More than 5,000 hours of Peer Learning Online: How Western Sydney University Made it Happen

Does your institution already have a peer learning program? At Western Sydney University, online peer learning sessions are a way to get students engaged and improve their study skills. Blackboard Learn resources facilitate peer assessments through machine learning and intuitive grading workflows.

by Leonardo Tissot
http://elearnmagazine.com/5000-hours-peer-learning-online-western-sydney-university-made-happen/

Going Online When Disaster Strikes

Texas colleges devastated by Hurricane Harvey are moving face-to-face courses online. Institutions in other disaster-prone states share their digital strategies.

By Mark Lieberman
September 6, 2017

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https://www.insidehighered.com/

Powering Up the Classroom: Teaching Tech to Teachers

Educational technologies have great potential to enhance student learning —but only if faculty use them. Here’s how several business schools are helping their faculty stay current in the digital age.

TECHNOLOGICAL INNOVATION in education has gone from a steady stream of individual advances—first email, then the web, then smartphones—to a whirlwind of social media, mobile apps, cloud-based computing, 3-D printing, data analytics, robotics, and the Internet of Things. What distinguishes educators who view that whirlwind as exciting from those who see it as overwhelming? In a phrase, institutional support.

By Tricia Bisoux

December 20, 2016

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http://www.bizedmagazine.com/ 

Pearson Releases Design Principles

Pearson on Tuesday released a list of 45 learning design principles under a Creative Commons license, giving away access to previously proprietary information about how the education company designs its products.

By Carl Straumsheim December 14, 2016

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https://www.insidehighered.com

When Plagiarism Is a Plea for Help

That summer night, at a dinner table surrounded by writing teachers, the plagiarism stories were hard to stop. There was the freshman who, given the writing prompt "Why Do I Procrastinate?," pasted in Yahoo Answers. I told about the senior who turned in an essay paraphrasing a scholarly article synonym by synonym, word by word. The winning story was the student who asked permission to study a novel written by his professor and then turned in an essay that copied text from the book jacket, including a line from the author bio: "She lives in Chicago with her two sons and their cat."

By Helen Rubinstein

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http://chronicle.com/

Student Engagement Strategies for the Online Learning Environment

During the past year and a half, our faculty development unit has been gathering data from students about how engaged they felt in their online courses. We wanted to use this data to develop a variety of strategies for faculty to use to better engage their students. Research provides evidence for the connection between higher student engagement and persistence and retention in online programs (Boston, et al., 2010; Wyatt, 2011). Encouraging student engagement is especially important in the online environment where attrition rates are higher than in the face-to-face setting (Allen & Seaman, 2015; Boston & Ice, 2011).

By: Paula M. Bigatel, PhD

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http://www.facultyfocus.com/ 

Can MOOCs work for executive education?

As we discussed in an earlier post, online courses have become a well-established segment of global executive-education programming. But what about massive open online courses (MOOCs)? 

• By  Laura Montgomery

https://execed.economist.com/blog/executive-education/can-moocs-work-executive-education