What exactly is a high-quality online course is a question that has held the attention of researchers, practitioners, and entrepreneurs for decades. Many schools have adopted their own set of guidelines, perhaps even templates other methods of making sure instructors have in place what the school leaders believe to be effective practices. Some schools have Read More
“What is it weakest part of your online or blended course?” is a question I have posed to faculty who teach online. A synopsis of one of the most commonly encountered answers is: I’m afraid my students feel the same about my discussions as I do. They post and respond, and I tell them “say Read More
George Veletsianos’s book Learning Online: The Student Experience is both very timely and ill-timed in the spring of 2020. We all now of the widespread and nearly-instantaneous move to remote teaching. Online teaching and learning is on our minds and urgent request for “how do I…?” are filling our inboxes. It seems a book (especially Read More
I write this in the midst of the pandemic. What the coming weeks and moths hold are unknown. All I can hope is that we are nearing the end of this rather than the beginning. For several days, I have been working with faculty to figure out how to teach online. We are preparing for Read More
A good online course will be complete (the syllabus will include everthing that it should), clear (well-organized and accessible to students), and allow for connections (between students and content and teacher and the world beyond the course). Such courses are designed through three iterative processes: First, the outcomes and products are designed to ensure it is clear what students will learn Read More
Cleaning out some files, I found one that contained a post for a blog for which I used to write. This was in my “to post” folder when I stopped blogging for the organization that sponsored the blog. I earned my Master of Arts in Education in 2000 at the local state college, and I Read More
Appropriate Proper Reasonable | RSS.com The title of this post appears to be a cryptic message, perhaps an arcane relationship from a long-forgotten physics textbook. In reality, it summarizes one of the most important ideas about learning to be articulated in the last 10 years or so. The relationship makes perfect sense to many teachers Read More
Many varieties of web 2.0 tools have been available since the late 1990’s; these tools are all designed to make it easy for users to publish information to the web and to interact with others via posts and responses. Many of these are built into LMS, so can easily be incorporated into virtual classrooms. The Read More
Over the decades I have been working with digital technologies, teachers, and learners; electronic portfolios have been a recurring topic. The story usually plays out like this: I arrive in a school (maybe k-12, maybe college) and there are groups (often departments in colleges) in which there is interest in adopting electronic portfolios. I hear, Read More
The central feature of every portfolio are the artifacts which are those examples and fragments of work that illustrate the learners’ skills, knowledge, and habits. It is important to note that with some exceptions, artifacts are fragments of work. Rather than including the entire paper, one will include only the abstract or the conclusion, or Read More