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QuadBlog Post 1

Posted on December 30th, 2012

How have new developments in the Web 2.0 world changed what I do for the courses I teach? This last semester I began recording my solutions to quiz questions for my community college statistics course. Many of students gave that work a thumb up in the discussion forums. I was just looking at the number of views though and the most watched only had 18 views and there where 24 people participating in the course during the last week.

For my HS courses I also have been using youtube to record video, flipping the classroom a bit. I also have been having students produce explanations. One issue that is arising is that I have just been awarding full credit for all presentations, some should not be and I need to create/steal a presentation rubric.

What am I doing new that has my focus and is related to digital learning? My HS Precalculus is working hard in class, doing what I ask of them but when I ask them to take a quiz on the material, they tank it. How do I fix this? Better quizzes? Maybe.  What I’m going to try this second term is use http://myopenmath.com and create a course portal which is aligned to this new text we have been using http://www.opentextbookstore.com/precalc/ . All students in the course have computer/broadband access at home and at school. I’m going to require online HW exercise sets that have embedded video. The exercises regenerate and the students will have multiple attempts allowed to show mastery. Maybe this work will help them to master and retain the skills needed to be successful in the course and as they move onto college they will get out of taking remedial courses.

As far as this Coursera course https://www.coursera.org/course/edc, I was looking at the description just now and read this line: For example, how is ‘learning’ represented in the film The Matrix, and how does this representation influence our understanding of the nature of e-learning? At this point, my response is: We cannot just “jack in” and download the knowledge. Learning something new still takes hard work and learning new skills requires repetition.  eLearning is no different, people still need practice. It will be interesting to see if the course content changes my mind about this.


Don’t Feed the Trolls

Posted on December 27th, 2012

Don’t Feed the Trolls This is a great little video. Worth the time to watch. God, please keep me from having my inner troll surface.


#EDCMOOC Quad Blog

Posted on December 25th, 2012

I’m not sure who is going to join the new QuadGroup I added my name to out at the #EDCMOOC FB group page, but I’ll make this first post. This group supports the course https://www.coursera.org/course/edc .