Category Archives:
Current Trends in Online Education
How Not to Get (Too) Lost in Social Media
“Don’t try to read all the tweets! You’ll have a seizure. Just poke around and respond when inspired.” This advice from @OpenSesame last week was specifically about a live Twitter chat with a large number of participants, but I think it is a great place to come back to when you are feeling inundated by […]
An Interview with Jill Ambrose, CMO for CourseSmart
Having access to digital course materials is increasing in popularity, with new tools and applications emerging to fill different instructional needs. In addition to providing access to eTextbooks, these systems include a variety of functions that allow students and instructors to interact with the materials and each other. Institutions, instructors, and students are all potential users […]
Disrupting Higher Education: Technology and Online Learning
There are calls for change in higher education, among them improvement in graduation rates and access to education, ways to help institutions deal with massive budget cuts without increasing tuition and fees, and increased employability of graduates and higher starting salaries. While many agree on the problems at hand, there are no clear-cut solutions. You’ve […]
Exploring the BioBook Project
A project funded by the Next Generation Learning Challenges (NGLC) program, the BioBook project seeks to fulfill the NGLC Wave I Challenge to use open core courseware, enhance learner engagement, and implement learning analytics. Wake Forest professors Jed Macosko and Daniel Johnson have partnered with educational technology experts at Odigia to develop this new, interactive […]
Open Access Week 2011: Wrap-Up and Resources
Last week was officially International Open Access Week (OA Week) in the world of education, and everywhere, really. The event’s tagline, “Learn Share Advance”, encourages us to consider how “open access to information – the free, immediate, online access to the results of scholarly research, and the right to use and re-use those results as […]
Social Networking Savvy
After reading one of my recent posts, LinkedIn for the Adjunct Professor, a colleague of mine pointed out that as helpful as social networking systems can be, they can also be a source of misinformation. Social media can be leveraged for many purposes and unfortunately you may encounter the negative as well as the positive as […]
What’s in the pipeline? The future of online learning via NGLC
You may have already heard of the Next Generation Learning Challenges (NGLC) grant program. This initiative has received a lot of media attention due to its partnerships with private foundations and not-for-profit organizations, and focus on finding practical solutions to existing challenges in education. The guiding principles of the group – people first, fundamentals of learning, information technology to […]
Adventures in eReading
Is the end of the printed textbook near? Last week’s announcement about Amazon’s new Kindle Fire keeps the discussion and debate going. Textbooks are still in use in many courses, both traditional and online, and evolving rapidly for accessibility in digital environments and with multiple devices. While college students have not widely purchased eReaders in […]
The Orphan Works Project: Increasing Access to Academic Resources
A recent press release from Cornell University announced the expansion of a new initiative, the Orphan Works Project, that makes additional resources available to students, instructors, and researchers. According to the release, orphan works are “out of print books that are still subject to copyright but whose copyright holders cannot be identified or located.” These items […]
Google+: New Social Media for Education?
Whether you consider yourself a technology innovator or laggard, you may want to take a look at Google+. It’s a new, brand new, social network launched less than a month ago. It’s also Google’s latest attempt at creating an online social network (you may remember Google Wave and Google Buzz). There are already 20 million […]