Ontario is creating a Centre of Excellence for Online Learning to give students across the province one window of access to high-quality, transferable online courses, while reducing course duplication.
To launch in time for the 2015-16 school year, Ontario Online will improve collaboration between colleges and universities by minimizing duplication — allowing students to take the same, centralized online course. The online platform will also give students the flexibility to receive world-class instruction wherever and whenever works best for them. It will operate through three inter-related hubs:
- The course hub will offer state-of-the-art online courses that are fully transferable between participating colleges and universities, giving students more options to earn credits and complete their education.
- The instruction hub will allow institutions to develop and share best practices, research, and data on how best to teach online courses.
- The support hub will provide academic and technical assistance to students, instructors, and institutions.
Supporting a world-class postsecondary education system that is a leader in innovation and online learning is part of the Ontario government’s economic plan to invest in people, build modern infrastructure, and support a dynamic and innovative business climate.
Author: Patric Lougheed
A Conversation About Online Course Quality – OnlineColleges.net
Get Involved in Quality Discussions
No matter your role in online education, the need to create and ensure high levels of value is a critical part of what we do. From my perspective, it’s all about making the most of the opportunity that online education allows, creating a best possible environment for students in any given course or program. How can you get involved in conversations about quality?
Students
- Research accreditation. Know what type of accreditation your institution and program may have, as well as which agencies grant the status. Be prepared to describe the quality level of your courses and program to employers in terms of accreditation as well as your learning experiences.
- Ask about quality measures. Were your online courses and programs designed using specific rubrics or other guidelines? How is your institution taking quality into consideration?
- Complete your course evaluations. This is just one way you can provide input on the course design process, informing your instructors and designers about suggested revisions. Help them to improve the quality of your courses for future students.
- Look for ways to be part of design and development activities. It’s still rare for students to join design teams and curriculum committees, but it does happen. During the Sloan conference session, instructional designers expressed an interest in getting more students involved in what they do.
Instructors
- Participate in course review and revision process. Use the opportunities provided by your institution to provide feedback on what is working and not working from your perspective. Whether it’s serving as a subject matter expert to help create a new course, providing periodic evaluation of an existing course, or preparing your face-to-face course for online delivery, keep quality in mind.
- Review course evaluations. Take time to consider the comments and suggestions submitted by your online students, and identify specific improvements that may be possible to implement after each term.
- Connect with your institution’s instructional support providers. Faculty development, technical support, and other resource teams are often available to assist in the design, review, and revision of your courses. Explore existing quality standards and how they might be used to further enhance the experience for students.
As the nature of online learning and online learners changes, so will the ways in which we measure what instructional strategies and components are most effective in our courses. We may never have one cohesive definition of quality, and I think that’s okay, but it is possible to develop an approach that conveys an institution or program’s priorities and promotes a valuable learning experience.
What does quality mean to you? Share your ideas and elements you might add to the existing frameworks.
http://www.onlinecolleges.net/2013/11/26/conversation-online-course-quality/
2020 Vision: Outlook for online learning in 2014 and way beyond
Last year I spent some time discussing the value of predictions. One point I didn’t mention is the limitation of predicting just one year ahead, because you can’t identify the long term directions, and so often you’re driven by what happened in the very recent past, i.e. last year, because that’s the latest and often only data you have. More importantly, though, looking one year ahead assumes that there is no choice in what technologies we will use and how we will use them, because they are already entering our society. Also, this is likely to be the last year in which I make predictions for the future. I will be 75 in April, and I plan to stop all paid professional activities at that point (although I will keep my blog, but more as a journalist than as a practitioner).
So this seems to be a good point to look not just at 2014, but where we might be going five to ten years from now, and in doing this, I want to include choice or human decision-making as well as technological determinism. In other words, what kind of online learning do I expect in the future, given what I know so far?
via 2020 Vision: Outlook for online learning in 2014 and way beyond.
What Is Agile Learning Design?
Agile started as a software development process—a reaction to the cumbersome “waterfall” methodology that had been brought over from older manufacturing practices. Early software development companies had no model for their new trade, so they simply borrowed what had been established for years in other industries where products are made.
The problem is that this method is extremely impractical for software development. This is because in order to move to the next stage of development, the stage before it must be 100% complete, perfect, and documented… and that’s just not how software development works. (I’m sure you can already start to see how this applies to learning design).
Agile vs ADDIE: Which Is Better for Learning Design?
This difference (of early sharing and collaborating) is such a breath of fresh air that some people have even recommended leaving ADDIE in favor of a new, more agile system.
I can see where they are coming from, because newer and more efficient processes have been developed. Agile (and other iterative models like it) take into account new technologies and more rapidly evolving ideas. But I’m not sure if “leaving” is the language we should be using. The concept behind the ADDIE model has worked for instructional designers for years. There is something about the simplicity of it—it grounds the team in stages so you know you’re not designing before you’ve defined the problem, or developing before you’ve laid out your design, etc.
Understanding the Building Blocks of Online Learning Series – pt1
This is an excellent series from a leader in educational technology and the affect on post-secondary institutions. I will will post a blog entry as these are published on the Contact North website. I encourage discussion!
For almost 50 years, Tony Bates has been a consistent, persistent and influential voice for the reform of teaching and learning in post-secondary education, notably through the effective use of emerging technologies. Author of 11 books and 350 research papers in the field of online learning and distance education, Tony Bates is also an advisor to over 40 organizations in 25 countries, and publisher of what is arguably the most influential blog on online learning with over 20,000 visits a month. A Contact North | Contact Nord Research Associate, Dr. Bates has helped educators, academic administrators and policy makers grasp key concepts, trends and challenges in online learning. This posting is one of a series that looks at Tony’s perspectives and advice on key issues in online learning.
This series was researched and developed by Contact North | Contact Nord Research Associates, Dr. Jane Brindley and Dr. Ross Paul.
“Adapting technology for effective learning is the mantra for Tony’s entire career – technology for accessibility, for flexible response to diverse needs, for improved quality and cost control, and for institutional accountability.
His constant message is that most institutions are under-exploiting the potential of technology to respond to the growing pressures for change in post-secondary education. For meaningful improvements, major changes are needed in the prevailing institutional cultures and the way they are managed. Online learning, which harnesses the power of the Internet, multimedia resources and Web-based tools, is taking post-secondary education by storm.
For Bates, the change is starkly different from that of earlier technologies mainly used to broadcast content. In the opportunities it provides to engage students, enhance quality, widen access and be cost efficient, and the radical changes it requires for the effective organization and rethinking of post-secondary education practices and processes, online learning is a game changer.”
Understanding the Building Blocks of Online Learning: | Contact North.
Inventing the future of publishing through human curated big data
Semantic technology has been around for years and was supposed to save us from information overload. So far, it failed. The Semantic Web or Web 3.0 is still Tim Berners-Lee’s dream, and good old Web 2.0 keeps drowning us in oceans of content. But while social media is certainly the cause of this deluge of information, it can also be the solution: first, as it provides us with a huge amount of data that we can use to qualify this information through big data technology; second, because it educated and created a need for millions to become human curators. By combining algorithms and humans, we reinvent media while bringing the meaning back to the Web.
Motivating Students with Teaching Techniques that Establish Relevance, Promote Autonomy | Faculty Focus
Underachievement in college students is linked to lack of motivation (Balduf, 2009 and references therein). Two major factors that contribute to poor motivation are inability of students to see the relevance of classroom activities to their chosen careers (Glynn et al., 2009) and lack of a sense of autonomy (Reeve and Jang, 2006; Reeve, 2009).
In this article, I provide examples of how I addressed these two issues with activities that promote experiential learning and encourage students to be more active participants in their learning. These techniques were used mainly in science courses but could be adapted to other disciplines.
New Open Access Policy for NSERC, SSHRC & CIHR: Draft now Open for Comments! | Creative Commons Canada
Earlier this week, the three major Canadian research funding agencies released a new draft for a harmonized open access policy amongst the three organizations. Once finalized, this policy will apply to all researchers who receive a grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC), the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), or the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR).
The proposed policy will advance important rules to help ensure that publicly-funded research in Canada is both accessible and beneficial to the public. Foremost, the rules will require researchers to make their results openly available within one year of publication.
6 Alternatives To Bloom’s Taxonomy For Teachers –
“At the end of the day, teaching is about learning, and learning is about understanding.
And as technology evolves to empower more diverse and flexible assessments forms, constantly improving our sense of what understanding looks like–during mobile learning, during project-based learning, and in a flipped classroom–can not only improve learning outcomes, but just might be the secret to providing personalized learning for every learner.
This content begs the question: why does one need alternatives to the established and entrenched Bloom’s? Because Bloom’s isn’t meant to be the alpha and the omega of framing instruction, learning, and assessment. Benjamin Bloom’s taxonomy does a brilliant job of offering “verbs” in categories that impose a helpful cognitive framework for planning learning experiences, but it neglects important ideas, such as self-knowledge that UbD places at the pinnacle of understanding, or the idea of moving from incompetence to competence that the SOLO taxonomy offers.
So with apologies to Bloom (whose work we covered recently), we have gathered five alternatives to his legendary, world-beating taxonomy, from the TeachThought Simple Taxonomy, to work from Marzano to Fink, to the crew at Understanding by Design.”