Serendipity35

On November 18 at 2 p.m. Eastern, join Inside Higher Ed editor Scott Jaschik and technology reporter Carl Straumsheim for a discussion of the survey findings in a free webinar on their findings from the 2014 Survey of Faculty Attitudes on Technology, conducted with Gallup.

REGISTER

You can also read up before you join the conversation and download the complete survey report, at www.insidehighered.com/news/survey.

Some of the questions addressed in the study are:

• Can online courses achieve learning outcomes that are equivalent to in-person courses?


• What are the most important quality indicators of an online education?


• How does the quality of online courses compare with the quality of in-person courses?


• To what extent have faculty members and technology administrators experienced online learning themselves, as students?


• To what extent have faculty taught online, hybrid, and face-to-face courses? For those who have not taught online, why is that?


• How supportive are institutions of online learning?


• Which should cost the student more -- online degree programs or those delivered face to face?


• Who should be responsible for creating and marketing online degree programs?


• Are institutions expanding online learning? Should they do so? To what extent do faculty feel that they are appropriately consulted in this decision-making process?


• How do faculty use learning management systems (LMS) and early warning systems?
  
  
  
  
  
  

The Learning Analytics Summer Institute (LASI) is being held now at at Harvard and runs for three days (June 30 – July 2).

The mission for the Society for Learning Analytics Research is to make data and algorithms open and accessible to researchers in order to create transparency around how analytics are being used in teaching and learning.

They are live streaming LASI and the schedule of speakers, panels and keynotes, is available now and if you scroll down the page, there is a live video feed.

A global network of LASI-Locals in Hong Kong, Egypt, South Africa, Netherlands, Spain, Latin America, UK, and other regions is in place. If you are interested in learning analytics and how they are being deployed by researchers and students, join this distributed global conversation with a few thousand peers who are exploring data, analytics, and learning.

Tag for the event: #lasi14 

 

May and June are the months for "professional development" in higher education. We try to grab faculty before they go into full summer vacation mode (or get wrapped up in summer classes and research).

I taught a session at the Faculty Institute at NJIT and last week another one on writing at Georgian Court University and today I am at at New Jersey City University. Their Academic Computing group and the Center for Teaching and Learning, in collaboration with the Office of Grants and Sponsored Programs, is hosting their first Summer Faculty Institute on Learning Technologies. The three-day institute is a time to connect with colleagues, guest speakers, and to get hands-on practice with new technologies.

I will be one of the keynote speakers. My talk - "I Have A Theory About Learning" - will hopefully give the faculty a number of ways to think about learning theories that are emerging from current technologies. I know that some of those theories will be developed further in hands-on sessions offered during the three days.

Craig Kapp is another keynote. He is  an interactive developer that I have seen before demonstrating some really interesting tech he has developed. I first met him when he was in Instructional Technology at TCNJ.  Now, he's at New York University as a Researcher in Residence at the Interactive Telecommunications Program. His company is ZooBurst, a web-based start-up that focuses on bringing augmented reality digital storytelling tools into classrooms around the world.

Eric Sheninger is the third day keynote. I have not met him before but know of him and follow him on social media. Eric is a Principal at New Milford High School in NJ, but he is known for his work on leading and learning in the digital age. Pillars of Digital Leadership is a framework for educators to initiate sustainable change to transform school cultures.His book is Digital Leadership: Changing Paradigms for Changing Times.

I will also be doing a longer workshop session on bringing Open Educational Resources (OER) into courses. The good thing about having two hours in a workshop setting is that rather than just try to sell faculty on using something like open textbooks or open courseware, we can actually look at sites that offer them and try to find some resources that work for their classes.

Too often professional development sessions give faculty good ideas to use, but then they have to leave and do the work of designing to implement those ideas. And that's where the model breaks down.

One idea in my opening talk is that with all the talk about "flipping the classroom" I would like to hear more about flipping the teacher and flipping professional development/learning.   I think that professional development would be more effective if some of it was done online and on-your-own prior to going to any face-to-face session. Get the theory out of the way and use the synchronous time to do the work and application.

The other NJCU sessions will be looking at how to use Personal Learning Networks, flipping the classroom, lecture capture, augmented reality,
data visualization and mobile devices, assistive technology for faculty and students, clickers for class and online polling, social media technologies as tools to engage college student, and robots in education for STEM and NAO.

For one of the projects I am working on currently, I participate in a weekly Hangout. The team meets using the Google service in order to talk and share materials. We don't archive the sessions or publish them to YouTube. It's an easy service to use and if you have never participated in a Hangout, it's worth experimenting with someone to see how it might be useful in your teaching or research.

Google has a lot of help materials online - support.google.com/plus/answer/2553119 will give you a start on using video Hangouts and Hangouts on Air directly from your Google+ Page.

Yes, this does require you to be part of the Google+ world that they have created and are both expanding and centralizing. ("One + to rule them all.")

The short directions are: Log in to your Google+ account and click Pages. Select the Google+ page for which you'd like to start a Hangout. Click Manage this page and the click Start a hangout.

Recently, I became aware of a small project (4-person team) based at the MIT Media Lab to have people create Unhangouts. The unhangout.media.mit.edu is an open source platform for running large scale online un-conferences.

The term "unconference" goes back to 1998. It was meant as a way to have a loosely structured conference emphasizing the informal exchange of information and ideas between participants, rather than following a conventionally structured program of events we are used to at a "conference."

Unhangout uses Google Hangouts to create as many small sessions as needed, and help users find others with shared interests. Their site says to "Think of it as a classroom with an infinite number of breakout sessions. Each event has a landing page, which we call the lobby. When participants arrive, they can see who else is there and chat with each other. The hosts can do a video welcome and introduction that gets streamed into the lobby. Participants then break out into smaller sessions (up to 10 people per session) for in-depth conversations, peer-to-peer learning, and collaboration on projects. UnHangouts are community-based learning instead of top-down information transfer."

Unhangout is an open source project. (The code is in their repository on GitHub.) The team offers to help get this set up on your own servers and may even be able to host your event on their installation.