Educational Solutions blog – Page 2 – Keeping up with the latest developments in learning, teaching, and technology

Does the world want our MOOCs?

Oh, burn! What a disappointment to think that “we” don’t have all the answers.

Inside Higher Ed reports that:
Online higher education is increasingly hailed as a chance for educators in the developed world to expand access and quality across the globe.

Yet it may not be quite so easy. Not only does much of the world not have broadband or speak English, but American-made educational material may be unfit for and unwanted in developing countries, according to academics who have worked for years on online distance education and with open educational resources, or OER.MOOCs may eye the world market, but does the world want them? | Inside Higher Ed.

Students Launch “Button” to Put Denied Access to Research on the Map | Open Access Button

One lament I have as a student and researcher is that my library often does not have full text access to a journal. Being the info geek that I am, I have access to various databases (my public library, the school I attend, and of course the databases here at Colorado College). As a last resort, I could even email my siblings at UC Davis to see if they can access the article. These students have created a button to help visualize the problem with access to academic journal articles.

Today, at an international meeting of student advocates for expanded access to academic research, two undergraduates from Great Britain announced the highly-anticipated launch of The Open Access Button – a browser-based tool to map the epidemic of denied access to academic research articles, and help users find the research they need.

via Students Launch “Button” to Put Denied Access to Research on the Map | Open Access Button.

Injury and Education: Speech Recognition

Computer-based speech recognition is getting better and can be essential in helping an injured student keep up with assignments.

An injury can make learning difficult, especially on the block plan. A concussion, if untreated, can permanently harm a student’s ability to think and react. Treatment usually involves complete boredom: limiting stimulus and light (no music, no reading, no watching things) for a long time. (Here’s an effective test for concussion) and here’s Kristi Erdahl’s study on concussion testing.
Other students are physically injured – imagine trying to type papers with a broken wrist or arm; imagine trying to participate in a geology field course with a broken leg.

One tool for getting around an inability to type is speech recognition software. Windows (Vista and later) and Android (later versions are better) come with speech recognition built-in and do a pretty good job. There’s also Siri for iOS and a free Nuance Dragon app.

Google Chrome also has voice recognition and there’s an app, Dictanote, which will even recognize multiple languages (Spanish, German, and several others!), which could be especially useful for students in upper-level language classes. Dictanote is available online and offline as a Chrome app. Continue reading “Injury and Education: Speech Recognition”

“The Shutdown”, Research, Spatial labs, and GIS at CC.

Sixteen days doesn’t sound all that long, but here at CC, September 30th was the start of Block Two as well as the start of the 2013 Government shutdown. How exactly does this impact education at a small liberal arts college…

In my world of GIS, spatial inquiry and analysis, information is king. The vast majority of the daily used spatial datasets are housed by the government, on the 30th all these online data warehouses went offline. This potentially could have put a halt to all B2 courses using GIS as a tool for investigation of classroom topics. B2: The GIS lab was supporting five courses as well as a large civic engagement project being done by a recent CC graduate, and a number senior thesis capstone projects and faculty collaborative research projects. Just a typical block in the GIS lab.

It wasn’t all doom and gloom as the GIS lab is well stock piled with data (72+ Terabytes). With some quick footwork and some late nights all courses and research continued with little downtime. This really helped illustrate how well equipped the GIS lab is for data.

The following are small highlight to illustrate some of the more popular heavily used data sets that we house on my GIS servers. We have a lot more which would take too long to list, so all you need to do is ask.

Demographic and Lifestyle data:

1. Esri 2012/2017 Updated Demographics – 2012 estimates and five-year projections for population, households, income, and housing; delivered in Census 2010 geographic boundaries

2. Esri 2012 Consumer Spending – Consumer spending patterns for a variety of goods and services, including apparel, food, financial services, household goods, and recreation; delivered in Census 2010 geographic boundaries

3. Esri 2012 Tapestry Data – Lifestyle data for US residential neighborhoods based on socioeconomic and demographic characteristcs; delivered in Census 2010 geographic boundaries.

4. 2010 Census Data – Complete population counts from Census 2010 combining the PL94-171 file and variables from Summary File 1 (SF1); delivered in Census 2010 geographic boundaries.

5. 2006/2010 American Community Survey – Population, school and work, households, and housing characteristics; delivered in Census 2010 geographic boundaries.

Digital Elevation Model Datasets:

1. We have compiled and mosaic’d complete DEMs for the following states at the 30 meter resolution – Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Michigan, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Ohio, Utah, and Wyoming.

2. We have complied and mosaic’d complete DEMs at the 10 meter resolution for almost the counties of Colorado, as well as a few in Wyoming and New Mexico.

3. We have compiled and mosaic’d complete DEMs at the 90 meter resolution for the entire US Rocky Mountain region including Mexico and the west coast of the continental US.

Hydrology Datasets:

1. We have complete detailed hydro line datasets for the US

2. We have detailed Hydraulic Units (polygons) for Colorado and the Rocky Mountain Region.

Aerial Imagery:

1. We have high resolution aerial photography for all counties in Colorado.

In other words the GIS lab at CC is ALWAYS open for collaborative research and classroom spatial inquiry.

Stop on down to Palmer 1 and check us out.

Thanks.

Matt – your friendly neighborhood GIS guy.

Mobile lecturing and class feedback – engaged teaching/learning

Perry J. Samson, professor — PERRY J. SAMSON (UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN-ANN ARBOR) Professor, Dept. Atmospheric, Oceanic & Space Sciences

EDUCAUSE is a gathering of educators who use technology. This yearly conference just happened last week (October 15-18, 2013) and several of the poster presenters put their materials online.

One presenter, Perry Samson of the University of Michigan, uses SpashTop and LectureTools to gather realtime feedback from his class as he’s walking around the room lecturing from his iPad.

Here’s a video of his presentation and here’s the EDUCAUSE page on the poster presentation. It sounds like these tools have helped him engage his students more and perhaps even engage himself more as a teacher, as he can more effectively teach his students.

Considerations in Instructional Design

A colleague shared this video a while back. I think it hints at the reasoning behind why instructional design is important.

I’ve been working on a degree in Instructional Design and while I don’t always think about how people could learn more effectively, I do occasionally think about how I would design an instruction (class, video, tutorial) differently.

WBT – Web-based training
SME – Subject matter expert

Further study is necessary to test the variables in adaptive learning

Arizona State has jumped on adaptive learning to try to combat increasing enrollment and lower funding. Scientific American reports:


Any accurate evaluation of adaptive-learning technology would have to isolate and account for all variables: increases or decreases in a class size; whether the classroom was “flipped” meaning homework was done in class and lectures were delivered via video on the students own time; whether the material was delivered via video, text or game; and so on. Arizona State says 78 percent of students taking the Knewton-ized developmental math course passed, up from 56 percent before. Yet it is always possible that more students are passing not because of technology but because of a change in policy: the university now lets students retake developmental math or stretch it over two semesters without paying tuition twice.
via How Big Data Is Taking Teachers Out of the Lecturing Business: Scientific American.

The article further states that teachers have been doing adaptive learning for years, but in my opinion, it’s never been a question of whether the teacher can do it, but if they do it. It’s really difficult, in a class of 30, to give every student what they need individually.

Signing a digital document – Print, Sign, Scan?

One of the things that gets me every time is when someone comes into the lab to print a document, sign it, and then scan it so they can email it back to someone. They then take the paper and throw it away, leave it or recycle it.

That does not have to happen any more. Previously, to get your signature on a digital document without printing, you had to have some expensive equipment or some technical skills. Now, you just need a few things:

Adobe Reader XI, Foxit Reader, or Mac OS X Preview (OS X 10.6 or greater)
A webcam or scanner

See the full article for details. Continue reading “Signing a digital document – Print, Sign, Scan?”

Free OpenSource Dyslexia Font | OpenDyslexic

One of the reasons it’s nice to have a live teacher in front of the class is the teacher’s ability to make adjustments for the students on the fly. While possible with computer-based instruction, it would be quite difficult to account for all potential problems, situations and characteristics of all likely learners.

One unique new to assist people with dyslexia is to use a free font called OpenDyslexic. This font is uniquely designed (and still being updated based on feedback) to be easier for a person with dyslexia to read. Check out an example here and download the Free OpenSource Dyslexia Font | OpenDyslexic.The example does more than just make use of the font. It also uses various types of shading to make it easier to focus on specific text.

Are We Guilty of EdTech Hype?

I know I like shiny things. If it’s new or has neat features, I like to look at it and see what it can do. I also like testing things out and comparing them, though, which is why I enjoyed doing literary analyses. What Kim suggested, in reaction to an article on academic technology activism, is that


1. He is on to something important here, as rigorous evaluation (using experimental methods) of educational technology investments in learning outcomes remain rare. (With the work of NCAT being one big exception, can you point to others?).

via Are We Guilty of EdTech Hype? | Inside Higher Ed.

Wouldn’t that be fun? Planning out experiments to see what kind of an impact technology actually has on a classroom? Does it speed up the grading process for the instructor? Does getting feedback to the student more quickly matter, if the feedback is not immediate? Does annotating slides and then sharing them with the students really improve performance? Interesting questions…