Research Area: Teaching
When massive open online courses (MOOCs) took the world of higher education by storm in 2012, many wondered how long it would take until some educational governing body recommended that the courses be accepted for credit. That day came with much fanfare earlier this month when the American Council on Education put its stamp of approval on five MOOCs. As if on cue, debate raged over the decision and the havoc it might wreak on the age-old credentialing system of universities … Continue reading
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
If we are witnessing a changing of the guard in higher education, the proponents of online learning still face an uphill battle against centuries-old tradition. But with each new convert to online teaching — like Eloise Tan — it becomes easier for all involved to see the benefits of the transformation. Tan, a teaching and learning developer at Dublin City University in Ireland, wrote a guest blog for the Chronicle of Higher Education last week that espoused many of the … Continue reading
Even as much of the academic world becomes convinced of the effectiveness of online education, some still have serious reservations about how one discipline in particular — science — can be taught efficiently outside a “traditional” classroom. The Colorado Community College System (CCCS), however, has been successfully delivering hands-on, laboratory-quality instruction to its distance students for more than a decade. The same can be said of Oregon State University Ecampus and many other providers of online education. And the effectiveness … 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
In a campaign year, it’s commonplace for fictional claims to make headlines and affect public opinion. But that strategy is also being levied against online education, especially as the field rapidly and ambitiously expands in ways some people never imagined. John Ebersole, however, is out to dispel the most common misconceptions about online and distance learning. Ebersole writes about higher education and is a regular contributor to Forbes.com. Late last month he wrote a piece about “six commonly heard myths … 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
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