Web Seminars Contributed by EDUCAUSE, ELI Web Seminars, and Teaching and Learning

In this web seminar, Malcolm Brown, will explore the concept of innovation and critical role that innovation plays in teaching and learning effectiveness.

More so than any other aspect of higher education, Brown says, learning continues to undergo rapid and far-reaching changes. This is due to a confluence of factors, such as the powerful emergence of the social web, mobile technologies that are more powerful and affordable, changes in the expectations of our students and younger faculty, and the impact of the insights of constructivist learning theory. These factors influence all of our learning designs, including learning practices, learning applications, and certainly learning spaces. In short, it seems to be a domain calling for almost constant innovation. The need to think creatively and to innovate will remain a fundamental part of our work to support higher education learning for some time to come.

In this session, we will look into the concept of innovation. Using some recent publications on this topic, we will explore what innovation is and is not. We‘ll explore what helps innovation and makes it constructive, and what hinders it and renders it ineffective. The goal of this session will be to gain some insight into our own practices and to come away with ideas as to how we can improve those practices.

Since the 1990s, we’ve been putting our Web courses in boxes, mastering enterprise course management systems, and striving for single sign-on seamless integration between all Web-enabled business and academic environments in each of our colleges and universities. Sometime around the turn of the century, however, explosive innovation on the open Web began to turn a “read only” environment into a “read/write” environment. With the development of RSS as a syndication platform, the read/write environment began to support and foster a very powerful, loosely coupled information architecture across the World Wide Web. In 2004, a group led by Tim O’Reilly gave this phenomenon a name: Web 2.0.

In this seminar, Campbell will explore the concepts behind Web 2.0, some of the individual tools and services (Flickr, Facebook, Second Life, del.icio.us) that are commonly listed under this rubric, and the implications of this phenomenon for teaching and learning, particularly in higher education. He will also present several ways in which he and his colleagues have used Web 2.0 tools and services, both as teachers and in their own learning, and comment on the good, the bad, and the ugly results. If time permits, he will also speak to the relationship between Web 2.0 and the open source software movement. Finally, he’ll offer some thoughts on what Web 3.0 might look like, and why educators should care.

In a short 10 years, the Internet may not have "changed everything" as was predicted, but it certainly has impacted approaches to learning and learning facilitation. In this talk, Rob Abel, educational researcher and CEO of the IMS Global Learning Consortium (IMS GLC), provides some insights on what we may have learned from the past 10 years and what it may mean for the next 10 years of learning technology and learning technology standards. Discussion topics will include IMS GLC's new focus on innovation, adoption, and, most important, learning impact. This talk will draw from the latest IMS GLC research in the satisfaction and use of learning technology in the U.S. higher education segment, indicating trends in digital content and learning platforms, and the most recent Learning Impact Awards.

Student Life is evolving exponentially and technology is driving the demands of the next generation of students. The prudent planning, financing, and operating of the Student Life facilities of the future will require accurate data, insight, and a peek into the crystal ball. The presenters will illustrate the impact of emerging trends on student lifestyle, media consumption, entertainment, personal communications, fitness, and computing needs found in the campus facilities that support Student Life.

The rise of the millenials has spawned new conversations about engagement and learning on today's college campuses. But what do these Net Gen learners really want? From the mouth of a confessed Net junkie, learn what makes these students tick, what ticks them off, and what faculty and administrators need to know to bridge the generational divide. Using anecdotes from her own life and the lives of her peers, Carie Windham will provide an overview of Net Gen characteristics and how those characteristics translate to the classroom, including the "Ten Commandments of Net Gen Teaching and Engagement."

The National Science Foundation is evolving an ambitious vision of cyberinfrastructure—the integration of computing, data, networks, digitally enabled sensors, observatories, and experimental facilities. As the nation begins to realize this vision, significant new capabilities are emerging for educational simulation, visualization, and real-time data collection. Through cyberinfrastructure, students could overcome time and distance barriers to conduct sophisticated activities, customize their learning, and participate in virtual communities. Instructors could use sophisticated methods of assessment based on real-time data collection about individual student performance. In this seminar, distinguished scholar and Harvard professor Chris Dede discusses the implications of these developments for practice and policy today.

EDUCAUSE Vice President Diana Oblinger will moderate this Web Seminar with Sawyer Hunley and Molly Schaller, in which they will discuss how to assess the effect of learning spaces on teaching and learning.

The impact of learning space on student learning and faculty approaches to facilitate learning has become a topic of interest over the past few years. Learning space is linked to learning through engagement, both theoretically and practically. How do we assess the relationship between learning space, engagement, and learning?

This Web Seminar offers a look at theoretical perspectives, a guide for developing an assessment plan, some specific examples of assessment instruments, and a brief discussion of results from the University of Dayton's assessment of learning spaces. Assessment is reviewed as a cyclical process which should inform our decisions about learning spaces on our campuses.

Virtual simulations, role-playing in games, discussion boards, and shared spaces are among the growing kinds of options educators are using to foster student learning. Aside from the efficiency of delivery and students' generally positive response to technology-based instruction, how can we learn about the efficacy of teaching and learning through technology?

This Web seminar offers principles of assessing technology-based student learning grounded in questions we ask about pedagogy, curricular design, instructional design, and other educational practices. It begins with a focus on assessment as a process of inquiry into the efficacy of your educational practices through the wide range of technology-based "texts" (for example, actions, decisions, dialogue, collaborative projects, visual representations) that students produce—direct evidence of how they construct meaning. Overall, a well-anchored approach to assessing student learning provides robust results that enable us to identify patterns of student strength and weakness through the various texts they produce. These patterns prompt us to examine and self-reflect on the efficacy of technology-based teaching and learning.

The population of adult learners—individuals who are over age 24 and have full-time jobs and family responsibilities—is large and growing. For example, one-third of California State University undergraduates are 25 or older, as are 55% of California's community college students. Nationally, adult learners comprise 45% of the college and university undergraduate population, and their numbers are expected to grow 20% by 2015. CAEL's Adult Learning Focused Institution (ALFI) Initiative focuses on helping adult learners overcome barriers and achieve the learning outcomes they want and need. Eight guiding principles that emerged from CAEL's ALFI benchmarking study will be discussed during the seminar, providing insights for how colleges and universities can ensure student success.