YouTube recently released a new section of their website that brings together all of the content that’s been posted to YouTube from various universities. The address is simple: http://www.youtube.com/edu

Duke has had several YouTube channels for some time. This recent development doesn’t change the official YouTube channels – it just brings them all together in a more readily available way. For more information on adding content to the Duke YouTube channel, see OIT’s information page.

Not unlike iTunesU and YouTubeEDU, Academic Earth is attempting to provide freely available educational resources via online video. So far, they only have a handful of universities involved (Harvard, Stanford, etc), but seem to be growing. (more…)

While faculty have a myriad of technology based tools that can be applied to teaching and use many of these tools everyday, it can be difficult to think about how pedagogy may be changing in response to those tools or changes in academia.

The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Wired Campus Blog recently featured a post about the Handbook of Emerging Technologies for Learning, an attempt by the Learning Technologies Centre at the University of Manitoba to spark debate and discussion about technology and pedagogy.

The staff at the Centre sees a new pedagogical model emerging, with students developing new ways of approaching problems with the vast array of information available on the Web and the new opportunities for distilling and collating data with technology tools.

The Guide itself is a model of this new way of collaborating and learning – the Handbook is set up as a wiki so that faculty can add their own changes and engage in dialogue at the site.

You can view the Handbook of Emerging Technologies for Learning at:
http://ltc.umanitoba.ca/wikis/etl/index.php/Handbook_of_Emerging_Technologies_for_Learning

Duke faculty and instructors in the University Writing Program and Romance Languages talk about how they use Blackboard for their teaching in short videos. Here are some examples:

• Cary Moskovitz discusses how he uses Blackboard’s Wiki feature for collaborative writing assignments
• Vicki Russell explains how she uses the discussion board and Wimba’s voice recording tools
• Robert Kilpatrick explains how he uses Blackboard to create exciting exercises for his French students.
• Christine Beaule talks about how she uses Blackboard’s content sections to organize her course material

See all 7 videos

To explore and discover Blackboard features, see the Blackboard support website. If you would like more extensive help for Blackboard, request an office visit and we will come to you.

If you are looking to study a foreign language on your own, or are a student enrolled in a language class looking for materials to supplement your coursework, here are some online resources you may find helpful:

• iTunes U and iTunes Podcasts – You can enhance your study of French or Spanish, or try learning a language that isn’t offered at Duke. A search of “learn language” in iTunes turns up hundreds of podcasts, including “One Minute Irish” and “Learn Tagolog Easy”. There are podcasts for Azeri, Kazakh, Uyghur, Tajiki, Yiddish – you name it and there is probably a podcast that will teach you how to speak it.
• Google Language Tools – At http://translate.google.com/, you can enter text from any one of 41 languages (as of this writing) and have it translated into any of the others. You can also have it translate an entire webpage. Want to read this in Lithuanian?
• News from Other Countries – An excellent starting point is http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/languages/, with 34 regional sites. Read and listen to news in Kirundi or Tamil.
• Video – Sites such as YouTube offer endless choices of foreign language clips. Watch Sesame Street in Dutch or Portuguese.

These are just a few of the many free, online resources for language self-study.

Join us on Friday, April 24th 2009  to meet colleagues and share stories at the Center for Instructional Technology showcase.

Talk with Julie Reynolds about using video to teach writing, Julie Perco about teaching with Second Life, Len White or Lucy Haagen about mobile devices, Victoria Szabo or Alex Glass or Peter Haff about using mapping in your course and student Jennifer Kim about effective blog assignments.

Talk with people who have been teaching in the Link (Liliana Paredes, Laura Florand, Sandra Valnes Quammen, Hugh Crumley, Susan Wynn and Deb Reisinger) and find out how to use the flexible spaces.

Learn how your colleagues have used VoiceThread or iTunesU (or find out what these are).  And more!

Register now to reserve your space.

NIH is soliciting applications for Challenge Grants in Health and Science Research to support research in several areas, including  Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics Education (STEM).   Specifically, funds are targeted for research on:

Efficacy of educational approaches toward promoting STEM competencies. Research on efficacy testing of educational pedagogy, tools, and curricula (both classroom and non-classroom approaches) that are targeted at improving student understanding of science, technology, engineering, and math.

Read the announcement. Projects are for two years, and the maximum requested budget is $500,000 total costs per year.

Contact: Dr. Bruce Fuchs, 301-402-5225, fuchsb@mail.nih.gov

Application Due Date(s): April 27, 2009

Earliest Anticipated Start Date(s): September 30, 2009

Thanks to David Needham for telling me about this!

At Educause Learning Initiative Conference 2009, John Fritz, University of Maryland, Baltimore County presented “Managing Online Discussions with a Participation Portfolio”.

As an instructor using online discussions, how do you avoid initiating every thread or simply counting all replies (including “I agree” posts)? Or, if you are trying to grade quality of posts, it can be tedious to find the posts, and grading may be subjective and difficult to justify. One way to streamline grading is to create rubrics for discussion posts  (see description in previous post). John Fritz takes this one step further: he uses a rubric, and requires students to submit an online “participation portfolio” of their best work, with student’s own rating of their work. He’s found that students take responsibility for discussions and reduce the assessment burden.

Steps for online discussion grading:

1. The instructor defines a grading rubric for good posts and replies (this is the hardest step for instructors, see previous post for help).
2. Instructor posts this rubric in an assignment in Blackboard for the students, and provides a template for a student portfolio (for the students to download and complete).  (See the blue arrows in the picture)
3. Students propose a grade they feel they deserve, based on 3 to 5 examples of their discussion posts and replies. The student examples must be taken from separate weeks to avoid end of semester “dog pile”. Students copy and paste examples into a portfolio and submit this portfolio electronically (using an “assignment” in Blackboard).  The portfolio template is below.  Students fill in the gray boxes, some of which are drop-down choices, based on the rubric.
4. Instructor can accept, raise or lower the student grade based on the student examples and the rubric.

In Fritz’s experience, most students grade their participation harder than he does. He does participate in the online discussions, to model participation. He responds to student posts, and because his rubric counts student responses to posts, his responses can be included in the student portfolio. He does not read every post, and does not have to grade every post. From following the discussions, he already has a sense of how the students are doing before they hand in their portfolios, so he can scan the grades students have assigned. He finds that the biggest problem is that students don’t take the discussion seriously the first time, so he repeats this assignment three times during the semester. Each discussion is for a fixed duration. Because students must leave time for replies to their posts (replies count in the rubric), students become more proactive and do not put off the assignment. It’s also easier for him to mange one discussion at a time, than several discussions concurrently.

Another faculty member uses online discussion to engage students in reading primary literature. He assigns students to read a paper, then post a question about the paper in the discussion board, and elicit responses as well as respond to other student questions. This assignment engages students in literature outside of class, and provides forum for discussion.

Resources

• See this presentation, watch faculty testimonials, and get the rubric and portfolio template here
• See part 1 of this post for more about rubrics for discussions

In a previous post on the CIT blog, we looked at the “micro blogging” and social networking tool, Twitter.  The service has become quite popular as a way to keep friends and colleagues updated on links to news, short tips about the local community, and even just what someone may be thinking about or researching at a particular time.

Academhack, a blog by David Perry, has a new post that lists some quick ideas on using Twitter in an academic setting to keep up with the work of colleagues and to discover how students in your courses are going about their research or problems areas they’re running into as they progress to your course.

Perry’s post is titled “Who I Follow in Twitter“.  You can also see his current Twitter feed and read who he’s following.

At Educause Learning Initiative Conference 2009,  I attended a session on “Using Discussion Rubrics to Encourage Student Participation and Learning” presented by Barbara Austin and Suzanne Pieper of Northern Arizona University.

How can we encourage students to participate in online discussions and ensure that the discussion contributes to learning? Successful, collaborative online discussions are directly linked to assessment; in other words, to encourage good online discussions, grade them (Swan, Shen and Hiltz, 2006).  How? Use rubrics. The idea is simple: the rubric explains to students what is expected, and then is used to grade the students according to these expectations.  Give the rubric to the students with the assignment, so they can meet your objectives.

What is a rubric? A rubric lays out the specific expectations for an assignment, and creates guidelines for assessing that assignment.  There are several types of rubrics:  checklists, rating scales, and the most useful, descriptive rubrics.   Pictured is an example of a descriptive rubric that can be used for a discussion, courtesy of Dr. Austin.

Steps to create a descriptive rubric for an assignment:

1. Explicitly state your goals  (stating your goals may be the hard part, use models to help)
2. Look for models  (see the resources, below, and ask colleagues if they have rubrics)
3. List the goals in the first column of the rubric
4. List the “things you are looking for” or criteria for each of the goals.  For example, if one of your goals is “make connections between the reading and the class project”, a good criteria might be “applies at least 2 specific ideas from the reading to the course project” and a not so good criteria might be “does not mention the course project” (see the example)
5. Create the rating scale for each of  the performance levels (number of points for each of the levels)
6. Test the rubric  (share with a colleague to try it out on a discussion board to determine ease of use or missing goals)

Rubrics can be used for any assignment, not just online discussions.  Rubrics make grading fair, equitable, and defensible, and save instructors time.  I’ve used rubrics to grade student presentations; it’s relatively quick to circle the boxes in the rubric that applies to each student presentation, and the students got immediate, specific feedback.  In addition, because the rubric stated the expectations, the students created presentations that met these expectations; they were great.

Resources

(many rubrics available have been created for grade school assignments, but can be adapted for other students)

• Resources and links to rubrics from North Carolina State University
• Rubistar guides you through creating a rubric, which can be easily downloaded and modified.  Also has sample rubrics.
• iRubric is a free online rubric building tool, with many models to chose from
• Checklist rubrics for project based learning
• University of Wisconsin-Stout has a collection of rubric models and resources
• Duke instructors can contact the CIT for help with creating rubrics or other ideas for online discussions (or anything else related to teaching with technology)

Thanks to Barbara Austin and Suzanne Pieper of Northern Arizona University for great information and sharing their experiences in the session, and for sharing their materials with me after the session.

Explore scholarly images sources and the concept of visual literacy with Art Librarian Lee Sorensen. Learn useful tips for projecting images in the classroom, creating personal visual collections and helping students use images in their research and writing. Open to all Duke faculty, graduate teaching assistants, and librarians.

Register now.

Tuesday, 17 March, 2-3pm, Bostock Library room 023