Blended Learning

There are, as a quick search of this blog will show you, any number of websites available which aggregate OERs and educational course materials. However, as we often find with the internet, just because something is available doesn’t mean that it’s useful, and it can be difficult to sift through the sheer volume of available information to find what’s really useful for you. For college-level instructors navigating the world of OERs, some of the obvious concerns include finding sites with thorough and extensive libraries, finding resources at college level (not just K-12), making sure that resources are reviewed. To get a sense of what’s available and where to find it, we will write a series of posts combing through four different OER repositories – OER Commons, Khan Academy, Connexions, and FREE – looking for three very different sets of material and evaluate the results as well as ease of use.

The wealth of available educational resources can be overwhelming and difficult to navigate. Sites which currate these resources all have some built-in mechanism for sorting -- by subject matter, level of difficulty, source, etc. However, these pre-packaged collections are no replacement for currating your own prefered resources and materials into sets that correspond to your interests and courses. This series of posts will provide tutorials on how to create your own collections from sites which offer currated resource lists. This post will focus on MERLOT.

Once the great menace of the classroom, cellphones and other mobile devices are gaining functionality as an educational tool, both in and out of the classroom. Though many educators may be skeptical about introducing or encouraging the use of these devices, creators of OERs and other educational materials are increasingly working to harness their potential for interesting and diverse uses. While there isn't necessarily cohesion to the pool of uses, the diversity is part of the appeal. It's worth experimenting with the different possibilities to see if and where they can be useful to you.

Resources covered:
Top Hat
Twitter
Flowboard

Thinking Context is a recent post by John Warner on his Inside Higher Ed blog, "Just Visiting," where Warner considers and discusses the implications of the language educators use. Regardless of whether or not the particular terms he discusses - peer review vs. peer response, workshop vs. laboratory, research paper vs. researched essay, etc - are relevant to your field and your classroom, he raises important points about the necessity of deliberate language in the classroom. These standardized education terms, as he points out, are often communicating more than we intend, and can set an unintended tone for assignments and activities.

While Warner's article is focused on the traditional classroom, his argument has interesting implications for the world of blended education, where the terminology is less established, less conventional, and more flexible. As we are beginning to arrive at mutually agreed upon and communally understood language, it's important to think through the implications of the terminology which is gaining traction.

If you would like to create your own interactive materials, Moodle offers several advantages. In addition to being relatively easy to use, even without coding ability, Moodle's extensive wiki "MoodleDocs" is full of instructions, explanations, and best practice suggestions.

Related resources:
Creating Quizzes on Moodle
Creating Flashcards on Moodle
Moodle Scheduler

I was struck by two themes running through the conference presentations this year:

First, the importance of "closing the loop," or bringing the online components of a blended course back into the classroom in some way. Kristine Rabberman, for example, talked about the importance of opening class discussions with insightful observations, questions, or debates from her course's online discussion boards and blogs, as part of her strategy for fostering a deeper, sustained intellectual conversation online and in the classroom. This resonated with feedback we received on student surveys of courses that were part of the NGLC blended learning study project. Rightly or wrongly, students perceived online work that was not recognized in some way as being unimportant or ancillary to the course. Making these activities "low-stakes" (i.e., giving some points or credit for completing them) rather than "no-stakes" was one common mechanism faculty used to signal that online materials were important, but student survey responses and experiences faculty shared suggest that discussing students' online work in class as Kristine did or explicitly communicating how you are using student's online work to diagnose and address problems -- for example, by going over a problem you noticed students were having trouble with in online homework, might be as, if not more, effective. 

The Sloan Consortium is offering a Blended Learning Mastery Series designed to help faculty develop effective blended courses. The series consists of three workshops spaced about a month apart to allow time for personal reflection and incorporation: research and design, teaching techniques, and assessment techniques. The next series runs from August 16, 2013 - October 25, 2013, and costs $599, which includes a certificate upon successful completion. For more information, Sloan-C is hosting a free webinar on July 18.

Educational clearinghouses with massive databases of resources provide access to different types of OERs covering multiple subjects and using multiple. This Blended Learning group is created to currate resources which we consider particularly useful for approaching specific problems, but there are thousands of other resources available. This post will direct instructors and students to two of the more comprehensive sites.

Resources covered:
OER Commons
Open.Michigan

OER Commons tracks down and currates resources which they consider to be the best OERs available. They currently have over 44,000 available. Their resources include labs and activities, video lectures, and readings. OER COmmons also features a section called "Teaching and Learning Strategies" which help instructors new to OERs how to find the right resources and implement them. In addition to some of the more complicated browsing structures, those looking for something in particular can search by subject areas, grade levels, and material types.