

Among today’s students, videos as an educational tool are as expected as textbooks.

A new study has found that 68 percent of students watch videos in class, and 79 percent watch them on their own time, outside of class, to assist in their learning.

By Casey Fabris

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http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/

Yale Announces ‘Blended’ Online Master’s Degree

Yale University is creating a master’s program that will hold many courses online, continuing the Ivy League institution’s foray into “blended” learning.

The online program, to be offered by the Yale School of Medicine, would aim to replicate its residential program for training physicians’ assistants. Students would meet in virtual classrooms where they would discuss course material using videoconferencing technology. They would also have to complete field training — accounting for roughly half of the coursework — in person, at Yale-approved clinics near where they live.

By Steve Kolowich

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http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus

Could Video Feedback Replace the Red Pen?

Writing useful comments on students’ work can be a fine art. And for instructors who put a lot of effort into crafting a critique, there’s always a substantial risk students will skip the written feedback and go right to the grade.

When Michael Henderson is grading his students’ final assignments, he likes to skip the written comments for them. Instead of a red pen, Mr. Henderson, a senior lecturer in education at Monash University, in Australia, takes out a video camera. He records a five-minute, unscripted critique for each student. He doesn’t bother editing the videos, even if he says “um” a lot or has to rephrase a sentence or two.

By Steve Kolowich

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http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/

As High-Tech Teaching Catches On, Students With Disabilities Can Be Left Behind

Educational innovations like the flipped classroom, clickers, and online discussions can present difficulties for students with disabilities.

The issue was highlighted this month, when Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were sued for allegedly failing to provide such students with closed captioning for online lectures and course materials.

Peter Blanck, chairman of the Burton Blatt Institute at Syracuse University and author of eQuality: The Struggle for Web Accessibility by Persons With Cognitive Disabilities (Cambridge University Press, 2014), said blind and deaf students need to be considered when shifting core parts of teaching to the Internet.

By Casey Fabris  

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http://chronicle.com/

BlendKit2015 Session 00: Orientation/Getting Acquainted

Illumination in Education

SDSU's Matt Anderson is changing the face of online learning.

Is it magic? Or is it physics in action?

Matt Anderson, a physics professor at San Diego State University, together with a team of engineers from SDSU's Instructional Technology Services are defying instructional norms with the introduction of a unique learning tool.

The innovation — dubbed Learning Glass — is an LED-lit glass board that faculty can use to write on or project PowerPoints and video, while maintaining eye contact with their students.

By Hallie Jacobs

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http://newscenter.sdsu.edu

Harvard and M.I.T. Are Sued Over Lack of Closed Captions

Advocates for the deaf on Thursday filed federal lawsuits against Harvard and M.I.T., saying both universities violated antidiscrimination laws by failing to provide closed captioning in their online lectures, courses, podcasts and other educational materials.

“Much of Harvard’s online content is either not captioned or is inaccurately or unintelligibly captioned, making it inaccessible for individuals who are deaf or hard of hearing,” the complaint said, echoing language used in the M.I.T. complaint. “Just as buildings without ramps bar people who use wheelchairs, online content without captions excludes individuals who are deaf or hard of hearing.”

By Tamar Lewin 

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http://www.nytimes.com/

3 Things Academic Leaders Believe About Online Education

The Babson Survey Research Group released its annual online-education survey on Thursday. The Babson surveyors, Jeffrey Seaman and I. Elaine Allen, have been tracking online higher education since 2002, soliciting responses from chief academic officers at thousands of institutions.

By Steve Kolowich

http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus
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The MOOC Hype Fades, in 3 Charts

Few people would now be willing to argue that massive open online courses are the future of higher education. The percentage of institutions offering a MOOC seems to be leveling off, at around 14 percent, while suspicions persist that MOOCs will not generate money or reduce costs for universities—and are not, in fact, sustainable.

By Steve Kolowich

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http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus

The EDUCAUSE 2015 Top 10 IT Issues | EDUCAUSE.edu

The EDUCAUSE 2015 Top 10 IT Issues | EDUCAUSE.edu

Top 10 IT Issues, 2015

1. Hiring and retaining qualified staff, and updating the knowledge and skills of existing technology staff
2. Optimizing the use of technology in teaching and learning in collaboration with academic leadership, including understanding the appropriate level of technology to use
3. Developing IT funding models that sustain core service, support innovation, and facilitate growth
4. Improving student outcomes through an institutional approach that strategically leverages technology
5. Demonstrating the business value of information technology and how technology and the IT organization can help the institution achieve its goals
6. Increasing the IT organization's capacity for managing change, despite differing community needs, priorities, and abilities
7. Providing user support in the new normal—mobile, online education, cloud, and BYOD environments
8. Developing mobile, cloud, and digital security policies that work for most of the institutional community
9. Developing an enterprise IT architecture that can respond to changing conditions and new opportunities
10. Balancing agility, openness, and security

How Big is Digital Education in the United States? An End of Year Review

Buzz about the potential of digital learning abounds. Despite the excitement, relatively little is known about how many students are actually taking advantage of digital learning opportunities. This is partly due to online learning tools having numerous forms, rendering them difficult to track. In addition, policies also vary greatly across states. A new report, Keeping Pace with K-12 Digital Learning, helps to shed light on the state of online learning in the United States.

By Joshua Bleiberg and Darrell M. West
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