Research Area: Technology
The New Media Consortium and Educause Learning Initiative (ELI) this month jointly released the NMC Horizon Report: 2013 Higher Education Edition, which identifies six emerging technologies as well as key trends and challenges that will shape the industry over the next one to five years. The NMC Horizon Report and its findings are designed to give campus leaders and practitioners a valuable guide for strategic technology planning. It’s the 10th such annual report conducted by the NMC Horizon Project, a … Continue reading
Doug Ward is an associate professor at the University of Kansas, and in 2011 he received an honor as the nation’s best teacher of journalism and mass communication. So when Ward decided to develop his first online class – one that would reflect his award-winning instruction in the traditional classroom – he figured it would be a successful transition. He couldn’t have been more wrong. Thankfully, Ward reflected on his shortcomings as an online instructor and the weaknesses of his course in … Continue reading
It’s often difficult to know which interactive tools help foster or improve student learning and which are merely flashy, distracting gadgets. But the folks at Getting Smart put together a list of 50 of the most useful tech tools that serve as educational aids in the online classroom. Some of them, such as Twitter, YouTube and Google Docs, are extremely well known and frequently utilized, whereas others are more obscure despite the fact that they offer plenty of value to … Continue reading
The timeless debate of quantity vs. quality has cropped up in the realm of online education, this time with regard to online discussion forums. And it appears that less is more. Piazza, a social Q&A web service, analyzed over 18 months the behavioral trends of students in 3,600 online courses at more than 500 institutions, and the fledgling company shared the results of its analysis with The Chronicle of Higher Education this week. Out of the study comes evidence that … Continue reading
Noted online course developer Debbie Morrison discusses in her latest blog entry the ways in which instructors can help curb what many in the field of online education know to be true: cognitive overload is rampant among online students. This entry is the first in what Morrison says will be a four-part series “that presents instructional strategies addressing the unique needs of online students.” And the greatest of those needs, she argues here, is support. Morrison’s post provides a learner … Continue reading
Chicken sandwiches and presidential politics aside, perhaps no topic is as divisive in the United States these days as the future of higher education and its relationship with the Internet. The results of a recent nationwide survey underscore that notion. More than 1,000 Internet experts, researchers, observers and users were polled in the Pew Internet/Elon University survey, called Bricks and Clicks: What is the potential future of higher education and the Internet by 2020? In their responses, some technology stakeholders view … Continue reading
[A message from Dave King, associate provost of Oregon State University Outreach and Engagement; and Lisa L. Templeton, executive director of Oregon State University Extended Campus] No doubt you’ve seen several stories lately in the news about what some people are calling MOOCs – Massive Open Online Classes – with 160,000 or so students in online open courseware classes. (See below.) The increased profile of these classes and the new enterprises involved in their development raise questions about what it … Continue reading
Simply adding a video component to an online course does not automatically improve its quality, but a recent study seems to show pretty conclusively that learners respond well to video lectures as a way of receiving course content. The study was conducted by Debbie Morrison, an online course developer at The Master’s College near Los Angeles, and as she noted in her blog post, the pool of students surveyed was relatively small. However, 90 percent of the learners who took … Continue reading
When you replace the traditional classroom with the Internet, it’s easy to lose the vital face-to-face connection between instructors and students. That makes it imperative for distance-education instructors to find new, effective ways to interact with the diverse group of people taking their courses. And thanks to the magic of the Internet, there are a host of innovative resources that can replicate the physical classroom. One of the newest and best tools is Google Hangouts, a video chat program that … Continue reading
In its first post-Steve Jobs product unveiling on Thursday, Apple announced its plans to shake up the world of education with a series of new textbook products that could drastically affect how students and professors receive and disseminate information. From today’s Los Angeles Times news article on Apple’s bold move: With the new iBooks 2 app, students can download interactive textbooks to their iPads, usually for $14.99 or less, eliminating the need for … out-of-date, hundred-dollar textbooks. IBooks Author enables … Continue reading