Higher Education | Distance-Educator.com

Archive for the ‘Higher Education’ Category

Video of Children as Anchors in an Online Forum for Elementary School Teachers: A Tool for Positioning Oneself as Knowledgeable About Physics

The authors investigated how prospective teachers enrolled in an undergraduate physical science course participated in an online forum in which they posted reactions to video episodes of children talking about science. Using Positioning Theory (Harré & Van Langenhove, 1991) as a lens, the authors analyzed 108 online posts from 26 prospective teachers as they completed […]

Using Online Error Analysis Items to Support Preservice Teachers’ Pedagogical Content Knowledge in Mathematics

This article describes how a free, web-based intelligent tutoring system, (ASSISTment), was used to create online error analysis items for preservice elementary and secondary mathematics teachers. The online error analysis items challenged preservice teachers to analyze, diagnose, and provide targeted instructional remediation intended to help mock students overcome common error patterns and misconceptions. A short […]

Teacher Candidates’ Perceptions of Technology Supported Literacy Practices

This study explores teacher education candidates’ perceptions of technologies used to support K-12 student literacy development. Candidates scored each technology based on their impressions of its ability to support student literacy development. They also evaluated their own level of expertise with each piece of technology using a pre-post survey. Technologies included broad-based applications (blogs, wikis, […]

Obama Plan to Tie Student Aid to College Ratings Draws Mixed Reviews

President Obama continues his three-campus “college cost” bus tour on Friday, promoting his plans to make college more affordable through a mix of carrots and sticks. The Chronicle of Higher Education Full Article

President Obama Explains His Plan to Combat Rising College Costs

Today [August 23, 2013], President Obama traveled to the University at Buffalo, the State University of New York to announce his plan to combat the soaring costs of higher education. The speech, the first stop on a two-day college affordability bus tour, is a part of his broader initiative to secure a better bargain for […]

Google Begins Selling Textbooks Through Play Store

With little fanfare, Google began offering electronic textbooks for rent or purchase on its Google Play store on Friday. Included will be books from some of the largest academic-text publishers, including Pearson, Macmillan Higher Education, and Wiley, among others. Wired Campus Full Article

Assessing Students’ Competency And Practical Learning Ability In A Distance Learning Environment

The National Open University of Nigeria (NOUN) operates an exclusively open and distance learning (ODL) mode of education whereby students study mostly by reading printed course materials. Practical activities including tasks, exercises, experiments and other activities that involve doing things practically are integrated in the course materials to support student learning. Because distance learners are […]

Teaching Writing in Online Distance Education: Supporting Student Success

An intervention is a counseling action an instructor may use to support a student who struggles to work productively in an online writing instruction (OWI) course. Interventions may increase retention and graduation rates at institutions as well as increase student and teacher satisfaction (Allen, Bourhis, Burrell, and Mabry, 2002; Archambault and Crippen, 2009; McCombs, Ufnar, […]

Adapting to the digital age: a narrative approach

The article adopts a narrative inquiry approach to foreground informal learning and exposes a collection of stories from tutors about how they adapted comfortably to the digital age. We were concerned that despite substantial evidence that bringing about changes in pedagogic practices can be difficult, there is a gap in convincing approaches to help in […]

THE podcast: David Willetts on Moocs

David Willetts, universities and science minister, talks at length about the potential for massive open online courses (Moocs) to change the way higher education is delivered. There then follows a question and answer session featuring UK university employees. The session is chaired by Anthony McClaran, chief executive of the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education, […]