Whew! It’s been a while since we posted. I figured if we were going to post something, it should probably be awesome! So, here is a Q&A session with Gagan Biyani from Udemy.com, a fairly new and, in my opinion, totally fabulous tool for education.

Haven’t heard of Udemy yet? Let me introduce you. To put it in simple terms, Udemy is a place for learning for people who love to teach and who love to learn! It’s online and anyone can use it. For more detail, let’s turn to what Udemy has to say about itself:

“Udemy’s goal is to enable anyone to teach and learn online. In less than 5 minutes, you can create your own online course on Udemy. You can upload presentations, videos, host live classroom sessions and write blog posts. It’s fast, easy and free.

By making it easy to teach online, Udemy also brings together the best teachers on the internet in an effort to educate the world. That means if you want to learn Multivariable Calculus, you can. If you want to learn Photoshop, you can. If you want to learn more about the metaphor for good and evil as presented by the dark and light colors in Star Wars, you can on Udemy.”

Wanting to learn more, I contacted Gagan who was kind enough to answer a few questions for me. Check them out below and I hope you’ll enjoy!

…continue reading

I stumbled across this awesome article on twitter tips for academics and it was just too good not to share.

As the author states, the tips in the article “will help you know just how to get started using Twitter in academia, teach you etiquette, offer strategies and benefits, provide suggestions for specific ways to use Twitter, list tools to use with Twitter, and more.” It includes sections on getting started with Twitter, Twitter Etiquette, Strategies, Ideas for Instructors, Benefits for Students, Tips for the Class, Twitter Tools, and Assignments Using Twitter. There is even a great list of resources to help you get started with finding people to follow.

Check out the full article here!

Spring has sprung! To celebrate the freshness that comes along with spring and the new green that replaces the bare trees and frozen lawns, we’re going to give some tips on having a “green” classroom at the post-secondary education level.

Going green is something a lot of people are doing these days in their personal and professional lives. As a professor, what are you doing to be more eco-friendly or environmentally conscious? Here are some ideas to help you leave a smaller footprint while you’re making your mark as an educator.

Go Digital. Instead of passing out papers every class period, post course materials on your content management site and allow students to print what they feel necessary or bring their computers to class to take notes. Not only will this help keep everyone organized, it will reduce the amount of paper used overall by you and your students.

Let your students stay home. If you plan on lecturing for 15 minutes or don’t have any real content to share with your students on lecture day, don’t make them come to campus. Instead of making your students drive to campus only to be there for a total of twenty minutes, try recording your would-be lecture and posting it online. Let your students know they need to listen to it before they come to class next time.

Reuse textbooks. It takes a lot of energy to create new things like books. Save the trees, the planet, electricity, and your students’ pocketbooks and use the same text book(s) in your classroom so the books can be used over again. If you’re feeling really generous, don’t even use a textbook at all! Use an ebook that is much cheaper and didn’t take a factory to produce.

According to Green Press Initiative, every year around 30 million trees are used to make books that are sold in the US (which is 1,153 times the number of trees in New York City’s Central Park)! The same source states that the book and newspaper industry emit nearly 125 million tons of CO2 annually, which is equivalent to over 7.2 million cars. On top of that, the industry has contributed to endangering forests and impacting the climate and communities around the world.

Pick green publishers. When you have to use new books, go with a publisher that has pledged to be green. Many publishers are doing what they can to make more environmentally conscious decisions about their book production. If you have the ability, pick a book made by a company that is doing whatever they can to shrink their footprint on the planet.

Have your lecture outside. It might sound a bit silly, but why not enjoy some beautiful weather? If you have a smaller class, take everyone outside and find a good spot to sit and have class. Why sit in a dim room when you can soak up some sun and save some energy?

Encourage recycling. Many campuses have their own recycling programs. Be sure to take part in yours by placing recycle bins (most likely for paper and plastic bottles) in a visible spot in your classroom and making sure students are aware of them. Then, make yourself use them! If your campus doesn’t have a program and it’s something you’d like to see, take the initiative and start one yourself. There are tons of great resources out there to help you get started. Check out this great article on how to start up a recycling program on a college campus: Green Campus: College and University Waste Reduction.

Use SAGrader! Okay, so maybe we’re a little biased, but SAGrader really is a green tool. Think of it this way: instead of making your students print out draft after draft for their essays and papers, which you will use pen after pen to grade, have them submit their papers electronically, receive personalized feedback instantly they can use to revise their work. Then you can view their work and progress all without printing a single paper or wasting your favorite pen!

What ways are you keeping your college classroom and campus green?

Here at SAGrader, we’re all about giving students the best feedback possible based on their submissions. We are able to assess knowledge through the content provided by students, which requires a program that does more than pick up on key words and phrases.

And while we still believe in all of this, we wanted to make SAGrader even more robust by adding metrics. The first three metrics in the lineup are Spellcheck, Grammar, and Fluff. Let’s take a look at what these mean.

Spellcheck – This one is pretty obvious. SAGrader will pick up on spelling errors made my students and list out each of the misspelled words. Students have the ability to go back in their submissions, correct their mistakes, and resubmit.

Grammar – Though they may want to, students doesn’t always use proper grammar. SAGrader can nudge them in the right direction by pointing out grammatical errors and areas that need more work. Again, SAGrader will use examples from student submissions to show them where and how they messed up, along with suggestions for improvement.

Fluff – Every once in a while, students will add some “fluff” to their writing to either add length or make it seem like they know what they’re talking about when they don’t. Fluff is essentially anything in a submission that doesn’t add value to the response – things like wordy phrases and unnecessary sentences or paragraphs.

Below, take a look at some example feedback for the new SAGrader metrics.

We stumbled across this [old but] great article about assessing student learning. Since we value student assessment a great deal (after all, that’s what SAGrader is all about!), we wanted to summarize the nine main points from the article and direct you to the full version, should you wish to read it.

Check out the summary below or click here to visit the source and to read the original article.

1. The assessment of student learning begins with educational value. Assessment is a vehicle for educational improvement. Educational values should drive not only what educators chose to assess but how they do it.

2. Assessment is most effective when it reflects an understanding of learning as multidimensional, integrated, and revealed in performance over time. Learning is a complex process that entails knowledge, abilities, values, attitudes, and habit of the mind – each something that affects both academic success and performance beyond the classroom. Assessment should take each of these things into consideration by employing diverse methods.

3. Assessment works best when the programs it seeks to improve have clear, explicitly stated purposes. Assessment is a goal oriented process and entails comparing educational performance with educational purposes and expectations.

4. Assessment requires attention to outcomes but also and equally to the experiences that lead to those outcomes. Looking at where students “end up” is only part of the puzzle. To improve outcomes, educators must look at what students experienced along the way.

5. Assessment works best when it is ongoing not episodic. Although one-time assessment instances can be better than none, assessment is most powerful when it entails a linked series of activities over time.

6. Assessment fosters wider improvement when representatives from across the educational community are involved. Student learning is a campus-wide responsibility, and assessment is a good way of enacting that responsibility. While any assessment effort may start small, the aim should be to involve people from across the educational community over time.

7. Assessment makes a difference when it begins with issues of use and illuminates questions that people really care about. To be the most useful, assessment must be connected to issues or questions that people really care about. The point of assessment isn’t to gather data and return “results”, but rather a process that starts with the questions of decision makers, involves them gathering and interpreting data, and informs and helps guide them to make continuous improvements.

8. Assessment is most likely to lead to improvement when it is part of a larger set of conditions that promote change. Assessment alone changes little. Its greatest contribution comes on campuses where the quality of teaching and learning is valued and worked at. Such campuses push to improve educational performance and the quality of education.

9. Through assessment, educators meet responsibilities to students and to the public. There is a certain responsibility of educators to public stakeholders. The responsibility goes beyond reporting information. Rather, educators are obliged, on behalf of themselves, their students, and society to improve. And, those who are accountable to these educators are obligated to support their attempts at improvement.

The way we learn and soak up information is always changing, along with the technology we use to access that information. Innovations in education (and in this case, those with an added entertainment factor) are always hot topics. In the past we’ve mentioned textbook alternatives, and today we introduce a new approach altogether.

In this post, I’m excited to share some Q&A with Bradley Inman, the CEO and founder of Vook, a “new innovation in reading that blends a well-written book, high-quality video and the power of the Internet into a single, complete story”. Here Inman tells us about the story behind Vook, the future he sees for the company in general and its products in higher education, and shares a bit of advice for innovators in any field. Enjoy!

What is the story behind Vook? Tell us about the people behind the idea and how you turned the idea into a reality.
I founded Vook in 2008 after seeing the value proposition of enhancing the reading experience beyond text. Previously, I founded TurnHere, an online video company that produces high quality content for publishers and other businesses, and this experience helped show me the great opportunities that existed with online video and its ability to enhance the reading experience with multi-media. Combining book + video led to the name Vook, and in 2009 we launched our first vooks in collaboration with Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins, Hachette and others. In 2010, we’re focused on developing relationships with publishers, agencies and authors of all kinds and continuing to release new vooks in a variety of genres throughout the year.

I noticed only a few available vooks. What’s in the lineup to be released soon?
We are growing very quickly and plan to release over 500 titles in 2010. We recently developed a publishing technology tool called MotherVook, which will allow us to streamline the creation of an individual vook. The MotherVook technology will make it very easy, fast and cost-effective to integrate the author’s text with professional video and other multi-media elements in the creation of each vook and will ultimately allow Vook to publish hundreds of titles each week. …continue reading

It’s about time we posted something fresh on here! We hope you enjoy these tips on how to market your classes to students!

Semester after semester, students sign up for classes. Most are ones they need, but some of them are classes they actually want. These classes are the ones that they squeeze into their schedules because they seem interesting or fun, and classes that they might actually get excited for (yes, I said excited)!

But there is a problem with classes that students only “want” and don’t “need” – interest can dwindle, schedules might not allow, or awareness of the class might fade. So how do you keep prospective students interested in taking your classes when they don’t “need” the credit, then actually get them to enroll? Here are a few helpful tips to keep those students enrolling!

Make the class interesting. It’s true. Students talk. They often gripe about classes and course work. But believe it or not, when they actually like classes, students talk about those too. Think of them as your customers. You are there to teach them something and make it as painless as possible (and dare I say, maybe even fun?!). If they have a great experience, they’ll talk about it with their friends or even recommend it.

Go door to door. Spark interest in prospective students by visiting related classrooms to share a little information about the class or classes you’re offering. For example, if you teach Buddhism of East Asia, talk to your colleagues that teach other Asian religion classes about briefly speaking to their students before or after class.

Get recommendations. Have the other instructors in your department recommend your class to their students at the end of each semester. Instead of going into a classroom and giving a pitch for your class yourself, have your peers do it for you.

Accept non-majors. When students want to mix up their schedules, they often look for classes that are different from those they have already taken or the courses they are currently in. Sometimes, they are in a completely different field of study and have absolutely nothing to do with the rest of that student’s coursework, but that’s the point. Make your class non-major friendly by allowing non-majors to enroll in and take the course without having to jump through too many hoops.

Pick the right time. Unless you work on a campus where students magically wake up at dawn, do not, I repeat, do not schedule your class for 8:00am. No matter how interesting your class is, sleeping in is a tempting option, especially if it’s during a class that isn’t needed to graduate. That being said, students also don’t want to stay on campus any later than they have to, so don’t pick times much later than 5:00pm.

Have you ever seen a loss of interest in the classes you teach? What have you done to create awareness and to get students to enroll?

Good morning and happy Friday! Here are some good reads we found this week. Enjoy!

10 Youngest College Graduates in U.S. History (and Where They Are Today)
Why is it that people are so fascinated by child prodigies? Who knows! But I admit, I find them interesting. Here is a post that talks about the ten youngest people to graduate from college in US history.

MILLENNIALS: A Portrait of Generation Next
Generational differences are an interesting thing. Being able to understand one group and how they function can help you better connect with those that are part of that group, whether it be in a work or educational setting.

The Case Against College Education
We certainly believe in higher education, and, well, education in general. This article, however, presents an interesting view of getting a college education and suggests that maybe getting that degree just isn’t for everyone.

101 College Blogs to Put You in the College Mood
We love blogs and bloggers, especially those in higher ed. Check out this list of 101 college blogs!

In celebration of Women’s History Month in March, we want to remember some influential women from the history of education and recognize the inspirational leaders in education today. These women have paved the way, and continue to do so, for the women leaders and educators of today and tomorrow.

Emma Hart Willard (1787-1870) – Willard started the first school for females, offering an equal or better education than men received at the time. She helped give young women the opportunity to have an education at a time when they were expected to learn only the rules and ways of the house and home.

Sarah Pierce (1767-1852) – Pierce founded the Litchfield Female Academy, the first school dedicated to the higher education of women. Students from across the United States and from around the world came to study at her school.

Nannie Helen Burroughs (1879-1961)– In addition to being a church leader and suffrage supporter, Burroughs founded the National Training School for Women and Girls as a national model school for the teaching of African American women at the time. Burroughs trained her students to become respectable employees and emphasized the important of bring a proud black women to all students by teaching African-American history and culture.

Mary Mason Lyon (1797-1849) – Lyon founded Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, the first college for females. The school was aimed at middle-class girls of the day because Lyon felt that educating this particular group of women would have the greatest influence on changing the standards for women overall.

Diana Oblinger – Educause’s President and CEO, Oblinger previously served as the company’s Vice President and was responsible for the association’s teaching and learning activities and the Educause Learning Initiative. Oblinger has held positions with both Microsoft and IBM, and has served as a faculty member at two universities and as an Associate Dean at the University of Missouri. Oblinger currently serves on a number of boards and is a frequent keynote speaker. She has written a number of books and received several awards because of her work in the fields of education and education technology.

Rosabeth M. Kanter – Kanter, a professor at the Harvard Business School, has been recognized as one of the “50 most powerful women of the world” as well as one of the “50 most influential business leaders in the world”. Having written or contributed to 18 books and receiving 23 honorary doctoral degrees, Kanter continues to teach and inspire the business leaders of tomorrow.

Katherine C. Boles – Boles writes and teaches about teacher education, school reform, and new forms of teacher leadership. Her work advocates real and positive changes in public policy with the aim of restructureing the field of teaching. She cofounded the Learning/Teaching Collaborative, a professional development school that ties public schools and colleges in the Boston area together.

We appreciate all of the energy and work these women have poured into improving the lives of women and the field of education!

Who inspires you? Leave a comment below on the people (men and women) who have inspired you as an educator.

50 Social Media Innovators in Higher Education
A list of the top social media innovators among the nation’s colleges and universities. It covers everything from active Twitter feeds to Facebook fan pages to videos and blogs.

2 Emerging Technologies That Will Impact College Campuses
If you work on a college campus, this is a good article for you! The article brings to your attention six technologies you should pay attention to and about how long it’ll take for each to be used on college campuses regularly.

Social Media in Higher Education: Two Perspectives
Take a look at social media in higher education from two different points of view – a student and an administrator.

Can higher education produce better/faster startups?
What can higher education do for startups? Can colleges offer the tools and resources necessary to crank out not only smart kids that enter the working world as managers but ones that start their own companies?