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14 Oct 09

Online Education in a Traditional University (EDUCAUSE Quarterly) | EDUCAUSE

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Online Education in a Traditional University
Online Education in a Traditional University
Good Ideas
Online Education in a Traditional University
A department’s successful online program ran into insurmountable barriers at the university level; from the ashes comes a proposal for developing a university-wide infrastructure
By Bud McClure and Sandy Woolum

During the past five years we built a sizeable online program in the Psychology Department at the University of Minnesota Duluth. During that time we learned a great deal about how to administer such a program. Our experience also led to the proposal described here for creating an infrastructure to support online programming in a traditional university.

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Blend-Online Resources | EDUCAUSE

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10 Jun 09

Faculty Development for the 21st Century (EDUCAUSE Review) | EDUCAUSE

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Charting the Course and Tapping the Community: The EDUCAUSE Top Teaching and Learning Challenges 2009 (EDUCAUSE Review) | EDUCAUSE

Before an audience of his peers at the EDUCAUSE Annual Conference in October 2008, Barron Koralesky, the associate director of Information Technology Services at Macalester College, began to define a problem. As he noted: "[It] wakes me up at night and gets me in to work in the morning." His problem? Encouraging faculty adoption and innovation in teaching and learning with information technology.

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The EDUCAUSE Top Teaching and Learning Challenges 2009 | EDUCAUSE

After months of spirited discussion, the EDUCAUSE community has identified their top five challenges in teaching and learning with technology.

1. Creating learning environments that promote active learning, critical thinking, collaborative learning, and knowledge creation.
2. Developing 21st century literacies (information, digital, and visual) among students and faculty.
3. Reaching and engaging today's learner.
4. Encouraging faculty adoption and innovation in teaching and learning with IT.
5. Advancing innovation in teaching and learning with technology in an era of budget cuts.

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Apprehending the Future: Emerging Technologies, from Science Fiction to Campus Reality (EDUCAUSE Review) | EDUCAUSE

How can those of us in higher education best understand new technologies? The phrases "emerging technologies" and "evolving technologies" remind us that the digital world is largely in flux. New devices, altered applications, and shifting practices keep crossing over the horizon—or quietly appearing in our midst.

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7 Things You Should Know About Twitter | EDUCAUSE

Twitter is an online application that is part blog, part social networking site, and part cell phone/IM tool. It is designed to let users describe what they are doing or thinking at a given moment in 140 characters or less. As a tool for students and faculty to compare thoughts on a topic, Twitter could be used academically to foster interaction and support metacognition.

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twitter educause

Twitter is an online application that is part blog, part social networking site, and part cell phone/IM tool. It is designed to let users describe what they are doing or thinking at a given moment in 140 characters or less. As a tool for students and faculty to compare thoughts on a topic, Twitter could be used academically to foster interaction and support metacognition.

08 Apr 09

The EDUCAUSE Top Teaching and Learning Challenges 2009 | EDUCAUSE

5 top challenges in teaching and learning with technology

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28 Mar 09

Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0 | EDUCAUSE CONNECT

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the places that are globally competitive are those that have robust local ecosystems of resources supporting innovation and productiveness.
And in a rapidly changing world, these ecosystems must not only supply this workforce but also provide support for continuous learning and for the ongoing creation of new ideas and skills.
20 more annotations...
- We are entering a world in which we all will have to acquire new knowledge and skills on an almost continuous basis.
- t is unlikely that sufficient resources will be available to build enough new campuses to meet the growing global demand for higher education—at least not the sort of campuses that we have traditionally built for colleges and universities. Nor is it likely that the current methods of teaching and learning will suffice to prepare students for the lives that they will lead in the twenty-first century.
- Fortunately, various initiatives launched over the past few years have created a series of building blocks that could provide the means for transforming the ways in which we provide education and support learning. Much of this activity has been enabled and inspired by the growth and evolution of the Internet, which has created a global “platform” that has vastly expanded access to all sorts of resources, including formal and informal educational materials. The Internet has also fostered a new culture of sharing, one in which content is freely contributed and distributed with few restrictions or costs.
- Arguably, the most visible impact of the Internet on education to date has been the Open Educational Resources (OER) movement, which has provided free access to a wide range of courses and other educational materials to anyone who wants to use them.
- The Internet has also been used to provide students with direct access to high-quality (and therefore scarce and expensive) tools like telescopes, scanning electron microscopes, and supercomputer simulation models, allowing students to engage personally in research.
- The latest evolution of the Internet, the so-called Web 2.0, has blurred the line between producers and consumers of content and has shifted attention from access to information toward access to other people. New kinds of online resources—such as social networking sites, blogs, wikis, and virtual communities—have allowed people with common interests to meet, share ideas, and collaborate in innovative ways. Indeed, the Web 2.0 is creating a new kind of participatory medium that is ideal for supporting multiple modes of learning.
- The most profound impact of the Internet, an impact that has yet to be fully realized, is its ability to support and expand the various aspects of social learning. What do we mean by “social learning”? Perhaps the simplest way to explain this concept is to note that social learning is based on the premise that our understanding of content is socially constructed through conversations about that content and through grounded interactions, especially with others, around problems or actions. The focus is not so much on what we are learning but on how we are learning.⁵
- The emphasis on social learning stands in sharp contrast to the traditional Cartesian view of knowledge and learning—a view that has largely dominated the way education has been structured for over one hundred years. The Cartesian perspective assumes that knowledge is a kind of substance and that pedagogy concerns the best way to transfer this substance from teachers to students. By contrast, instead of starting from the Cartesian premise of “I think, therefore I am,” and from the assumption that knowledge is something that is transferred to the student via various pedagogical strategies, the social view of learning says, “We participate, therefore we are.”
- There is a second, perhaps even more significant, aspect of social learning. Mastering a field of knowledge involves not only “learning about” the subject matter but also “learning to be” a full participant in the field.
- In a traditional Cartesian educational system, students may spend years learning about a subject; only after amassing sufficient (explicit) knowledge are they expected to start acquiring the (tacit) knowledge or practice of how to be an active practitioner/professional in a field.⁹ But viewing learning as the process of joining a community of practice reverses this pattern and allows new students to engage in “learning to be” even as they are mastering the content of a field.
- “productive inquiry”
- ways in which technology has begun to change the game in education
- virtual environment is the Terra Incognita project of the University of Southern Queensland (Australia), which has built a classroom in Second Life,
- it also seems likely that a great deal of informal learning is taking place both on and off campus via the online social networks that have attracted millions of young people.
- As more of learning becomes Internet-based, a similar pattern seems to be occurring. Whereas traditional schools offer a finite number of courses of study, the “catalog” of subjects that can be learned online is almost unlimited. There are already several thousand sets of course materials and modules online, and more are being added regularly. Furthermore, for any topic that a student is passionate about, there is likely to be an online niche community of practice of others who share that passion.
- Finding and joining a community that ignites a student’s passion can set the stage for the student to acquire both deep knowledge about a subject (“learning about”) and the ability to participate in the practice of a field through productive inquiry and peer-based learning (“learning to be”). These communities are harbingers of the emergence of a new form of technology-enhanced learning—Learning 2.0—which goes beyond providing free access to traditional course materials and educational tools and creates a participatory architecture for supporting communities of learners.
- All of these institutions are practicums—places where knowledge is created and stored and transmitted. But are they reflective practicums? Are they evaluating what they do and engaging in anything resembling cycles of continuous improvement? Are their reflections being systematically captured and shared?
- An example of such a practicum is the online Teaching and Learning Commons
- The original World Wide Web—the “Web 1.0” that emerged in the mid-1990s—vastly expanded access to information. The Open Educational Resources movement is an example of the impact that the Web 1.0 has had on education. But the Web 2.0, which has emerged in just the past few years, is sparking an even more far-reaching revolution. Tools such as blogs, wikis, social networks, tagging systems, mashups, and content-sharing sites are examples of a new user-centric information infrastructure that emphasizes participation (e.g., creating, re-mixing) over presentation, that encourages focused conversation and short briefs (often written in a less technical, public vernacular) rather than traditional publication, and that facilitates innovative explorations, experimentations, and purposeful tinkerings that often form the basis of a situated understanding emerging from action, not passivity.
- In the twentieth century, the dominant approach to education focused on helping students to build stocks of knowledge and cognitive skills that could be deployed later in appropriate situations.

25 Mar 09

Meeting the Top Challenges in Teaching and Learning with Technology (Notes from March 24th discussion session) | EDUCAUSE CONNECT

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Five topics were presented and voted upon, to drill down to two for discussion
            1. Creating learning environment that promote active learning, critical thinking, collaborative learning, and knowledge creation. (winner)
            2. Developing 21^st century literacies
            3. Reaching and engaging today’s learners
            4. Encouraging faculty adoption and innovation in teaching and learning with IT. (winner)
            5.Advancing innovation in teaching and learning in an era of budget cuts

06 Oct 08

Collaboration Tools | EDUCAUSE CONNECT

Students use technology in natural ways that allow them to do what they want: communicate with anyone they want, in the time and space that suits them best. Easily accessible and user-friendly, collaboration tools allow students to explore, share, engage,

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17 Jul 08

2008 Horizon Report

The New Media Consortium (NMC) and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) jointly produced Horizon Report describes six areas of emerging technology that will have significant impact on higher education within three adoption horizons over the next on

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