PennEduTech

Interactive Learning Online at Public Universities: Evidence from Randomized Trials

“… we measure the effect on learning outcomes of a prototypical interactive learning online (ILO) statistics course by randomly assigning students on six public university campuses to take the course in a hybrid format (with machine-guided instruction accompanied by one hour of face-to-face instruction each week) or a traditional format (as it is usually offered by their campus, typically with 3-4 hours of face-to-face instruction each week).”

Empowering Students and Instructors: Reflections on the Effectiveness of iPads for Teaching and Learning

Interesting article that I think others will like to read.

I came across the new Journal of Digital Humanities.  Dan Cohen is one of the editors, so that speaks well for the quality of the content.

http://journalofdigitalhumanities.org/

We’re happy to announce that the Campus Leaders Advisory Board (C-LAB, “see-lab”) is being reinvigorated here at Penn.  The C-LAB is a campus group promoted by the New Media Consortium (NMC), which is “an international community of experts in educational technology” (http://www.nmc.org/about/) that Penn belongs to as an organization, and several people here belong to as individuals.

So what is the C-LAB?  
The Campus Leaders Advisory Board is a group of people from across campus who have various roles in technology planning and support.  C-LABs exist at most of the colleges, universities and other institutions that belong to NMC.  We participate in a variety of NMC events including conferences and webinars where we share what’s going on at Penn and learn from others about what they’re doing.  By participating in a national organization like NMC, we stay on top of what’s new and exciting in educational technology, with input from others around the country and around the world.  One of the goals of Penn’s C-LAB is to translate what we learn into ideas that fit our own context, and to share those ideas with people in various roles all over campus.  

On our campus, Mark Aseltine of ISC is the NMC Campus Liaison, and the other C-LAB members are Chris Alexy (Nursing), David Brubaker (SEAS), Nate Cosgrove (Design), Liz Evans (ISC), John MacDermott (SAS), Marilyn Puchalski (ISC/MAGPI), Elizabeth Scheyder (SAS) and Anu Vedantham (Penn Libraries).  As we increase the activity of the C-LAB here at Penn, various members of the group will be sharing information and promoting ideas and activities.  We’ll be using this blog to share ideas, so please bookmark this page (or subscribe to the RSS feed) to see what’s new!

I recently participated in a 3-day workshop hosted by the Learning Spaces Collaboratory (LSC).  This group “…is an emerging community of practice making the case that spaces matter to learning.”  See http://www.pkallsc.org/ for more about the LSC and its ongoing work. I came away with much to think about, so I’m taking the time for a little reflection. Read more…

I recently created my first .epub file. This is a type of e-book file that can be read on Android devices, the Nook, Sony Reader, and portable Apple devices among others. The files are a little odd in the way they need to be formatted. Here are a few resources I found helpful when creating my first document.

http://calibre-ebook.com/
Calibre is a free and open source e-book library management application developed by users of e-books for users of e-books. This program allows you to convert between several different formats.

http://code.google.com/p/sigil/
Sigil is Google’s free multi-platform WYSIWYG ebook editor.

Adobe TV ebook creation using InDesign
This is a link to a series of three videos on Adobe TV about ebook creation using InDesign. These are what I primarily used to get started, and they helped a lot, although you need a little bit of an InDesign background to get started. You also need to be using InDesign CS4 or CS5 to export the .epub file.

Spring break offers the opportunity to spend a few minutes checking out interesting (and sometimes even useful!) new software.  Here are a few things that I’ve tried and liked:

• Evernote is a very popular utility for keeping track of notes, to-do lists, snippets from web pages, documents and just about anything.  It is available for Mac and Windows PCs, but its real advantage comes when used on a mobile device.  It’s free, easy to use and a real productivity booster.  Lots of people love it; I’m a little late in getting to the party, but I am not starting to use it on a daily basis.
• Sigil is a free, open source utility for creating documents in the ePub format for display on iPad, Kindle and other readers.  Available for Mac, Windows and Linux, easy to install; good documentation available.  Jutoh  is another inexpensive ($40) option for creating ePubs.
• Google Document Viewer is a free utility for presenting PDF documents in the format the Google uses for its online books.    It’s not really all that useful, but it’s dead simple to use and lets you claim the moral victory of having published something in an electronic book format.
• Sophia is a brand new system intended to help people easily share tutorials and other instructional materials in brief “packets.”  It’s an intriguing tool and I’ll be curious to see if it gets much traction.  Be sure to read the Terms of Use carefully before posting any content, or inviting your students to do so. When posting content to the site, you are effectively giving the site operators license to your material.  From their Terms of Use statement: “… we ask that you not send us any User Generated Content that you do not wish to license to us, including any confidential information or product ideas.”
• CMap Tools is  a free, intuitive tool designed to generate concept maps.  Concept maps are a good way to visualize complex relationships among a variety of factors.  It is available for Mac, Windows and Linux, and include collaboration features. The CMap site includes good information about the tool itself, and the theory of concept mapping in general.  After just a few minutes of playing around with CMap, I was able to generate this simple chart which I’m using to help me understand how to get better outcomes from technology initiatives (click the graphic below to expand to a bigger size).
  

I’m looking forward to Dan Cohen’s presentation next week here on his new book The Ivory Tower and the Open Web. It’s been almost a year since Peter Decherney first suggested bringing Dan to Penn. In that time, we have been in touch with several faculty on campus who are exploring the tools that Dan has helped to create such as Zotero and Omeka. I’ve also enjoyed the YouTube video of Dan’s presentation at the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) fall meeting.

Dan will speak in the Class of ’55 Conference Room on the second floor of the Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Center on Friday February 25 from 10:30 to 11:30 am. Then he will join some members of the Weigle Information Commons Faculty Advisory Group and Program Partners Group for an informal lunch.

This will also be the Weigle Information Commons’ first event to be simulcast via a web broadcast with a twitter back channel for questions. It will be interesting to see how that works out! We are asking folks watching online to use the hashtag #dancohen to send in questions during the live lecture. Go to this page to watch the live broadcast.

Editor’s note: This blog entry was written by Lisa Minetti, Curriculum Design and Assessment Specialist at the College of Liberal and Professional Studies.

Over the past year, the Program Development Group at the College of Liberal and Professional Studies (LPS) has developed and implemented the Penn LPS Commons, a custom-built online learning environment designed to center participants on the social interactions that drive learning communities. Built with Drupal and Moodle, the LPS Commons includes social networking, learning management and collaborative web 2.0 tools as well as robust permissions models which allow select elements of online learning communities to be shared with public audiences as institutional Open Educational Resources (OERs). In our beta year, we’ve delivered 27 blended and fully online courses to over 1400 participants from 65 counties. Whew!

As we emerge from our first year of work, we’d like to invite the campus community to come and hear us talk about our efforts both designing this new online environment and optimizing flexible instructional designs which allow student-generated conversations to drive the online course experience.

Please join us as we co-host the March meeting of the Pennsylvania Distance Learning Association (PADLA) on March 16, from 8:30-11:45 am in the Bodek Lounge at Houston Hall. Complete details about the event can be found on PADLA website. Members of the Penn community can attend this event for free, but others are asked to register in advance.

Hope to meet you there!

Editor’s note: This blog entry was written by Lisa Minetti, Curriculum Design and Assessment Specialist at the College of Liberal and Professional Studies.

Consider this blog post an advertisement of sorts for a great resource I think anyone interested in educational technology should be reading whenever they get the chance!

Educause Learning Initiative: 7 Things You Should Know About

The “7 Things You Should Know About…” series provides concise information on emerging learning technologies. Each brief focuses on a single technology and describes what it is, where it is going, and why it matters to teaching and learning. Use these briefs for a no-jargon, quick overview of a topic and share them with time-pressed colleagues.

This month’s brief examines backchannel communications, which I mentioned in my recent post on designing interactivity into live web conferences on the Adobe Connect Professional tool. While our online faculty harness the power of the backchannel to foster participation and drive lecture content, I wonder whether others here at Penn are experimenting with using backchannel tools in their face-to-face teaching.

Anyone out there using chat, IM, Twitter, or Google Wave for group participation in their face-to-face classes? If so, would you consider sharing your activity with us here?

If not, what do you think are the potential pros and cons of enabling backchannel conversations to become a part of the student experience in face-to-face classes at Penn?