Growing Online Learning: Faculty Share Lessons Learned

Happy New Year!  Spring 2015 is officially on its way.  I know we’re all busy checking on students and responding to emails, but we wanted to share a free web-based conference opportunity focusing on Illinois community colleges beginning February 9 through February 12, 2015.  Illinois Community Colleges Online (ILCCO) is hosting a free web-based conference with a Faculty Shared Lessons Learned theme.  This is an excellent opportunity for current faculty teaching online or those who are interested.  For more information on individual sessions and to register (did I mention it was free?) visit http://ilcco.net/ILCCO/index.cfm?p=conferences

See you there!

OER Publication: PLOS

Whew…it’s been a busy few months and this blog has been on my mind.  So, here’s a quick resource for online science oriented publications.  The Public Library of Science, better known as PLOS, describes itself as “a nonprofit publisher and advocacy organization located in San Francisco, CA, USA and Cambridge, UK.  Our mission is to accelerate progress in science and medicine by leading a transformation in research communication. Everything that we publish is Open-Access – freely available online for anyone to use and we maximize the value of this resource through technology.”  They have a variety of peer-reviewed publications across all areas of science and medicine.  

This is another excellent opportunity to provide students free and open resources that are high quality and up to date.  Are you currently using other great resources?  Let us know!
Wishing everyone a happy and healthy holiday season!

Tech Tip: Backing Up and Syncing Documents

SyncToy logo

There are many golden gems on Microsoft’s web site, like SyncToy, which is a free application that allows the user to sync files and folders between two places. I use it on both my thumb drive and my primary computer to save time by automatically syncing my files for me when I decide to work on my laptop or on any other computer. It also works as a backup. There’s another bonus: it’s absolutely free to download at http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=15155!

This "little" program has saved me so much time & frustration. I use three or four computers in different locations; however, I need access to the same set of files for each location. Unfortunately, not all of the computers have stable Internet services (or any Internet); therefore, I can place my files on my thumb drive and just “sync” it when I get back to my primary workstation. According to the system requirements listed on SyncToy, this application is compatible with Windows 7, Windows Vista and XP.

Other options for backing up assignments and documents can be to email yourself the assignment or sign up for one of many web synchronization (and/or file sharing) software programs such as http://www.google.com/drive/index.html or https://www.dropbox.com/.  Google Drive and Dropbox are cloud storage services that allow you to access them via a browser, app or designated folder. Currently, Google Drive offers 15 GB of free cloud storage and Dropbox offers 2 GB.

7 OER Sites Every Faculty Member Should Visit

In preparation for conferences and training sessions, I wanted to develop a list of my top 10 OER sites for faculty members to visit.  As it turns out, I don't have that many.  So, here's my top 7 OER sites that every faculty member should visit (in no specific order).

Open Professionals Education Network (OPEN)

In support of Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training (TAACCCT) grant, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation funded OPEN and encourages grantees to reuse existing OER to save time and effort.  OPEN provides specific sources for grantee use for photo/images, video, audio/music, general education searches, such as repositories, open textbooks and complete courses, including the ones listed below. Select the “Find OER” tab at the top of the page for a list of OER.

College Open Textbooks

College Open Textbooks is dedicated to increasing awareness and adopting OER for community colleges and two-year colleges.  The College Open Textbooks Collaborative consists of twenty-non for-profit and non-profit organizations with over 200 colleges.  Furthermore, the organization provides training opportunities for instructors and peer reviews textbooks.  These efforts are focused on decreasing textbook costs by offering high-quality open source textbooks.

MERLOT II

MERLOT is a program of the California State University.  It contains thousands of learning materials, including textbooks, animations, assessment tools, presentations and much, much more!

MIT OpenCourseWare

In 1999, MIT Faculty developed and launched OpenCourseWare (OCW).  The pilot version ran in 2002 with 50 courses published.  A decade later, 2150 courses have been published with numerous translations available including Spanish and Portuguese.  Additionally, as of September 2013, MIT reported that OCW has tracked over 49 million YouTube views, 43 million iTunesU downloads and over 182 million visits to their website (MITOCW dashboard report). 

OER Commons

This site provides access to OER, as well as tools to organize, create and save.  Allows free registration and advanced search features including Education Level, Material Type and Media Format to name a few.

Open Course Library

The Open Course Library (OCL) was launched in 2011 by the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges in order to combat the effect of textbook costs on student success and completion.  OCL created new course material using Creative Commons licenses for 81 of its highest-enrolled courses.

Wikimedia Foundation

Wikimedia Foundation is a non-profit organization that hosts numerous projects including Wikimedia Commons, Wikipedia and Wiktionary, all of which are available under a Creative Commons License.  Commons has over 19 million media files including images, sound and videos that can be used at no charge. 

Please feel free to share any of your go-to resources.

So Many Apps! So Little Time!

With iPads and Apple TV sweeping the campus, many faculty are trying to just keep up with what's happening in the app world.  If you turn to your colleagues and ask them what are their favorite apps, each one will likely provide you with a list of their top picks.  So the question becomes, how do I really know what's out there and available?

While the ProfHacker in The Chronicle of Higher Education will periodically publish a piece on iPad apps, eliciting recommendations from its readers, there are also a few web sites that I have found particularly helpful when exploring the wonderful world of iPad Apps.

One can always turn to the Apple iTunes Preview Apps Store or iTunes for Education through your favorite browser for lists of popular educational apps.  Not to be outdone, Google Play also has its site which can be browsed for apps for android devices. Excellent descriptions of each app is available with a simple mouse click. 

PadGadget (http://www.padgadget.com/ ) is the self-proclaimed “…premier iPad focused website for iPad news, apps and accessory reviews.”  While the site is not specifically focused on educational technology, those of you who want to know what's happening in the wonderful world of the iPad will find this web site appealing.  It is a great site for to help you keep up with what is happening in the iPad world and the latest apps and gadgets that you can use to extend your iPad's functionality.  In addition, the Apps Tracker tab allows one to filter the top 200 apps by category and cost.  The results can be sorted by number of downloads, rating, trends, etc. Clicking on any app in the list will pop up a more detailed app description. You can also follow PadGadget on Twitter.

Another excellent site, EducationalTechnology and Mobile Learning, provides several pages with links to iPad resources, Ed Tech Resources, and a number of other tools for educators.

Happy exploring!

C3B4Me Policy

A new semester is upon us.  I try to do one new "thing" every time I teach a class.  This summer, CTE hosted a Flip It! Workshop.  One of my take-aways was the C3B4Me Policy.  I decided to refer to it as the C3B4Me practice to avoid confusion with "real" institutional policies.  Essentially, this policy encourages students to be self-directed and reliant.  Read the article by Dr. Honeycutt, the founder of Flip It Consulting.

I plan on discussing it briefly during my first synchronous chat.  Here’s what I have posted in my classroom as an announcement:

C3B4Me Practice

Have a question?  Before emailing me, please try to locate your answer on your own by checking three different sources.  Consider contacting a classmate, reviewing the syllabus, reading the assignment directions or checking the announcements.  If you can’t locate the information you need, please feel free to contact.  I’m here to help!

If you decide to use it this semester, please share your experiences with this practice/policy.  Tried something new this semester?  We love to hear about it too!  Have a great semester!

On the search for videos

In my last two blogs, we discussed tools that we can use for creating your own videos.  This time I would like to share a few sources for videos and searching tips. The sources are primarily open educational resources (OER) that have licensing designed to make it simple for users to reuse, rework, remix and redistribute materials.  For more information, visit Creative Commons (CC) for a short video with information regarding their open licenses.

So, what are OER?  There are many definitions of OER.  In simple terms, OER are any type of resources (videos, images, tests, software, textbooks and much, much more!) that are in the public domain or licensed to permit free use and re-purposing by others.

Whew…finally, I’m onto the video sources I mentioned earlier. 

YouTube

The best way to find a video that is licensed under the Creative Commons license on YouTube is to use the CC Search tool described above in the General Search and Photo/Image Search sections. Unfortunately, YouTube does not provide a filter or advanced search capability on their home page for finding all YouTube Creative Commons licensed videos. However, http://www.youtube.com/creativecommons lets you see the most viewed and most reused Creative Commons licensed videos.

Tip:  If you are on the YouTube home page and type in your search term followed by a comma and then “creativecommons” the videos returned are CC licensed.  Also, when uploading videos, by default, the licensing is set at “Standard YouTube License”, which essentially means the creator is granting YouTube the right to broadcast the video.  See the Terms of Service (specifically, Section 6.C.) for full details.

Vimeo

Let’s you easily upload and find CC licensed videos.  This site tends to be used by businesses and organizations.

The Internet Archive has a collection of old video and movie footage.  Check out site for old cartoons, sports videos, ephermal films and news footage.

Tip:  This site allows you to download video and you burn them to a DVD or thumb drive to avoid slow internet connection (not that the internet is ever slow!).

TED is a nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. In 1984, it started out as a conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design. Since then its scope has become ever broader. The best talks and performances from TED and partners are made available to the world, for free. More videos are added on a regular basis.  All of the talks are subtitled in English, and many are subtitled in various languages. If you’re wondering, there’s an app too!

Do you have any go-to sites for videos?  Please share them with us.

Attribution:  “Video Search” in open4us.org, CC BY 4.0