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.…

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…

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…

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…

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,…

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…

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…