Instructional Design Blog

In catching up with what is new in MERLOT, I read that the online Free Assessment Summary Tool (FAST) had received their Classics Award.

FAST is an anonymous online survey tool that automatically summarizes students' impressions of a course and/or teacher and supplies the data directly to the instructor. It is completely web based, password protected, anonymous, and instantaneously updated.

According to their mission statement, the FAST initiative will "provide professional, technical and academic advice to faculty who wish to become more informed about the teaching and learning process through the application of faculty-administered, anonymous online student feedback."

Continue reading "Friday's Pick: FAST - Assessing Teaching Tool" »

The Immersive Education Initiative has certainly been in the news recently. This "international collaboration of universities, colleges, research institutes, consortia and companies" is working to support online education using 3-D virtual platforms. In December, Harvard sponsored an Immersive Education Event and on January 22, at the Boston Digital Media Summit, the Immersive Education Initiative announced the creation of the "Education Grid and corresponding Platform Ecosystem" which will provide educators with "a comprehensive end-to-end infrastructure for a new generation of virtual world learning environments, interactive learning games, and simulations."

The first three platforms in the ecosystem are Second Life, Sun Microsystems Laboratory's Project Wonderland, and Croquet. According to a Media Grid announcement:

"These platforms will be enhanced to utilize the server-side Education Grid that will deliver a rich library of learning objects, digital media assets, learning games and services from which a wide variety of Immersive Education experiences can be assembled."

Since 2004, Boston College students have been using a version of the Immersive Education platform to take courses. You can read more about how the Immersive Education platform was used with students in The Wired Campus article 'Immersive Education' Submerges Students in Online Worlds Made for Learning.

The platform includes:

"interactive 3D graphics, commercial game and simulation technology, virtual reality, voice chat (Voice over IP/VoIP), Web cameras (webcams) and rich digital media with collaborative online course environments and classrooms."

Continue reading "Friday's Pick: Immersive Education " »

Last fall I wrote about Zotero, a free Firefox extension that enables faculty to collect, manage, and cite their research from George Mason University. In December Zotero was in the news again with their partnership with the non-profit Internet Archive to create a shared online database for scholars to upload their notes, photographs, digital scans of research documents, and other data from their hard drives.

This opening up of private research materials before publication may be counter to the usual university research culture of waiting until publication for research to be shared but the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarded $514,000 to the Center for History and New Media at George Mason to support the effort, and gave more than $700,000 more to the Internet Archive for the project according to an article in The Wired Campus.

The Zotero-IA alliance will create a “Zotero Commons” into which scholarly materials can be added simply via the Zotero client, according to Dan Cohen, the Director of the Center.

Continue reading "Friday's Pick: Sharing Pre-Publication Research" »

“The Cost of Copyright Confusion for Media Literacy,” released by the American University’s Center for Social Media, is based on interviews that university researchers conducted with more than 60 media-literacy educators. Those interviews reveal that "educators today have no consensus around what constitutes acceptable fair use practices" according to the Center.

The interviews also highlight how "as a result of poor guidance, counterproductive guidelines, and fear, teachers use less effective teaching techniques, teach and transmit erroneous copyright information, fail to share innovative instructional approaches, and do not take advantage of new digital platforms."

Continue reading "Friday's Pick: Copyright Confusion" »

Much is being written about the characteristics of the Net Generation learner in higher education but if you have a moment (about 4 minutes actually), check out the video on YouTube - A Vision of Students Today.. Or better yet, watch the first video of this three-part series, Information R/evolution and then watch the Vision video.

This example of "digital ethnography" comes from a "working group of Kansas State University students and faculty dedicated to exploring and extending the possibilities of digital ethnography" led by Michael Wesch, an assistant professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State.

Two hundred of his Introduction to Cultural Anthropology 2007 students assisted with the creation of the Vision video "...to call attention to the growing gap between how our students learn and how we choose to teach them", according to comments by Wesch. The Vision video is Part Two of a three-part series on higher education that Wesch is producing.

According to Wesch, "It began as a brainstorming exercise, thinking about how students learn, what they need to learn for their future, and how our current educational system fits in."

You can read more about this video, including its transcript in the blog Digital Ethnography. You can also read comments to the Chronicle of Higher Education's Wired Campus posting about the video here.

Continue reading "Friday's Pick: A Vision of Students Today " »

I haven't heard much recently about the digital divide - a term coined to "represent the gap between those with regular, effective access to digital and information technology, and those without this access," according to Wikipedia.

However, while looking at Tufts University School of Medicine student Catherine Hooper's Journey to Africa digital story, I was struck by the thought that many of the students and faculty in Tanzania may not be able to watch this report as easily as I was. Hooper traveled to Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, where she helped establish a link between the Tufts University Sciences Knowledgebase (TUSK) and Muhimbili University College of Health Sciences.

A recent article in Business Daily by Harvard Professor Calestous Juma makes the following points about the growing digital chasm in higher education in Africa:

"Most faculty and students have no reliable Internet access. African universities of the size of the University of California have the Internet capability of a single US household."

"Africa (other than South Africa) is currently linked to the developed world by a single fiber-optic cable down the West Africa coast. It is the most digitally-isolated region on the globe."

Continue reading "Friday's Pick: Disconnecting Africa " »

Whether or not you have ventured into Second Life and have your own avatar, you may have heard about it and that universities are beginning to create virtual campuses, teach online courses, and have virtual meetings there. Some in higher education are concerned about the recent interest in virtual worlds, but there are many experiments happening in Second Life and other non-gaming virtual 3d-worlds that bear watching.

Image is from Boise State University's edtech Island video on YouTube.

Professor Avatar: In the digital universe of Second Life, classroom instruction also takes on a new personality

This article in the Chronicle of Higher Education online describes various ways Second Life is being used by academics and universities. While you are there, take the tour of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's campus in Second Life and if you aren't quite willing to venture into Second Life itself, check out the videos in YouTube using "university second life" as your search terms.

Edward L. Lamoureux, an associate professor in Bradley University's multimedia program is teaching his second ethnography class online in Second Life. One of the reasons for teaching in Second Life was to enable undergraduate "field" research which is evidently considered a bit risky in downtown Peoria, Illinois where Bradley is located.

Evidently the New Media Consortium, a nonprofit higher-education technology group, has been providing the technical support and space Lamoureux's class but soon Bradley will have its own Second Life campus.

Continue reading "Friday's Pick: Avatars, The Second Life of PhDs " »

The new EDUCAUSE Quarterly is online and the article Top-Ten Teaching and Learning Issues, 2007 was especially interesting to me as an instructional designer.

And the Top 10 are -

1. Establishing and supporting a culture of evidence
2. Demonstrating improvement of learning
3. Translating learning research into practice
4. Selecting appropriate models and strategies for e-learning
5. Providing tools to meet growing student expectations
6. Providing professional development and support to new audiences
7. Sharing content, applications, and application development
8. Protecting institutional data
9. Addressing emerging ethical challenges
10. Understanding the evolving role of academic technologists

Continue reading "Friday's Pick: Instruction 2.0" »

Fluid is a worldwide collaborative project funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to "to address the values of usability, accessibility, internationalization, quality assurance and security within academic software projects."

Members are from the Sakai, uPortal, Moodle, and Kuali Student communities and their goal is to "help improve the user experience of community source web applications."

This is a project that is well worth watching as it is sometimes difficult in academic software projects to truly involve potential users in an iterative software design process beyond basic user testing. This project hopes to "help address the diverse needs represented within education, including needs related to ability, language, culture, discipline and institutional conventions."

To help achieve and disseminate this goal, the Fluid team is developing and will freely distribute a library of sharable customizable user interfaces "designed to improve the user experience of web applications."

Continue reading "Friday's Pick: Fluid" »

The National Science Foundation, the Public Library of Science, and the San Diego Supercomputing Center have collaborated to support a site that is being billed as a "You Tube for Scientists" - SciVee.

SciVee's goal is the "widespread dissemination and comprehension of science." To reach this goal, scientists are invited to upload a video and synchronize it to their research papers. They can also publish podcasts, jand oin a disciplinary communities of scientists.

From their About page:

"SciVee allows scientists to communicate their work as a multimedia presentation incorporated with the content of their published article. Other scientists can freely view uploaded presentations and engage in virtual discussions with the author and other viewers. SciVee also facilitates the creation of communities around specific articles and keywords. Use this medium to meet peers and future collaborators that share your particular research interests."

Continue reading "Friday's Pick: SciVee" »