Citing in-house research that surveyed over 100,000 students in the United States, THE reported late last week (see article) that students in exclusively face to face courses and students in exclusively online courses tended to give higher marks to their programs than those students taking blended courses that combine face to face learning with online […]
student voice
SmartSite Goes Dumb: A student’s view of the UC Davis LMS outage
[ed. Cydney Jones is a junior at UC Davis, and she was kind enough to share information and insights during my coverage of the UC Davis LMS outage (their Sakai-based LMS is branded as SmartSite and hosted by Scriba). I asked her if she could write a post giving a student’s inside view of the situation. […]
Using TAs As Key Component Of Active Learning Transformation at UC Davis
Last week I described how UC Davis is making efforts to personalize one of the most impersonal of learning experiences – large lecture introductory science courses. It is telling that the first changes that they made were not to the lecture itself but to the associated discussion sections led by teaching assistants (TAs). It is […]
UC Davis: A look inside attempts to make large lecture classes active and personal
In my recent keynote for the Online Teaching Conference, the core argument was as follows: While there will be (significant) unbundling around the edges, the bigger potential impact [of ed innovation] is how existing colleges and universities allow technology-enabled change to enter the mainstream of the academic mission. Let’s look at one example. Back in […]
WCET14 Student Panel: What do students think of online education?
Yesterday at the WCET14 conference in Portland I had the opportunity along with Pat James to moderate a student panel. ((Pat is the executive director of the California Community College Online Education Initiative (OEI) – see her blog here for program updates.)) I have been trying to encourage conference organizers to include more opportunities to […]
Three Makes a Movement: Branson creates youth panel for student voice in ed tech
Based on my involvement in the Evolve conference sponsored by the 20 Million Minds Foundation, held in January, I wrote a series of posts covering the discussions around online education and educational technology. The three main posts: Evolve Conference Analysis: Move Past Status Quo and Focus on Student Success Evolve Analysis: Student Success in Online Requires […]