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"Home Teaching and learning assessment, exams and online courses: why proctoring is the wrong issue ..."
Via Leona Ungerer
"I have now published the ‘master’ version of the third edition of Teaching in a Digital Age at:.."
Via Leona Ungerer
"It’s 50 years since I started researching the effectiveness of learning technologies. Over that time, I have gradually come to define a set of key principles in their use that have outlasted the many changes in technology, and the fewer changes in teaching practice ..."
Via Leona Ungerer
This study has received a lot of attention, being reported in many different outlets. The main reporting suggests that discussions in online learning are strongly biased, with more attention being paid to white male students by instructors, and white female students more likely to correspond with or respond to other white females. I don’t dispute these findings, as far as they apply to the 124 MOOCs that the researchers studied. Where the madness comes in is then generalising this to all online courses. This is like finding that members of drug gangs in Mexico are likely to kill each other so the probability of death by gunfire is the same for all Mexicans. MOOCs are one specific type of online learning, offered mainly by elitist institutions with predominantly white male faculty delivering the MOOCs. Furthermore, the instructor:student ratio in MOOCs is far higher than in credit-based online learning, which still remains the main form of online learning, despite the nonsense spouted by Stanford, MIT and Harvard about MOOCs. In an edX or Coursera MOOC, with very many students, it is impossible for an instructor to respond to every student. Some form of selection has to take place.
Via Miloš Bajčetić
This is a useful report about the current situation in the USA regarding the accreditation or otherwise of online courses in law. Does the American Bar Association (ABA) recognise qualifications where some or all the courses were taken online? The answer is: maybe but in most cases so far, no.
Via Miloš Bajčetić
How must colleges change in the next ten years, in order to remain successful as they face the challenges of declining enrolment, decreased funding and shrinking infrastructures? I am limiting my comments here to Canada’s two year public post-secondary college system, drawing on some of the results and experience from the recent National Survey of Online Learning and Distance Education. This is another good question. Resources are always limited, and there is no evidence that online learning leads to significant reductions in costs, at least in the short term. Indeed, the evidence suggests that online learning needs initial extra investment at governmental and institutional level, and also at the individual instructor level, if time is considered a cost.
Via Miloš Bajčetić
I find it a fun exercise to analyse the statistics for my blog at the end of the year, to see what were the most popular posts, as it gives some idea of the topics which have grabbed readers over the year. First let’s look at the figures for 2015 as a whole.
Via Miloš Bajčetić
I am surprised how often academic colleagues argue that there are no quality standards for e-learning. Well, hello, I’m sorry, but there are and some of them are damned good. However, I was surprised to find while doing some research for a client that there is no single source where one can go to compare different quality standards for e-learning. So I’m starting a list here, and would appreciate it if readers could direct me to ones that I may have missed. (For more detailed information on some of these, see comments below).
Via Peter Mellow, Miloš Bajčetić
I have now finished the first draft on Chapter 6, Models for Designing Teaching and Learning, and this is now published as part of my open textbook, Teaching in a Digital Age. The chapter covers the following design models: 6.1 What is a design model? 6.2 The classroom design model 6.3 Old wine in new bottles: classroom-type online learning 6.4 Online collaborative learning 6.5 The ADDIE model 6.6. Design models for experiential learning 6.7. Competency-based learning 6.8 Communities of practice 6.9 Massive Open Online Courses 6.10 ‘Agile’ Design: flexible designs for learning 6.11 Making decisions about design models 6.12 References on design models Most of it has been published as posts on this blog, except the last section (6.11), which I’m sharing with you here. I will publish the complete bibliography for the chapter separately.
Via Miloš Bajčetić, Ivon Prefontaine, PhD
These are all very powerful drivers of MOOC mania, which makes it all the more important to try to be clear and cool headed about the strengths and weaknesses of MOOCs. The real test is whether MOOCs can help develop the knowledge and skills that learners need in a knowledge-based society. The answer of course is yes and no. As a low-cost supplement to formal education, they can be quite valuable, but not as a complete replacement. They can at present teach conceptual learning, comprehension and in a narrow range of activities, application of knowledge. They can be useful for building communities of practice, where already well educated people or people with a deep, shared passion for a topic can learn from one another, another form of continuing education. However, certainly to date, MOOCs have not been able to demonstrate that they can lead to transformative learning, deep intellectual understanding, evaluation of complex alternatives, and evidence-based decision-making, and without greater emphasis on expert-based learner support and more qualitative forms of assessment, they probably never will, at least without substantial increases in their costs. At the end of the day, there is a choice between throwing more resources into MOOCs and hoping that some of their fundamental flaws can be overcome without too dramatic an increase in costs, or whether we would be better investing in other forms of online learning and educational technology that could lead to more cost-effective learning outcomes. I know where I would put my money, and it’s not into MOOCs.
Via Miloš Bajčetić
I have already covered seven different design models for teaching and learning in Chapter 6 of my open textbook, Teaching in a Digital Age. I have dithered a bit over whether MOOCs are a unique design model, because they contain a mix of familiar and somewhat unfamiliar approaches to teaching and learning – and also because there are different forms of MOOCs. I also don’t want to give too much attention to a form of teaching and learning that is already grossly overhyped. However I have decided to bite the bullet. I have to deal with MOOCs somewhere in the book, so a chapter on models of design for teaching and learning seems as good a place as any. Because this topic is too big for one blog post, I plan a series of three or four posts. I could do a whole book on this topic , but this section of Chapter 6 has to be concise and accurate, while also dealing with the strengths and weaknesses of MOOCs, particularly with regard to meeting the needs of learners in a digital age, which for me means asking the question: can or do MOOCs provide the learning and skills that students will need in the future? Also please remember this book is aimed at teachers and instructors who are NOT specialists or even experienced in online learning, so the content of this blog post in particular will not come as a surprise to any of my regular readers.
Via Miloš Bajčetić
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"...Given the strong consensus on definitions, I hope all registrars will now require instructors to classify their courses according to the definitions above- at least until the next wave of innovation. ..."
Via Leona Ungerer
"I’m busy revising my online, open textbook, Teaching in a Digital Age, and at this stage I’m revising Chapter 8 on the pedagogical affordances of different media ..."
Via Leona Ungerer
"However, it also identified a new challenge: how to scale up instructional design and media support. When only 10 per cent of courses were online, one-on-one support for faculty was feasible ..."
Via Leona Ungerer
Considered by many to be one of the “founding fathers” of virtual learning as we know it today, Tony Bates has been a major force in shaping its direction – as a faculty member, university administrator and research team leader; prolific writer, in-demand conference speaker and expert consultant. After earning a Ph.D. in educational administration in 1969, Bates helped launch the newly created Open University in the United Kingdom. More than two decades later, he moved on to become Director of Distance Education and Technology at the University of British Columbia, where he developed and taught the school’s first online courses and fully online degree programs. Having retired in 2003, Bates now consults to universities, colleges and government agencies worldwide, while also serving on international panels and working with such global organizations as the World Bank, UNESCO, and OECD. In addition, he has published more than 350 papers and a dozen books on open and technology-enhanced education. And in his spare time, he’s an avid skier, golfer and small plane pilot. Dr. Tony Bates is the author of eleven books in the field of online learning and distance education. He has provided consulting services specializing in training in the planning and management of online learning and distance education, working with over 40 organizations in 25 countries. Tony is a Research Associate with Contact North | Contact Nord, Ontario’s Distance Education & Training Network.
Via Miloš Bajčetić
One of my most popular blog posts is A student guide to studying online. However, it was written five years ago, so I have just updated it, making sure all the links are still working and where necessary replacing dead links with new ones. In particular, I have added links to an excellent new book on how to master an online degree, and a link to a very useful general study guide from the UK’s 360 GSP. Below are reviews of both resources.
Via Miloš Bajčetić
What? Not ANOTHER book from me? Well, no, not quite. ‘Teaching in a Digital Age‘ has been a great success but it appears it is being primarily used by faculty and instructors already committed to online learning, or on courses for post-graduate students, who don’t have much choice if it is set reading. That’s great, but even though it’s been downloaded over 40,000 times and is being translated into seven languages, there are still hundreds of thousands of faculty and instructors in North America alone who are either not interested in teaching online or are very nervous about it. The Babson 2013 survey for instance found that only 30 percent of chief academic officers believe their faculty accept the value and legitimacy of online education. This rate is lower than the rate recorded in 2004. One reason for this is that there are many misconceptions about online learning. At the same time, there are legitimate concerns about online learning being more work or about the quality of online instruction. Of course, reading Teaching in a Digital Age might help dispel the misconceptions and the concerns, but instructors resistant to online learning are not likely to engage with a 500 page textbook in the first place. I therefore did a series of blog posts aimed at encouraging ‘resistant’ faculty and instructors to at least give online learning a try. The series was initially called ‘Online learning for beginners‘. Contact North liked the idea and suggested that the 10 posts should be re-edited into a 37 page booklet that can be given to faculty and instructors. This booklet is now available. It can either be downloaded as a pdf from the Contact North|Contact Nord website, or printed locally on demand and then can be physically given to instructors. Of course it is likely to be most effective if used in conjunction with Teaching in a Digital Age, but the booklet is written to stand on its own.
Via Miloš Bajčetić
by Tony Bates "Section 12.7 is really a summary of the main points in the book, which I reproduce below as the key takeaways from the book.
I will do a separate post on Scenario G, which provides a possible future scenario for teaching in a digital age.
The book is by no means finished. I need to do some serious editing, but the book now exists in a form that can be used immediately for supporting faculty development, or for teachers and instructors interested in improving their teaching."
Via Miloš Bajčetić
Defining media and technology Philosophers and scientists have argued about the nature of media and technologies over a very long period. The distinction is challenging because in everyday language use, we tend to use these two terms interchangeably. For instance, television is often referred to as both a medium and a technology. Is the Internet a medium or a technology? And does it matter? I will argue that there are differences, and it does matter to distinguish between media and technology, especially if we are looking for guidelines on when and how to use media or technologies. There is a danger in looking too much at the raw technology, and not enough at the personal, social and cultural contexts in which we use technology, particularly in education. We shall also see that media and technology represent different ways altogether of thinking about the choice and use of technology in teaching and learning.
Via Miloš Bajčetić
Here I am looking at the work of two separate and important Canadian theorists and practitioners, what we might call the Toronto school, Linda Harasim and her former colleagues at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) in Toronto (although Linda has been firmly based for 25 years at SFU in Vancouver/Burnaby), and the Alberta school, Randy Garrison, and colleagues Terry Anderson and Walter Archer. However, they are not the only contributors to the design of online collaborative learning, as the following post makes clear. Perhaps more importantly, I believe that online collaborative learning is a key model for teaching the knowledge and skills needed in a digital age. So here’s my first draft:
Via Miloš Bajčetić
For my open textbook Teaching in a Digital Age, I am writing a chapter on different design models for teaching and learning. I have started writing the section on MOOCs, and in my previous post, ‘What is a MOOC?‘, I gave a brief history and described the key common characteristics of all MOOCs. In this post I examine the differences in philosophy and practice between xMOOCs and cMOOCs.
Via Miloš Bajčetić
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