Journal of Distance Education Receives SSHRC Grant

The Journal of Distance Education has been awarded a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) to support publication for the next three years. The journal publishes research and scholarly articles on issues related to distance education, and e-learning and is supported by the Canadian Network for Innovation in Education (CNIE). It began publication in 1986 and has earned a reputation as one of the leading academic journals in the field of distance education. BCIT took over publication and editorship of the journal in 2006.

The grant of $58,448 will allow the journal to publish at least three issues per year and to finalize its migration to online-only delivery.

This also marks the first successful SSHRC grant application for BCIT.

Open Educational Technology Summit

I had the privilege of meeting with a group of about 25 "educational and technology experts" this week to brainstorm issues and trends in open education. This is open education that goes beyond the traditional notion (familiar to distance educators) of providing access to formal education without barriers and prerequisites. This is a learning 2.0 version of open education which aims to make "educational assets visible and accessible and by harnessing the collective wisdom of a community of practice and reflection"(Iioshi & Kumar, 2008, p. 2). It's about making the educational resources and knowledge in higher education open and freely available for use and repurposing and in the process improving the resources and practices and further developing the knowledge. This new open education is much bolder and potentially more transformative than the old open education but it faces significant challenges if it is really to take hold. It will require educational institutions and the people working in them to abandon the closed, proprietary culture and embrace openness and sharing.

The Open Educational Technology Summit brainstormed four themes:
1) The personalization of the learning process
2) Learning content development and delivery
3) Future technologies at the service of learning
4) Learning: everyone, everywhere and anytime

If you want to learn more about the open education movement, I highly recommend the recently released book, Opening Up Education which is available in an online open access version.

Iioshi, T., & Kumar, V. (2008). Opening Up Education: The Collective Advancement of Education through Open Technology, Open Content, and Open Knowledge. MIT Press.

Wikis in Practice at BCIT - Now available for download in BCIT's iTunes U!

How do you get geographically separated students taking a distance course to reflect, share, and build on their collective wisdom and experience? Well, there are lots of ways! Find out how wikis helped with this goal in two Specialty Nursing distance courses. Discover the the "what, why, and how" of wikis, see wikis in action, and find out how you can get started setting up a wiki for your own courses.

A podcast of the recent LTC Lunch 'n' Learn session "Wikis in Practice at BCIT" is now available from BCIT's iTunes U.

Facilitators: Jan Morrison, Pauline O'Reilly, and Kathy Siedlaczek

To access this pre-recorded Teaching with Technology Lunch 'n' Learn session:

1. Go to: www.bcit.ca/casting.
2. Choose BCIT User or Guest. You will be asked to sign in to BCIT's iTunes U campus using your MyBCIT A00 number and password.
3. Under BCIT Commons, click Personal and Professional Development.
4. Click LTC - Lunch and Learns.
5. Select Wikis in Practice at BCIT then click Get Movie.
   

You need iTunes on your computer. (Many of our lab computers have iTunes already installed.) If you do not have iTunes installed you can follow these directions to help prepare your computer to view this and future Faculty Development sessions.

If you have any questions about the Innovative Teaching events or have suggestions for future sessions, please contact Lisa O'Neill at Tel. (604) 454-2286 or via email at lisa_oneill@bcit.ca.

Developing rubrics for assessments

Working with an instructor to redevelop some of their assessments, I came across this neat tool for developing rubrics: http://rubistar.4teachers.org/index.php. It allows you to create or adapt rubrics that you then use in your courses for the purposes of grading or assessment. The rubrics are straightforward and prompt you to set out categories and levels of proficiency for making your assessments. You can search for boilerplate versions in several subject areas or you can create your own from scratch. As an instructor you could use these to create your own rubrics or guide students through their creation so that they can contribute to some of the assessment criteria.

Rubistar is part of the 4Teachers website (http://www.4teachers.org), which appears to be a branch of a group called ALTEC, Advanced Learning Technologies from the University of Kansas. The focus appears to be on the K-12 side but a tool like this one can be used for any level.

Dave

Educause Student and Information Technology Study - 2008

The ECAR Research Study on Students and Information Technology was published on Oct. 17, 2008.

This Educause study samples 90 four-year and 8 two-year HE institutions, and over 27,000 respondents. It also compares longitudinal data over three years.

The study provides a perspective on how IT is being used effectively (or not) within HE. It confirms how pervasive social networking has become in the lives of our students and increasingly in the lives of our instructors. Here is an interesting excerpt:

<<< ...Net Generation students, along with older students, report that they are not looking for extensive use of IT when it comes to their academic courses. They do not take lots of entirely online courses, and most indicate that even when course lecture materials are posted online, they still do not skip classes. Instead, we found a widespread attitude that IT resources--no matter how students think about them--are best situated in learning environments where technology is balanced with other learning activities, especially face-to-face interactions with faculty and students in the classroom. As one engineering major summed up, "I feel that IT is a wonderful tool when it is fully understood by both the course instructor and the students. Anything less than that and the tool suddenly becomes something that merely looks pretty, or, in the worst case, is a clunky monster." >>>

An executive summary and the full report can be found at:

http://connect.educause.edu/

Chris

Online teaching and learning conference

This past week, Kathy and I logged in to the Online Teaching and Learning conference sponsored by Jossey-Bass.

http://www.onlineteachingandlearning.com/program.html#

The sessions focused on the publisher's series on online teaching and learning, with many of their authors as the session presenters along with some special guests. There were two full days of presentations, each one lasting about an hour. The topics presented on include:

• collaborating in the online class
• online assessment
• motivating adult learners
• synchronous teaching and learning
• critical thinking for online environments
• digital libraries
• teaching and learning in virtual worlds
• online course design
  

The sessions and many of the books they are based on are very applied with lots of practical advice, guidelines, and samples. The sessions themselves were delivered in Adobe's Meeting Place and were highly interactive (a little too much so with up to 400 participants per session all chiming in at once).

The sessions are all recorded and as registrants we have access to them, so if you are interested in exploring any of the above topics, let me know and maybe we can set something up.

Opening Up Education

Opening Up Education: The Collective Advancement of Education through Open Technology, Open Content, and Open Knowledge explores open education from all angles, surveying the learningscape, and putting into action the ecological approach to education supported by John Seely Brown in his introduction to this collection of essays.

The book "argues that we must develop not only the technical capability but also the intellectual capacity for transforming tacit pedagogical knowledge into commonly usable and visible knowledge: by providing incentives for faculty to use (and contribute to) open education goods, and by looking beyond institutional boundaries to connect a variety of settings and open source entrepreneurs."

MIT Press has released open access versions and you can read them here