regular
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On George Siemens’s Duplication Theory of Value
I think a lot of this is happening, frankly. Univ. of Central Florida, a leader in online/hybrid courses has a student body that for the most part takes a fluid blend of online, hybrid, and f2f classes. That model is being duplicated many places. The Innovative University’s fascinating final chapters talk about this as well… Continue reading
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Ed Roulette
via Wall of People Being Awesome on Chat Roulette. A post on Philipp Schmidt’s stream got me thinking about how we might tap into the 20 years of research on Peer Instruction to better inform peer learning initiatives. I’m assuming here that readers are familiar with the Peer Instruction research (if you are not, you… Continue reading
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Smart Use of Cognitive Disfluency Goes Mainstream
From the NYT, today: Another common misconception about how we learn holds that if information feels easy to absorb, we’ve learned it well. In fact, the opposite is true. When we work hard to understand information, we recall it better; the extra effort signals the brain that this knowledge is worth keeping. This phenomenon, known… Continue reading
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The Edupunk’s Guide to a DIY Credential: A Review by Someone Else
Part of the reason I started Hapgood was to try to break the habit of wasting time engaging in Big Rhetorical Debates about Stuff That Capital-M Matters. Hapgood is largely about me getting back to the research and implementation focus that grounds me, and keeping the rhetorical stuff intermittent and focused on pressing concerns. I’m… Continue reading
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Do pre-tests boost achievement in online courses?
From an older paper which found that online courses involving pretests outperformed F2F instructions, but that online courses with no pretest showed no difference: There exists a possibility that a pre-test works as a moderator affecting teaching and learning processes of ODE settings. For example, a pre-test might provide information for the online instructors to… Continue reading
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Informal Statistical Inference
What we are trying to do in our Stat Lit class is to develop good intuitions about data, rather than create mini-statisticians. Our belief is that everyone, in almost any job or civic task, has to make inferences from data without having access to complex data crunching tools or methods, and, as such, it is… Continue reading
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Openness and Analytics
I am sure someone has already commented on this, but it occurs to me that openness and analytics have a problematic relationship. For instance, in the Intro to Psych course we are developing on several campuses, we’d like to use analytics to do things like nationally norm percent correct on questions. So you answer a… Continue reading
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AASCU, Red Balloon & National Course Collaborations
So this is really neat. I’m on the phone here with some American Association of State Colleges and Universities people on a conference call, and we’re hammering out how multiple state colleges and universities can best work together to build fully articulated blended and fully online courses that we share with one another. The basic… Continue reading
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You will do what you are told, until the rights are sold…
I’m with this commentary, mostly, until about halfway through when it gets into the thicket of what ownership means. There is a shock doctrine that edtech-vangelists have been all-to-willing to sell. Here’s the real deal, once again. The main problem with education is that it competes financially as a social good with health care. Health… Continue reading
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Did OER teach millions of people the wrong physics?
Probably too provocative a title. But it’s a question worth asking, because it’s a question to which we don’t have an answer. Professor Walter Lewin’s classes (above) have been viewed by millions of people on cable TV and downloaded by millions via OCW. In them, Walter demonstrates the best of breed in demonstration-based physics. If… Continue reading
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