Ed Tech Center offers D2L workshops
The Educational Technology Center is offering short workshops on Desire2Learn. No registration is required for these sessions, which will be held in in LIB 373.
These hands-on demos plus Q and A will last 50 minutes, with more time available for those faculty or staff who would like additional one-on-one support.
Scheduled sessions are:
D2L Basics – Wednesday, July 2, 1-3 p.m.D2L Basics – Monday, July 7, 5-7 p.m.Manage Your Course – Wednesday, July 9, 2-4 p.m.Gradebook Overview – Friday, July 11, 9-11 a.m.D2L Basics – Monday, July 14, 1-3 p.m.Communications – Wednesday, July 16, 5-7 p.m.Build Your Course – Friday, July 18, 10 a.m. – noonD2L Basics – Monday, July 21, 2-4 p.m.Assessments – Tuesday, July 22, 5-7 p.m.D2L Basics – Wednesday, July 23, 1-3 p.m.- Gradebook Overview – Thursday, July 24, 2-4 p.m.
As always, stop by LIB 375 or make an appointment with an Ed Tech Analyst at edtech@jccc.edu or ext. 3842, or let us know if you’d like D2L training customized for your department or work group. For the D2L iTeach training series, see also http://tinyurl.com/d2l-train-continued
Engagement of Non-Traditional Adult Learners in Distance Education
An article in the March 2014 issue of the International HETL Review (IHR): https://www.hetl.org/feature-articles/engagement-of-non-traditional-adult-learners-in-distance-education/
Microsoft OneNote is now free for everyone – including Macs
It took forever for OneNote to finally come out with a Mac version. It doesn’t include Outlook and SharePoint integration, but otherwise what they did release is a pretty good equivalent of the Windows version. There are also iPhone/iPad, Android, and (of course) Windows phone versions of the product. What’s better, all of the versions are now free.
I’ve been a long-time Evernote user, mostly because it was already free and available on all those devices, but I might be convinced to switch. There’s a lot to like with OneNote. Evernote still offers what I consider to be a better mobile experience, and integration with Skitch is really nice. If you don’t have a cloud-based note taking system, you should check both Evernote and OneNote out.
Evernote is here. It is available for free for desktop and mobile devices.
OneNote is here. Also available for free for desktop and mobile device.
What Faculty Should Know About Adaptive Learning
The phrase “adaptive learning” is an umbrella term that applies to an incredibly broad range of technologies and techniques with very different educational applications. The common thread is that they all involve software that observes some aspect of student performance and adjusts what it presents to each student based on those observations. In other words, all adaptive software tries to mimic some aspect of what a good teacher does, given that every student has individual needs.
It is critical to develop a clear and well-articulated position on which teaching functions the software can fulfill and which it can’t in order to defend the value of a real college education and the faculty who deliver it. There is a cultural temptation, fed somewhat by eager vendors and a press that tends toward an excess of techno-optimism, to believe that adaptive learning platforms are the future of education and can be full replacements for teacher-facilitated classes.
Read more at: http://mfeldstein.com/faculty-know-adaptive-learning/ Top 10 Adaptive Learning Systems
Improving Motivation in eLearning
Motivation has been and continues to be a widely studied area across many of life’s domains. Motivation is said to be the energizing force that initiates and sustains behavior and ultimately produces results. Many motivation theories focus on the amount of motivation, with a larger quantity said to result in improved outcomes. However, as educators we should not focus on generating more motivation from our learners but instead focus on creating conditions that facilitate the internalization of motivation from within our learners.
Read more at: http://elearnmag.acm.org/featured.cfm?aid=2527388
Turnitin Put to the Test
The plagiarism detection service Turnitin on Wednesday made bold claims about the effectiveness of its product to weed out “unoriginal writing”, but researchers in the field aren’t buying the results. In a study detailed in the report released Wednesday morning, Turnitin tracked the decrease in “unoriginal writing” — meaning writing that scored 50 percent or higher on the software’s Overall Similarity Index — at 1,003 non-profit colleges and universities in the U.S. that had used Turnitin for five years.
Most institutions started experiencing drops in unoriginal writing by the third year of Turnitin use, and by year four, not a single type of institution reported an increase. In the fifth and final year of the study, every class posted a double-digit decrease, ranging from 19.1 percent among four-year institutions with fewer than 1,000 students to 77.9 percent among two-year colleges with 3,000 to 5,000 students. Overall, unoriginal writing decreased by 39.1 percent.
College IT Employees Face Shifts in Responsibilities
As email and other information services migrate to the cloud, colleges’ information-technology employees are spending less of their time running complex in-house systems and more helping faculty members and administrative colleagues—as well as students—make the most of services provided by companies like Google. That shift puts a premium on the employees’ “soft skills” in communication, relationship building, and project management rather than on technical expertise.
Read more at: http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/college-it-employees-face-shifts-in-responsibilities/50073
A Visual Map of Learning Theory Concepts, Theorists, Paradigms and Disciplines
Learning theory is complex, and while the graphic below may initially seem to reinforce that idea, it actually makes a complicated topic very digestible. Richard Millwood is an assistant professor at Trinity College Dublin, and he also runs Core Education, a nonprofit that helps schools use technology for better learning outcomes. As part of his work for the HoTEL Project (Holistic Approach to Technology Enhanced Learning), Millwood created this guide to learning theories. On his blog, Millwood describes his motivation to collect information and resources about learning theories featured in the map:
“Learning theory has been a contested scientific field for most of its history, with conflicting contributions from many scientific disciplines, practice and policy positions. With the continuing and disruptive influence of technology on information, knowledge and practice in all sectors of society it is no wonder that innovators, drawn to the interactive potential that computers bring to learning, are challenged by the theoretical basis for their innovations.”
Read more at: http://www.edtechmagazine.com/higher/article/2013/12/map-learning-theory-concepts-theorists-paradigms-and-disciplines
How MOOCs Can Be Free and Profitable at the Same Time
In three years, massive open online courses (MOOCs) have taken online education into uncharted territory. MOOCs promise to bring educational content to anyone with a computer, and companies like Coursera and edX are gaining attention amid an environment of stubbornly high unemployment, prohibitively expensive education and a nationwide skills gap. But the value of a MOOC education is still not clear. Critics argue that the meteoric rise of MOOCs will eventually collapse under the weight of a few key weaknesses — namely, high attrition rates and a lack of participation from underprivileged students. These criticisms, however, ignore the market forces that led to the rise of MOOCs in the first place and will continue to support the movement going forward.
Read more at: http://www.edtechmagazine.com/higher/article/2013/12/how-moocs-can-be-free-and-profitable-same-time
The Awesome Power of Gaming in Higher Education
Games designer, author and researcher Jane McGonigal sees a future in education where MOOCs, live events and ordinary gamification initiatives all blend into a new way of learning, creating “extreme learning environments” full of opportunities for play and creation.
McGonigal shared a quote from Joi Ito, director of the MIT Media Lab, who has said that education is no longer “about centralized instruction. Rather, it’s the process of establishing oneself as a node in a broader network of distributed creativity.” “Gamification in higher education is going to be a lot more than what you’re seeing today,” McGonigal said. “This is flipping our concept. Should students be learning knowledge that is already known, or solving problems that nobody’s solved before as part of their education?” McGonigal shared three examples of new games now advancing a variety of fields of study, and offered hope that such techniques could be applied to revolutionize the ways through which higher education is delivered or assessed.
Read more at http://www.edtechmagazine.com/higher/article/2013/10/awesome-power-gaming-higher-education
About
The ETC's primary mission is to assist JCCC faculty in developing and incorporating instructional technologies into the curriculum.
www.jccc.edu/edtech
edtech@jccc.edu
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913-469-4433, for Fax
Billington Library Suite 375
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