EDUCAUSE | Contributed by Organizations or Campuses; Articles, Papers, and Reports; and Online Teaching Strategies

Envisioning the Educational Possibilities of User-Created Virtual Worlds

elilly — Tue, 06 May 2008 12:03:10 -0500

Educational games and simulations can engage students in higher-level cognitive thinking, such as interpreting, analyzing, discovering, evaluating, acting, and problem solving. Recent technical advances in multiplayer, user-created virtual worlds have significantly expanded the capabilities of user interaction and development within these simulated worlds. This ability to develop and interact with your own simulated world offers many new and exciting educational possibilities. This article explores the technical capabilities and educational potential of these new worlds. Additionally, it presents and illustrates a model, which uses interaction combinations, to identify course content and topics having educational applications in virtual worlds.

Sizing Up Second Life

elilly — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 12:14:17 -0600

Higher ed learns how to live in a virtual world.

Ways to prevent cheating on online exams

ckeller — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 17:05:31 -0600

The author provides guidelines and tips to for instructors reduce cheating when they use objective exams in online courses.

Online Training for Online Faculty

ckeller — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 14:53:46 -0500

A checklist of the best strategies for designing and delivering online courses to train online faculty.

Strategies to Engage Online Students and Reduce Attrition Rates

ckeller — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 15:06:19 -0500

Attrition continues to be a major issue in higher education. Attrition rates for classes taught through distance education are 10 - 20% higher than classes taught in a face-to-face setting. Educators should engage students early and often, using different learning strategies customized to the class content and the students' pre-existing knowledge. The goal for the professor is to develop relationships with the students such that they feel comfortable in the environment. The professor should facilitate learner-learner integration and collaboration so that they will learn from one another and expand their knowledge base together. Through an integrative literature review, this article presents key concepts in online learning and a review of different methods of engaging students with the goals of enhancing the learning process and reducing attrition rates.

Using technology in teaching and learning: Resources to help you navigate a digital world

ckeller — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 11:38:30 -0500

The author provides a long and comprehensive list of resources concerning teaching and learning with technology.

Five Questions...For Tom Carey

ckeller — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 15:51:36 -0500

Instructors in higher education get e-learning support from two distinct sources: their own institutions, through colleagues and faculty teaching centers, and their disciplines, through subject area experts and scholarly associations. Tom Carey, professor of management sciences at the University of Waterloo and chief learning officer of MERLOT, explains how the MERLOT consortium is finding the sweet spot where those two processes come together.

Mobile Learning

ckeller — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 16:44:43 -0500

This entire issue of The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, Vol 8, No 2 (2007), is focused on mobile learning. This special issue addresses some of the issues and challenges of mobile learning, and provides suggestions and recommendations for mobile learning and for research on mobile learning.

How Many Students Are Just Right in a Web Course?

drupal — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 11:46:31 -0500

" The Web is still a relatively new environment for teaching and learning at a distance. Faculty are still learning from their experiences with various faculty—student ratios, and not unlike Goldilocks, finding out how many students are too many, too few, or just right."

Qualitative Assignments to Enhance Online Learning

drupal — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 15:26:32 -0500

Rapid advances in online education bring new focus to online teaching and learning strategies. As faculty seek best practices to design online learning experiences, familiar tools can be applied in new ways. Qualitative tools such as interview and observation provide a beginning toolkit for developing authentic and meaningful applied assignments. A student-focused online learning community evolves as students share experiences and build meaning from the assignments and discussion. Strategies, benefits, and sample online learning assignments using qualitative tools are shared.