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The T in Teaching Centers
These centers at colleges have many different names - Teaching & Learning Center (TLC), Teaching Support Center (TSC), Center for Teaching Excellence (CTE) etc. - but "what's in a name" - or a...
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Flipping Learning and Making Spaces
I did a presentation titled "Flipping the Learning Model" for the annual conference of the Connecticut Education Network in May 2015. The flipped classroom has been a hot topic in education for a...
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Are You Ready To Teach Online?
When I started working with designing online courses in 2000, our focus on readiness for online learning was on students. Like other colleges at that time, we considered freshman "not ready" for the...
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The Return of the Autodidacts
"Autodidact" has its roots in the Ancient Greek words autós, or "self" and didaktikos, meaning "teaching." Dacticism defines an artistic philosophy of education and autodidacticism (also autodidactism)...
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Group Work and Holacracy
My wife told me recently that in her next life we wants to come back as the person in the group who does none of the work and gets the same grade as the people who did all the work. She was in a bad...
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Lessons Learned: MOOC Edition
Justin Reich on Education Weekly has been blogging about what the last two years of MOOC research seems to tell us about how to improve the design of courses. Here is my bulleted list version: 1. MOOC...
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Teaching Large To Massive Online Classes
The terms MOOC, Massive Open Online Course, and LOOC, Large Open Online Course, may be relatively new, but large online courses have been around since the earliest days of online education. The move...
View ArticleWhere Are the Learning Engineers?
Do we need learning engineers? Most people would answer that they didn't even know there was such a job. Currently, I don't think anyone does have that job (though I could imagine it being on someone's...
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Kindergarten Engineers
I was thinking about my earlier post about "learning engineers" after I came across a video storybook on pbslearningmedia.org called "David and Kayleen Design a Glider." Actually, the first thing I...
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Stemming the STEM Gap, But Softly
There has been more than $750 million in recent years from tech companies to try to help schools bridge the long-acknowledged STEM skills gap. Much of that money was earmarked for what we would term...
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Brain Scans and Lesson Plans
Bridging neuroscience and educational practice - brain scans and lesson plans - probably sounds like a good idea and a frightening one. I saw that Pearson asks two experts (one from higher education...
View ArticleIt's About Real AND Virtual Learning (emphasis on AND)
Virtual learning is not going away. It continues to grow in digital leaps. Of course, virtual learning has been around for a lot longer than digital and the Net. This 2008 video is titled “virtual...
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Backwards Design
I brought up the topic of "backward design" last fall in one of my classes at NJIT and the students had never heard the term. One of them, not surprisingly, took his phone and did a search on...
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How Transparent Is Your Teaching?
by Daniel Baránek CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia CommonsIt seems that I am most likely to hear the word "transparency" used these days in the context of politics, science, engineering and business. The...
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Gettin Some SOLE
Educational researcher Dr. Sugata Mitra’s Hole in the Wall experiments have shown that, in the absence of supervision or formal teaching, children can teach themselves and each other, if they’re...
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Is Online Teaching Student-Centered?
I'm looking over a review of an article from the Higher Education Research Institute at the UCLA that has comprehensive national data sets on the attitudes and working conditions of undergraduate...
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Competency and Mastery: Part 2 - How to Measure It
Yesterday, I was writing about about differentiating mastery and competency in the light of movements such as competency-based education and degree programs. The Mozilla Open Badge project and other...
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Making Learning Visible to Increase Student Engagement
On March 13, I will be presenting on "Making Learning Visible to Increase Student Engagement" at the NJEDge Faculty Showcase. This "Best Practices" presentation was inspired in part by the educational...
View ArticleA Liberal Arts Consortium for Online and On Campus Teaching
"The first four liberal arts colleges to join the massive open online course provider edX are forming a consortium to improve teaching both online and on campus. Administrators, faculty members and...
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What Makes a Digitally Competent Teacher?
Looking at this infographic on the "7 Characteristics of a Digitally Competent Teacher," I can imagine that most teacher would add to the list. 1 You can integrate digital skills into everyday life:...
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