The CTL Teaching Team events have really taken off during the past couple of weeks. We’ve had the CIS folks at both S&D and Red Mtn., sharing their expertise and teaching us all how to navigate the new interfaces of the MS Office 2007 suite.
On Monday Paul Valach introduced TED: Ideas Worth Spreading to a few of us. If you ever decide you want a guest speaker for your class, face-to-face or online, TED is the place to start looking. (more…)
As instructors continue to increase the number of online courses MCC offers, as well as continue to shift from paper to electronic homework submissions, we are beginning to notice the following two trends:
1. many of our students do not own MS Word; therefore,
2. an increasing number of our students electronically submit documents that are not in the “.doc” format.
There are a few easy suggestions to help with this issues.
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I’ve prided myself for a long time on being a liaison for technology and people who aren’t technologists or those who at the very least tolerate it. However I still would like to contribute to the web development community regardless of whether they are developing e-Learning or educational software interfaces or not. With that said, I would like to emphasize that my first degree was in software engineering, so I am an engineer at heart. Therefore I will proceed to get a little tech-y…
More and more traditional desktop applications are finding ways of living on the web via the Web 2.0 hype. (Please bear in mind that I’m going with the flow of people who are classifying the next generation of web applications with this sometimes publicly scorned misnomer). What this means is that software that you normally have to purchase from a retail store contained in a shrink-wrapped box or download an installer file from a website can now be hosted by the developer on a web page. I suppose this is good and bad for a few reasons:
I’m not about to become an authority on the subject of constructivism, but one of the challenges with early online learning where instructors who knew their subjects very well but didn’t understand how less-productive it could be to just toss students into an online learning environment and expect that their instincts would take over and they would just ‘figure it out’. Most distance-learning students (including myself) have a certain amount of online survival mechanism built in that very closely mimics survival in the real world.