The Teaching Professor Blog

If you enjoy reading blogs for helpful hints or insights from other educators, you might want to subscribe to the Teaching Professor Blog by Dr. Maryellen Weimer, professor emeritus at Penn State.  Read her weekly blogs at http://www.facultyfocus.com/topic/articles/teaching-professor-blog/

Fun way to find themes in writing

Have you ever seen a student paper loose focus?  Some students can write from an outline, but others just cannot seem to find the organization.  One creative tool that you can use is Wordle found at http://www.wordle.net/create.  I wrote a short manuscript about patient teaching and pasted the content into Wordle...Look below at the content I created using this tool.   I can easily see the main concepts in the paper.  Give it a try. I would love to hear how the tool works for your students.

 

Pump UpYour Distance Education Skills!

Are you ready to take your online courses to the next level?
Designing an Exemplary Course is a free, synchronous class (Wednesday at 2pm EST) and asynchronous content and activities that give distance education teachers a chance to try new ideas and learn from others.

Starts Thursday, September 26, 2012 and Ends October 17, 2012


Designing an Exemplary Course: Open Course, launching in late-September, will prepare participants to develop quality online courses using the Blackboard Rubric as a guide. The course is geared toward instructors and is LMS agnostic.

To maximize benefits of participation, optional homework assignments will be provided each week that provide guidance for applying the principles to build out one’s own course structure and materials.

Open Access Journals about Distance Education

As educators who teach online, it is important for us to stay current with technology and with pedagogy.  An efficient method to track research findings or case examples about distance education is to subscribe to RSS feeds for open access journals.  Below is a list that are published in English and contain articles from teachers from many different disciplines across the globe.

Asian Journal of Distance Education http://www.asianjde.org/2012v10.1.Contents.html
Journal of Online Learning and Teaching http://jolt.merlot.org/index.html
The Journal of Educators Online http://www.thejeo.com/
The Journal of Distance Education http://www.jofde.ca/index.php/jde
World Journal on Educational Technology http://www.world-education-center.org/index.php/wjet/index

Why Open Access?

Open Education Resources (OER) materials freely available online materials.  In March 2012 the Creative Commons, the U.S. Department of Education, and the Open Society Foundations co-sponsored a competition to produce short videos describing the why OER is important for local and global communities.  Take a few minutes to view the winning videos found at http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/33343?utm_campaign=newsletter_1208&utm_medium=blog&utm_source=newsletter

BIG News

Big news...the Department of Education on Friday, July 27 softened its enforcement stance on state authorizations.  This means that distance education programs or schools that enroll students from states other than their home state are responsible for obtaining state authorizations, but the Department of Education will not enforce this rule.  For the entire Department of Education document, go to http://ifap.ed.gov/dpcletters/attachments/GEN1213Attach.pdf,

Distance Education Initiatives to Provde Open Access

Harvard and MIT have initiated a joint venture called edX to provide online courses by Fall 2012.  Courses will be taught by Harvard and MIT faculty and populated with courses already developed by the two universities in their open access curriculum. So what's new?  The edX initiative will also be used as a test bed for research about effectiveness of online technologies.  To read more, go to http://www.edxonline.org/release.html

Another group of 12 U.S. universities including, Univ. of Virgina, Univ. of Washington, Univ. of Illinois, Duke Univ., Univ. of California - San Francisco, Rice Univ., Johns Hopkins Univ., Georgia Institute of Technology, and the California Institute of Technology and other universities from abroad have joined Coursera to offer open access online courses. Go to https://www.coursera.org/ to read more and examine open access courses.  Why will universities offer open access courses? The reasons are varied -- some want to increase recognition of their brand, others want to offer education to people in the global community without the chance of attending a university, and others...well we will see.