"Predicting the future is easy. It's trying to figure out what's going on now that's hard" (Dressler, 2005)
A grand experiment is launching today at VCU – our first cMOOC. As it notes on the About page: Starting June 9, the official course opens for six sections taught at VCU, and the rest of the internet is invited to join along as open participants. The official name of this course at Virginia Commonwealth University is UNIV… Read more Thought Vectors Firing Up
Next Monday, our fifth OCDI starts, with (to date) 17 faculty enrolled. This is a one-year investment towards developing quality courses for VCU with the mindset and practice associated with learning on the open web. As a change this year, we are moving from our traditional LMS to a WordPress open site – http://rampages.us/ocdi/ Check it… Read more Our Fifth Online Course Development Initiative
. I saw this image this morning, and my first impression is that this was a great metaphor for the kind of learner I would like to be … and the kind of enthusiasm and joy for learning that I would hope to imbue in my students. Every morning, my first website after emails is… Read more My Kind of Learner
Today is our final packing day here at the Center for Teaching Excellence at VCU. Over the weekend, movers will haul our stuff across the street to our new academic building. My new office will be halfway down the top floor. So, after nearly seven years here at the CTE, my third office. We were… Read more Moving Day at the CTE
Another Pi Day (3.14) is upon us, and math geeks worldwide celebrate this most famous of irrational numbers. For those who would love to follow the thread, here is a link to one million digits of pi. Yet, I feel some other just as good irrational numbers are being left out. There are plenty of… Read more Yet Another Pi Day Has Come
I discussed the first week in the Coursera course, E-Learning and Digital Cultures, in my last post. Now, four days later, it has been interesting to see the social side of this massive open online course unfold. Friday, I attended the Google Hangout session for the class. Bud Deihl joined me in my office as… Read more EDCMOOC Thoughts on Social Side
Five weeks pass pretty rapidly! … In this final week of BlendKit2012, we focused on quality assurance. Kelvin Thompson suggested the following questions to ponder: How will you know whether your blended learning course is sound prior to teaching it? How will you know whether your teaching of the course was effective once it has… Read more Final Week of BlendKit2012
I fell behind in BlendKit 2012 for the simple reasons many of my students fall behind in some of my classes – life intervened. I managed to keep up the first two weeks, but in the past two, I attended SLOAN-C’s International Conference on Online Learning, our Center started a new Learning Path for online… Read more Blendkit2012 Weeks 3 and 4
In a post last week, I discussed starting UCF‘s MOOC on blended learning. In the first week, we looked at what our blend might be. This week, the focus is on how and when students will interact, with each other and with the instructor. There are some things I like about this course and things… Read more BlendKit2012 Week 2
This semester, Joyce Kincannon and I are both facilitating two separate faculty learning communities on blended learning. I am also trying to wrap my brain around the whole MOOC thing. So what better way than to sign up for a MOOC on blended learning! Joyce is taking it too, so we will see if we… Read more Starting BlendKit2012