Using Data to Improve Student Learning

Purdue University has created a unique tool that allows students to know if they are in trouble in their classes. Called Signals, the program tracks students' academic progress, alerting them if they need help in certain areas. During a pilot phase, one faculty member said students who were flagged as needing help contacted him to improve grades. That, he said, rarely happened before.

http://www.purdue.edu/UNS/x/2009b/090827ArnoldSignals.html

Obama's Great Course Giveaway

There has been much talk within higher education circles since the President came out with is open-course initiative in July. The Chronicle of Higher Education looks at how the plan might work if it comes to fruition.

http://chronicle.com/article/Obamas-Great-Course-Giveaway/47530/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

Good News for Community Colleges

The nations's community colleges got some got news from President Obama Tuesday when he unveiled a $12 billion reform and expanion plan. The president said his plan will focus on getting people educated so they can get into the workforce.

At the center of this plan is online learning. He is proposing $500 million to develop new online courses that would be free and in the public domain.

Interesting concept that has lots of possibilities. We'll certainly be exploring some of them at Montgomery College. To read more about the plan, check out this story in the Washington Post.

The Advantages of Online Learning

The United States Department of Education recently came out with a study that shows online learning has advantages over face-to-face learning. The study found that performance was better for students who took all or part of their instruction online. Those who took blended courses did the best of all.

What the study demonstrates is what fans of online learning having been saying for a number of years: with the right design and the proper student engagement as much learning can take place as in face-to-face classes.

For a more complete article, check out Inside Higher Ed.

Murphy’s Law- The importance of backing up, for you and your students

The following was provided by Michele Knight of the Rockville support center. It's a valuable reminder to back up your data.


You never think that it will happen to you, a computer virus, spyware, or a faulty hard drive. Of course, we all know Murphy’s law: anything that can go wrong, will go wrong, and it will go wrong when you have the least amount of time to address the issue. About a year ago, I purchased a wonderful, shiny new laptop. Last Saturday morning, the unthinkable happened; my laptop hard drive died, with a crashing blue screen, and when I restarted the computer I was greeted with a blinking black screen “hard disk failure”.

Fortunately, I had backed up my entire hard drive’s contents onto an external hard drive, which is my regular practice, the night before. As a result, I lost nothing, none of my precious personal writings, mp3s, course work, or work related assignments. However, the moral here is that hard drive failure, computer viruses, etc, all sorts of things can happen and when they do, you will thank yourself if you have a regular practice of backing up all your files, and you will weep and grind your teeth if you do not have a backup strategy in place, and loose months, or years worth of precious mp3s, photos, documents, etc.

For online teachers, without a regular backup system in place you run the risk of losing not only your precious, sentimental data, but potential courses under construction, and student work! Do not be caught unaware. Backing up can be as simple as emailing critical documents to yourself, or popping them on a flash drive or an external hard drive (for those of you who have tons of files like me). You can also go through an elaborate backup process to clone your hard drive so that you do not have to reinstall all your programs, should your hard drive crash. This is something I am looking into. While I was happy I had preserved my data, I was grossly unhappy at the three days it took me to reinstall all the programs that I own, to find the license keys, etc.

Online students without a regular backup system in place will not only lose all the great mp3s they downloaded from iTunes, they will also lose potential coursework that they are drafting. If you have not already emphasized the importance of having a backup plan in place for course work, add this to your syllabus immediately. Give students ideas for how they can perform simple backups by emailing themselves important course files, saving them to a flash drive, external hard drive, or burning them to CD if need be. Let your students know that you know a real life student (I was that student about five years ago) whose computer died, but continued in their online course on a second computer while the main computer was being repaired, and she did not lose any of her work because she backed up frequently. Backing up now saves a litany of frustration later. I’ve lived to tell this tale many times.

You can preserve your precious documents by:
· Backing up to flash drive
· Backing up to external HDD
· Emailing yourself important documents
· Burning important documents on CD

If you really want to get fancy with preservation, and save documents as well as data, the following programs are useful:
· Shadow protect desktop
· Norton Ghost 12

What are your backup strategies as a faculty member?
What backup strategies do you recommend to your students?

Quality Matters

I spent two days last week in Baltimore at the first-ever Quality Matters conference. For those who are not familiar with QM, it is a faculty-centered process that focuses on the quality of online courses.

Montgomery College faculty will be hearing more about QM in the months ahead. I believe this nationally-recognized program is one that MC needs to embrace. Faculty who develop online and blended courses already are made aware of the various standards outlined in the QM rubric.

For more information, check out the Quality Matters website.

Qualities of Successful Online Learners

The Illinois Online Network has posted a wonderful list of qualities that online learners should possess. Certainly not all students who have these qualities will be successful in an online class. Nor does it mean that a student who does not have these qualities will be unable to succeed. But it is a good starting point.

I think that all of us need to provide as much information as possible to students considering online learning.