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Curating your Experience – What an ePortfolio can do for you
[social_share/] [social-bio] I recently spent some time on a project to move a learning log used by a non-profit organization to track the progress of their young participants into an online environment. I have since learned a lot about the various tools available to create and publish such documents online, but I remained curious about the rationale behind creating an online learning log or, as it is commonly called, an ePortfolio. Luckily, the TOOC (Introduction to Learning Technologies) currently running through the GMCTE covers e-portfolios extensively in week 11. My goal with this post is to provide a summary of what I have learned about ePortfolios, some of which draws…
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Open Textbooks – An Instructor’s Perspective
[social_share/] [social-bio] By Karla Panchuk This post originally appeared on the blog Petragogy on March 23, 2014. I’ve wondered before about the feasibility of creating an open textbook for introductory physical geology. I got as far as sketching out some of the ideas and stopped when it became clear that a lot of work would be involved. My most recent thinking about open textbooks was motivated by learning some startling facts from my students: (1) At sea level, water boils at 1007°C. (2) In areas on the ocean floor where new ocean crust is produced, water can be heated up to 10,007°C. Setting aside for a moment the fact that that my students…
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2014 Higher Ed Horizon Report Released
[social_share/] [social-bio] Every year the New Media Consortium (NMC) and EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative release a series of reports on what they see as the coming trends in learning technologies. One such report looks specifically at higher education and the 2014 edition was recently released. While the report has always included what these groups see as the “important developments” that will be adopted in this area in three time frames (within one year, in two to three years, and in four to five years), this year’s report also includes “Key Trends Accelerating EdTech Adoption in Higher Education” and “Significant Challenges Impeding EdTech Adoption in Higher Education”. The “key trends” are broken…
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High Impact Teaching Practices
[social_share/] [social-bio] NOTE: There are ten high impact educational practices that reportedly increase student success. You can access that list and brief description at https://www.aacu.org/leap/hip.cfm, http://www.uwgb.edu/outreach/highimpact/assets/pdfs/kinzieHO2012.pdf, or watch this short 6-minute video: For the back-story—the elements that make these high impact practices check out http://us.tamu.edu/Faculty-Administrators/High-Impact-Learning. A summary is provided here: High impact practices have these elements in common: 1. EFFORTFUL is not a bad thing. In fact, “effortful” stimulates learning and increases retention of that which is learned. “Effortful” is also engaging and focuses attention for an extended period. One of the greatest disservices we can do for students is to reduce the required effort and make things easy. 2.…
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Why You Should Consider Lecture Capture
[social_share/] [social-bio] “Lecture Capture describes technologies instructors can use to record voice and data projector content and make those recordings available digitally” (ICT University of Saskatchewan). At the University of Saskatchewan, many rooms are equipped to allow instructors to easily record their live lectures and distribute these recordings to their students. Now that I’ve defined what lecture capture is, let’s explore why you should consider using it. Research has shown numerous benefits. A study found that, after using lecture capture across a variety of disciplines, class sizes, and teaching styles, students and faculty were both in favor of using lecture recordings. Benefits for students included: being able to review material that was…
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Communicating Expectations: The Course Syllabus & First Day of Class
[social_share/] [social-bio] This post was originally published on the GSR 989: Philosophy and Practice of University Teaching blog on February 28, 2014. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the course syllabus and the impression it gives students on our first day of class. Personally, I like to think of the syllabus as a map with the following components: Where are we headed? (What are we studying and why?) How do we get there? (schedule, readings, assignments, etc) How do we know when we’ve arrived? (exams, evaluation, etc) What will it be like along the way? (classroom climate, expectations, behaviour) After coming up with this metaphor, I did some reading…
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Effective – By Design
[social_share/] [social-bio] I just observed in a large first-year class that has incorporated an undergraduate research experience. Today one third of the class attended to work on operationalizing their research questions into items for a survey in their small groups. Last week I observed a whole group lecture. The differences are notable: On lecture day, students were packing up and leaving by 10:13 (the class wasn’t over. Some were just leaving.) Today students had to be reminded that the class was over and then they started to leave. On lecture day there were many more students using computers and smart phones and—from where I sat—not all were looking at the…
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Using Google Hangouts to Bring in Guest Speakers
[social_share/] [social-bio] This post was originally published on Heather Ross’s blog on February 28, 2014. I’m considering myself very fortunate that I’m the instructor for Introduction to Learning Technologies. I get to meet with students in the blended cohort. I get to communicate with participants in both groups through email, Twitter, Facebook and Google+, and a couple of weeks ago I got to sit down and have a Google Hangout with John Boyer, a geography professor at Virginia Tech. He’s done some amazing things with learning technologies in his World Regions course. I started following John some time ago on Twitter and he was kind enough to respond to my…
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WOW!! Polar Bears, Tundra, Teams AND Learning…
[social_share/] [social-bio] Ryan Brook teaches Animal Science 475.3 Field Studies in Arctic Ecosystems and Aboriginal Peoples and about 120 students have taken the course in the ten years he has been teaching it. Ryan has spent twenty summers on the Hudson’s Bay coast. Here is the course description: This field-based travel course will provide hands-on research experience in natural ecosystems in the sub-arctic of the Hudson Bay coast in northern Manitoba at the interface between animals, people, and the environment. This experiential course is an intensive introduction to and connection between the ecology and Aboriginal cultures of the sub-arctic. This is a paired course with the University of Manitoba so…