Category: Teaching and Learning with Technology

Learning Online

From CUNY Academic Commons

Contents

Learning Online

by Jim Lengel, Hunter College and Boston University

A new, startup high school in New York City was putting it’s curriculum together over the summer. As in most states, biology is a required course for all students. The favored biology textbook, published by Holt and well-aligned with the Regent’s exam, is listed by the publisher at $105 per copy. That’s one hundred five dollars and no cents. For a book for a ninth-grader. One of many necessary to float him through the curriculum. (Or sink him with a backpack full of weighty tomes.)

It’s no wonder the school decided to provide the biology course, as well as the rest of the curriculum, online. You want to learn biology? Connect to the school’s Moodle server, click your biology course, and see the assignments from your teacher. Click on the introductory reading, and you’re connected to the appropriate chapter in the Holt textbook. You can connect from school, from home, from the library, from your iPhone. Do the same for World Civilization, Math, and English — though physical, hold-in-the-hand books, in the form of novels, are allowed in the latter. the school has weaned itself from textbooks, and also from much paper and pencil.

Providing learning materials online is growing at the high school level, a reflection of what’s already happened at many colleges. Not just textbooks, but assignments, quizzes, exercises, problem sets, articles, discussions, presentations and podcasts. In most cases it’s the same content made available more efficiently; in some cases it allows new forms of learning to take place. In the new high school, each faculty member has put all of the necessary learning materials for each course online. From there, students can work on it whenever and wherever they have the opportunity.

What does this mean for the teacher? As we plan an online course, how should we think differently about learning? After helping educators at a variety of schools and colleges and companies to build and improve online learning experiences, I share in this article some of the key discoveries about this mode of learning.


Quality Content

Generally, what you put online must be more carefully crafted than what you say in the lecture hall, and more precise than what you hand out in the classroom. Students expect readings, assignments, and quizzes they see on the computer to be better thought out than what they see in the classroom. The diagram quickly sketched on the chalkboard will not suffice for an online illustration; it should be re-drawn on the computer so that its concepts are immediately clear. Remember: when students confront your teaching material online, you are not there in person to explain it, or provide further details: the document they see must cover all bases. Each piece of content posted online must be self-contained and self-explanatory, so that students know exactly what they are supposed to do and have all the support they need to do it.

Think of it like a can of soup. If you are at home, in your own kitchen, you can put a bowl of soup on the table for your guests, and if it’s not exactly right you can fix it: add some salt, warm it up, thicken it a bit, put a dollop of butter in it, suggest they try it with crackers, and explain how good it is for them. But if you need to prepare and preserve that soup for someone going on a trip, you’ve got to make sure it’s just right, so when they open it and eat it all by themselves far away, it tastes just right, with no explanation needed


Small Chunks

Today’s students do not spend hours at a time with a single activity on the computer. And the act of reading on the computer (or iPod) is different from reading from a book or paper. The setting, the technology, the habits of mind, all tend toward short increments of time, multiple distractions, and multimedia expectations. You can’t simply post your hour-and-a-half lecture to the web site, or paste the 20-page full-text article to Blackboard, and expect it to have the same impact as in the classroom or in the journal. It’s better to divide your content into manageable chunks, pieces of information that can be confronted and understood in 15 or 20 minutes rather then 50 or 80.

So find within that long lecture five or six key concepts, and develop a five-minute podcast for each one. Use subheads more liberally in your writing. Read a bit, then ask a question that requires an answer to be submitted online. Better to build the students’ work around six short assignments rather then two long ones.


Active Assignments

It’s not what you do, it’s what they do. In the classroom the teacher is at the center; students focus on the professor; it’s what the faculty member does that makes the difference. Not so with online work. The only thing you get to do is prepare the content and pose the assignments; from then on, learning is dependent on what the students do. So the key to successful online courses is to craft a set of activities for the students to do: read this, look at that, ask yourself this, write that, discuss all of it together with your classmates. The clearer and more active the assignments, the more likely your students are to follow the course of study.

Think of your online course as a series of verbs; begin each item with an action word that directs the student to do something. Read. Consider. Compare. Discuss. Browse. Defend. Explain. Think. Find. Comment. Reflect. And for each assignment, make them produce something: a short answer, a contribution to a discussion, a response to a quiz question, a well-founded essay.


Multimedia

Whenever possible, illustrate the ideas from the course with media that go beyond the written word. Think of the many ways your academic ideas can appeal to the eye and the ear, the two great gateways to the mind. It’s much easier to do this online than on paper, so take advantage of maps, diagrams, images, illustrations, paintings, photos, animations, graphics, drawings, sounds, music, voice, and visuals. Socrates and Plato used all of these in their academy. So can you. You can make them yourself, license them from the textbook publisher, or find them freely on the Web. Or ask your students to help you construct them. The software tools for finding, gathering, organizing, creating and editing multimedia learning materials are more powerful and easier to use than ever.

Multimedia works. It helps students understand ideas. It provokes new kinds of thinking about old concepts. Not just multimedia presentations of the teacher’s ideas, but multimedia reports from students. Consider assigning projects that require students to express their ideas in several media at once.


Frequent Evaluation

Research on student engagement finds that many small evaluations work better than a few big exams. Students learn more this way, remember it longer, and find it more useful. The more opportunities your online course provides for students to turn something in, and have it evaluated (by you or by the computer), the better. So add some self-correcting quizzes to your course. Require a weekly (if not daily) response to a course assignment form every student. This keeps them connected, and notifies you of students who are falling by the wayside.

Most of the systems used to manage online learning, such as Blackboard and Moodle, make it easy to construct these kinds of evaluations, and to organize the results for you online so that feedback and grading is easy accomplished.


The Learning Sequence

The teachers in the new start-up high school are learning to structure their courses for an online environment. They are now thinking of each course as a sequence of activities that students go through as they learn the material. For instance, the biology teacher has divided his course into weekly sections. In each section students follow a carefully-crafted sequence of online activities:

  • Pre-assessment. A short, two- or three-question self-correcting quiz to see what he already knows (and doesn’t know) about the subject.
  • Close reading. A serious and detailed look at the key concept, often guided by an essential question.
  • Written response. An opportunity for the student to summarize the key idea in her own words, and get online feedback from the teacher.
  • Wide browsing. Moving beyond the text to explore numerous (and perhaps conflicting) online sources bout the concept.
  • Discussion contribution. Responding publicly in writing to the questions posed by the teacher and commenting on the contributions of classmates.
  • Collaborative work. Contacting and conversing with classmates online to create a short presentation of ideas.
  • Capstone project. Putting all that you have learned about this concept into a paper of presentation, and submitting it online.
  • Post-assessment. A self-correcting five-or six-question exam, with questions drawn from the state mastery test, that shows how much you have learned.

As online learning grows, we will all learn more about what works best. But by following the guidelines above, you have a better chance to develop an effective course of study.

For more ideas about online learning, take a look at Online Learning: What’s the Buzz?, Distance Learning, Learning Objects, and Supply and Demand.

This article published here with the permission of the author. Jim Lengel is a visiting Professor, Hunter College School of Education (October 2008)

CUNY on iTunes U

From CUNY Academic Commons

This section of the CUNY Academic Commons wiki supports a university-wide, collaborative effort coordinated by the Project Management Office of The City University of New York to establish a CUNY presence on iTunes U. The project encompasses the university and its 23 colleges and schools.

Contents

One Project, Two Tracks

CUNY University Relations is sponsoring the effort to focus on public and community affairs missions of the university to inform, teach, and promote the university, its colleges, schools, institutes and programs to its various constituencies, including students, faculty, prospective students, staff, alumni and the public at large in the City of New York, the United States and beyond.

Visit CUNY on iTunes U (You must have the iTunes application on your computer or be prepared to download this application to view CUNY on iTunes U.)

CUNY Academic Affairs is sponsoring the effort to bring together the vast and able resources of the university’s faculties, academic technologists, Centers for Excellence in Teaching & Learning, and students to develop a body of best practices, to identify technologies and processes and to integrate the university’s Learning Management System with the iTunes U platform in ways that enhance teaching and learning.

The CUNY on iTunes U project has two tracks:

Teaching and Learning

The wiki pages devoted to the Teaching and Learning track can be accessed here: CUNY on iTunes U Teaching and Learning Track

The Teaching and Learning track also has an invitation only discussion group.

Public and Community Affairs

The wiki pages devoted to the Public and Community Affairs track can be accessed here: CUNY on iTunes U Public and Community Affairs Track

The Public and Community Affairs track also has an invitation only discussion group.

Wiki Pages

Teach and Learn Academic Pilot Project

Public, Community Affairs Project

Miscellaneous Links and other Wikis

Project Management

Featured Rich Media Clip

“Relativity” with Dan Ariely, Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Behavioral Economics, Fuqua School of Business, Duke University (running time 4 min. 24 secs.)



Featured Media Clip II

Daniel Coleman of Stanford U: Open Culture Blog

Daniel Colman, director and associate dean of Stanford University’s continuing-studies program, runs a blog tracking podcasts made by colleges and professors. He talks about the pros and cons of putting recordings of lectures online, and lists his favorites.

New Moodle – Project Stretch

From CUNY Academic Commons

EduMoodle demo site (with sample themes)

Roadmap for Moodle 2.0 in development – planned changes etc.

Dynamic chart of Moodle 2.0 development progress

Niles VikingNet – administrator/designer Patrick Malley

Moodle’s Human readable course links

A disguised moodle – Leeds City College, UK

Another disguised moodle – The site of an intermediate school class

Moodle at CUNY

Any implementations of Moodle at CUNY?

Back to Other Web 2.0 Teaching Tools and Resources

Cool Stuff for Teachers

From CUNY Academic Commons

Image:Teachingandlearning.jpg

  • The Forum Network provides a collection of talks and lectures PBS and NPR have decided to make freely available.
  • 99 Awesome Firefox Add-ons for Educators comes courtesy of OnlineCourses.org, for those interested in extensions to the browser most of us use.
  • Zotero is a bibliographic tool for collecting and citing the sources you meet with on the Web. (It’s #22 of the above 99 but is good enough to merit its own entry.)
  • Evernote isa way to clip, annotate, and collect almost anything you come across in the digital world.
  • EtherPad isa web-based word processor that allows people to work together in real time.
  • Mendeley is a pdf management and bibliographic tool that allows you to organize, share, and discover research papers. 
  • WolframAlpha is a “computational knowledge engine” that will answer your math questions, do your calculations, and much more.
  • citeulike is a combination of social bookmarking tools that allows you to do (possibly annotated) bibliographies and reading lists that link right to the sources.
  • VoiceThread allows you to upload images in a slideshow format, including narration or text for each slide, and also allows text or voice comments from any user.
  • 10 sites for sharpening critical thinking is a compendium brought to you by Jeff Cobb’s Mission to Learn blog.
  • AcaWiki bills itself as a “‘Wikipedia for academic research’ designed to allow” students and teachers “to share summaries and discuss academic papers online.”
  • Hot Potatoes is free quiz generation software.
  • Free Online OCR (optical character recognition) analyzes the text in any image file (like a scanned document), then that into text that you can easily edit on your computer.
  • Gizmoz is an app that lets you create, customize and animate 3D characters that talk — e.g., from a photo you have of yourself (or a historical personage, or what/whomever).
  • Top 100 Tools for Learning 2009 as put together by Jane Hart, a “social learning consultant.”
  • Educational Videos on the Internet– a listing of vidos available on the web for use with instruction in various academic areas
  • {Please add your own favorites}

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Cool Tools for Teachers

From CUNY Academic Commons

Image:Teachingandlearning.jpg

  • The Forum Network provides a collection of talks and lectures PBS and NPR have decided to make freely available.
  • 99 Awesome Firefox Add-ons for Educators comes courtesy of OnlineCourses.org, for those interested in extensions to the browser most of us use.
  • Zotero is a bibliographic tool for collecting and citing the sources you meet with on the Web. (It’s #22 of the above 99 but is good enough to merit its own entry.)
  • Evernote isa way to clip, annotate, and collect almost anything you come across in the digital world.
  • EtherPad isa web-based word processor that allows people to work together in real time.
  • Mendeley is a pdf management and bibliographic tool that allows you to organize, share, and discover research papers. 
  • WolframAlpha is a “computational knowledge engine” that will answer your math questions, do your calculations, and much more.
  • citeulike is a combination of social bookmarking tools that allows you to do (possibly annotated) bibliographies and reading lists that link right to the sources.
  • VoiceThread allows you to upload images in a slideshow format, including narration or text for each slide, and also allows text or voice comments from any user.
  • 10 sites for sharpening critical thinking is a compendium brought to you by Jeff Cobb’s Mission to Learn blog.
  • AcaWiki bills itself as a “‘Wikipedia for academic research’ designed to allow” students and teachers “to share summaries and discuss academic papers online.”
  • Hot Potatoes is free quiz generation software.
  • Free Online OCR (optical character recognition) analyzes the text in any image file (like a scanned document), then that into text that you can easily edit on your computer.
  • Gizmoz is an app that lets you create, customize and animate 3D characters that talk — e.g., from a photo you have of yourself (or a historical personage, or what/whomever).
  • Top 100 Tools for Learning 2009 as put together by Jane Hart, a “social learning consultant.”
  • Educational Videos on the Internet– a listing of vidos available on the web for use with instruction in various academic areas
  • {Please add your own favorites}

HOME | Web 2.0 Teaching Tools and Resources

Teaching and Learning with Digital Media

From CUNY Academic Commons

Powerpoint Presentations

What are their strengths and weaknesses?  How do I create an effective one?  And how do I include graphics, audio, and video?

Podcasts

What are podcasts, why are they useful, and how do I create them?

Screencasts and Videos

What are screencasts, why are they useful, and how do I create them?  Ditto for videos.

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Web 2.0 eTeaching and eLearning

From CUNY Academic Commons

Contents

What is Web 2.0?

Web 2.0 eTeaching Concepts, Theory, Uses, and Research

The linked sites explain eTeaching 2.0–a social and collaborative approach that facilitates active learning through the use of online communities and networks in which students co-create, collaborate and share knowledge, thereby participating fully in their learning.

Sites with Information about Teaching with Web 2.0

These links describe (and provide examples of) dozens of new social interaction tools, social bookmarking tools.

EduTech Wiki

This is a “resource kit” for educational technology teaching and research,.

WikiUniversity

This is a repository of free learning resources, learning projects, and research for use in all levels, types, and styles of education (including professional training and informal learning).

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Moodle and Moodle 2.0

From CUNY Academic Commons

EduMoodle demo site (with sample themes)

Roadmap for Moodle 2.0 in development – planned changes etc.

Dynamic chart of Moodle 2.0 development progress

Niles VikingNet – administrator/designer Patrick Malley

Moodle’s Human readable course links

A disguised moodle – Leeds City College, UK

Another disguised moodle – The site of an intermediate school class

Moodle at CUNY

Any implementations of Moodle at CUNY?

Back to Other Web 2.0 Teaching Tools and Resources

Useful Sites

From CUNY Academic Commons

EDUCAUSE – EDUCAUSE is “a nonprofit association whose mission is to advance higher education by promoting the intelligent use of information technology.” It provides comprehensive resources educational technology teaching and learning initiatives, applied research and online information services. Its electronic publications include books, monographs, the journals EDUCAUSE Quarterly and EDUCAUSE Review, and newsletters of special interest collaborative communities, (The current membership comprises more than 2,200 colleges, universities, and educational organizations, with more than 17,000 active members.)

“Building from Content to Community: (Re)Thinking the Transition to Online Teaching and Learning” – provides “research-based approaches to translating effective pedagogy in ways that support meaningful online learning.”

Technology as Facilitator of Quality Education

The American Association of Higher Education’s Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education (Chickering & Gamson) –  is the best known summary of what decades of educational research indicates are the kinds of teaching and learning activities most likely to improve postsecondary learning outcomes This site includes links to the original document and to documents that describe how faculty have used technology to try to implement one or more of the principles.

Explore Ideas for Technology Use in Instruction – This Web site is a sub-section of Duke University’s Center for Instructional Technology. Not only does it provide ideas but also references online resources as well.

English 104 in Second Life  This Ball State University course takes place almost entirely in Second Life.

The Academic Uses of iPods– This report summarizes all the academic iPod projects at Duke University. This is a good place to get some ideas.

Wikipedia’s URLS of Public Domain Sources – This is an excellent compilation of free image and audio (particularly for historical images).

Academic Earth– This site has a huge collection of recorded lectures from “top scholars at Yale, MIT, Berkeley, Harvard, Princeton, Stanford,” all of which can be searched by university, subject, top rated professor, top rated lecture, and top rated courses.

The Visible Knowledge Project– The Visible Knowledge Project (VKP) was a five-year project aimed at improving the quality of college and university teaching through a focus on both student learning and faculty development in technology-enhanced environments. Some of the resources and “posters” (summaries of ongoing research) were contributed by CUNY faculty whom many of you will recognize.

Women in World History – This comprehensive project uses multiple kinds of digital artifacts of communicating information (documents, images, photographs, archival footage, audios of teacher commentary, videos, and links to other sites) to help students learn interactively how to examine, research, and analyze the role of women in world history.

Center for History and New Media – This site has an excellent “Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web.”

Digital History – This online “book” (from the Center for History and New Media) “provides a plainspoken and thorough introduction to the web for historians who wish to produce online work or to build upon and improve the projects they have already started.” Included in it are “live links” to hundreds of sites (e.g., the Marxists’ Organizations Online Archive of scholarly materials, the Smithsonian’s 9/11 project, a multimedia exhibit on “Remembering Nagasaki,” and so forth).

American Passages – American Passages: A Literary Survey is one of Annenberg Media’s sites for professional development and classroom materials. This one is aimed at enhancing the study of American Literature in its cultural context. It includes a powerful search tool and access to more than 3000 items (including visual art, documentary videos, audio files, primary source materials and additional texts), a Slideshow Tool (which is a “point-and-click” method for creating multi-media presentations in response to reading and writing assignments), and Unit Instructor Guides that feature thematically-organized contextual materials.

CUNY WriteSite – Created by CUNY faculty and students, this site offers online instructional support in grammar and style, help with each stage of the writing process, and hints for how to handle various kinds of writing, throughout the disciplines. It also provides interactive practice exercises and discussion of issues connected with writing and links to each college’s writing resources and resources on the Internet to help students develop, revise, and edit their writing assignments.

Back to Web 2.0 eTeaching and eLearning

Other Web 2.0 Teaching Tools and Resources

From CUNY Academic Commons

Image:Teachingandlearning.jpg

Lists of Tools and Their Pedagogical Applications

What is Web 2.0 A wiki page on the Commons with an introduction to Web 2.0 for teaching and learning.

Wikis in the Classroom A wiki page on the Commons with resources for faculty interested in incorporating wikis in the classroom.

Blogs in the Classroom A wiki page on the Commons with resources for faculty interested in using blogs in their teaching.

Kitchen Sink Utilities A wiki page on the Commons with a list of all the miscellaneous odds and ends and potpourri that are out there for doing cool things with classes and students. This page was adapted from a blog post on the ITCP Core 2 Spring 2011 blog.

Cool Tools for Teachers A wiki page on the Commons with a list of innovative new web 2.0 tools for teachers.

Web 2.0 Tools and their Potential Uses for Educators   This is an continuously updated list of Web 2.0 applications and their potential uses for educators.

Sites with Information about Teaching with Web 2.0 Another growing list of websites with information for faculty interested in incorporating web 2.0 tools into their teaching.

Learning Tools Directory   This site lists (and links to) more than 2000 tools, grouped into ten categories (instructional; “virtual”/live”; documentation & presentation; images, audio, & video; blogs & wikis; micro-blogging & Twitter apps; collaboration & bookmarking; social networking; personal productivity; and browsers, players, & readers.

Web 2.0 Tools: Annotated Links and Resources   Explanations (with illustrations) of social networking tools, blogs and blog guides, wikis and wiki guides, collaboration tools. social bookmarking tools, virtual arts collaborations, RSS feeds, and more.

Software Essentials for the Modern Educator  This has links to dozens of (mostly free) applications to make online course design (and life) easier.

Moodle 2.0 and EduMoodles  What is “Moodle”?  Why should we create and use one?

Microblogging and “Twittering” in College Courses What is microblogging?  What is Twitter?  And what relevance does either have for higher education??

Twitter and Classroom Engagement A blog post from Valerie Futch on the TE(a)CH with Purpose @ Bronx CC blog. 

The Brain Free Thinking Software Software which allows users to create diagrams during brain storming sessions. Users can attach files or webpages to different nodes in the diagram.

Dipity Interactive Timelines Allows users to create interactive timelines with text, pictures and video.

Omeka web publishing softwareOpen source web publishing platform which can be used to display collections, create visual exhibits,or personal pages.

Evernote Note taking and research organizing system which allows user to capture full web pages, journal articles or pictures.

Zotero Free, easy-to-use tool to help you collect, organize, cite, and share your research sources. It lives right where you do your work—in the web browser itself.

Educause’s “7 Things You Need to Know About . . .” Articles

EDUCAUSE is a nonprofit association whose mission is to advance higher education by promoting the intelligent use of information technology. Below is a list of helpful PDF documents that provide advice on various web applications and their eductional uses. Please add others as you find them.

Media Converters

  • Media Conversion – This is an online media converter which allows users to convert a video directly from various portals, by url or by uploading a video, audio or office file from their local hard disks.
  • Free Flv Converter for Mac This website allows users to convert flv files to iMovie compatable formats such as .mpg.

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