Solutions through Partnership: the Evolution of an Online Science Course

Solutions through Partnership: the Evolution of an Online Science Course
This was, unfortunately, a pretty bad presentation. The presenter didn't lay any foundation, so I had no idea until midway through the presentation that the presenter was not from a college, but an educational organization (Dallas Telelearning). I guess had I realized that this was essentially a sales demo, I would have selected a different session.

Here are my basic notes:

Dallas telelearning science for non- science majors
Using eScience labs, integrating Evernote for student note taking - cool
EScience labs customized the labs for the college, pulling from existing products and customizing products
McGraw hill also involved, filling in areas of the Cost, Time, Quality
Each of the partners contributed money to the effort as well.

Assessment - how is it done? Varies by instructor, some take pictures, some have students upload video of the entire lab

EScience labs notes that there is a level where the kit can't do the trick. But it does work well for college level, introductory science courses.

AACC Conference

I'm in San Francisco at the American Association of Community Colleges conference, at the invitation of my college president, Dr. Kilpatrick. I normally go to teaching or eLearning related conferences, so this is something different for me.

Dissertations and OER Hub

This presenter is arguing that dissertations should be published using open attributions. He wants to integrate the option to license openly into the doctoral process. Interesting. 

The next session was the one I wanted to hear, on the OER Hub, presented by folks from the UK Open University.  They wanted to provide a structure, a place for collect open resources.

He talked about the Learning Space at Open University, explained more extensively here.

Evaluating open texts

Dilbert - i like to have opinions, but not informed opinions. http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2012-10-07/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+DilbertDailyStrip+%28Dilbert+Daily+Strip%29

This session is dissertation research on the quality of open textbooks and how to measure that. I was hoping that he would present us with the

8 themes with two groupings

Technology ( related to the digital nature of the book)
Navigation
Access
Performance
Interaction

Content ( would be in any textbook)
Revelance
( other items that I didn't catch)
The research is still in process, so the takeaway that I wanted, how to evaluate the quality and could I use the tool to evaluate open course library resources.

The second part was also on adopting open textbooks in community colleges. Research showed that the adoption of Flat World Knowledge books had positive outcomes. I am using a Flat World knowledge text in my American Government class, so it is always nice to see this kind of info.

Viualizing Learning Data

This is a presentation from the Open Learning Initiative.  You may have heard about their open courses and incredibly powerful software behind them. Anyone can use these courses for instruction and we have a grant funded group in SAM teaching a statistics course through OLI.

I've personally been very interested in learner data and how faculty can use it to improve teaching and learning. I presented on this topic earlier this year at Whatcom CC. 

Also, Canvas, through Canvas Analytics, makes it really easy to see the data that is gathered and see what you can do with it.

OLI has created an instructor Learning Dashboard that helps instructors take the data and do something with it.  Howver, it is hard for faculty to know what to do with the data. 

I think Canvas makes what they are talking about pretty straightforward, but it is useful to think about how to talk to people about what to do with the data they get.  The cool thing that takes this OLI effort to the next level is they are thinking of integrating this info right into the course, so while you are working in your course, a flag might pop up next to an outcome that students are not meeting, so you as faculty can act in real time to address where students are struggling.

MIT Scholar

MIT Open Courseware is something that many of us are familiar with. MIT puts up syllabus, course notes, sometimes lectures and asssignments from all of their courses. They are not distance learning courses, they are meant to be a repository of resources for faculty, contributing to the community of scholars. They have over 2000 courses up there.

9% of their visitors are faculty, 40-some percent are students.  The big surprise is that another 40-some percent are independent learners - folks just learning for their own edification.

With those folks in mind, they have crafted some new courses called MIT Scholar. These courses are more courses, rather than just a materials repository. They pull together work from several classes on the same topic. They structure the materials in more of a course structure, with units or modules, etc. They are supporting community through OpenStudy ( website that facilitates online study groups).

Independent learners and students alike are enjoying this new format. However, creating the courses take significantly more effort on MIT's part to create.  Creating one of these courses is the equivalent of 7 regular classes. They only have limited resources, so as they create scholar classes, the regular classes are less current. So, they are trying to determine how to move forward. They are also wondering how these scholar courses work with MITx, the MOOC effort.

MIT Scholar - 12 courses

Best practices in open and online teaching

This session was presented by some K-12 educators from Utah. They made some useful points about how to think about why using open resources is important.

They emphasized how essential it is to have a detailed curriculum map before looking for OER. In essence, you have to know where you are going if you successfully want to get there. I blogged about Course Maps in my Stephanie Plans a Class blog.

They recommended using Google advanced search and OER commons as good resources for OER.

Slides and recording of this presentationhttp://openedconference.org/2012/program/day-1/day1-11am-c680/