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Archive for the ‘Instructional Design’ Category

EDTECH: Artificial Intelligence And Big Data Are Transforming Online Learning

The robots are coming for education — tech will help instructors enhance the learning experience Artificial intelligence (or AI) has permeated most facets of our lives. Algorithms suggest our social media mates. Software trades our stocks. Soon, computers may even whizz us about town, autonomously. Online Leraning Consortium

The nature of collaboration and perceived learning in wiki-based collaborative writing

Wiki-based collaborative writing has been widely adopted in education to facilitate collaborative learning. However, research shows that students adopt different collaboration patterns during wiki-based collaborative writing, and that collaboration patterns may vary in how they enhance learning. It is thus critical to understand the relationship between the nature of collaboration and learning. This study examined […]

Summer School Helps Students Build Tech Tools To Improve Learning

Ashish Aggarwal wants to help students taking online classes by creating a digital teaching assistant to answer questions. To help turn his idea into reality, Aggarwal needed to learn about data and software. So, he enrolled in Carnegie Mellon University’s Simon Initiative LearnLab Summer School, which teaches participants about the leading tools that merge education, […]

Online professional learning for rural teachers of mathematics and science

Professional learning is crucial for the ongoing development of teachers and the improvement of student outcomes. Professional learning in mathematics and science education has the potential to address concerns about shortages in these areas and their impact on economic growth. However, attendance at face-to-face professional learning is problematic for many teachers located in rural areas. […]

The Online Learner: Characteristics and Pedagogical Implications

Globalization has stretched the scope of the online learner population from a homogeneous profile of mostly adult, mostly employed, place-bound, goal-oriented, and intrinsically motivated to one that is heterogeneous, younger, dynamic, and responsive to rapid technological innovations. This paper describes the emerging characteristics of the online learner and ensuing pedagogical implications and suggests that exploratory […]

Enhancing Student-Student Online Interaction: Exploring the Study Buddy Peer Review Activity

The study buddy is a learning strategy employed in a graduate distance course to promote informal peer reviewing of assignments before submission. This strategy promotes student-student interaction and helps break the social isolation of distance learning. Given the concern by Arum and Roksa (2011) that student-student interaction may be distracting from instead of contributing to […]

The Quest for Great Instructional Designers

Although instructional designers are, in many ways, the linchpin of higher education’s digital transformation, they are hard to find, writes Paxton Riter. Inside Higher Ed

Blurring Boundaries in Education: Context and Impact of MOOCs

The opinions on MOOCs go to extremes, covering a wide variety of topics, affecting economy, pedagogy, and computer science which makes it hard to keep oversight. Despite the many excellent research reports and articles, an overview of the bigger picture, providing a holistic qualitative summary of the different opinions, is still very welcome. Special attention […]

Does Formal Credit Work for MOOC-Like Learning Environments?

Although a number of claims have been made describing massive open online courses (MOOCs) as a disruptive innovation in education, these claims have not yet been proven through research. Instead, MOOCs should perhaps be considered as an integrative model for higher education systems, but to do so will require recognition of credentials. Initial experiments of […]

Effects of Web-Based Collaborative Writing on Individual L2 Writing Development

This study investigated the effect of repeated in-class web-based collaborative writing tasks on second language writers’ (L2) individual writing scores. A pre-test post-test research model was used in addition to participant surveys, class observations, and teacher interviews. Participants included 59 L2 writers in a writing class at a large U.S. university. The 32 participants in […]