Category: Teaching
August 13, 2010, 02:14 PM ET
Researcher Sees Digital-Music 'Drug' as Study Aid
Students are seeking highs by listening to specially recorded music, in a trend called iDosing. But one researcher who has studied binaural music, as it is called, sees the unusual music as a powerful study aid for students who want to maintain their concentration.
"There are hundreds of examples of students using binaural beats and metamusic to overcome their fears, like helping them get past their 'I can'ts,'" said the researcher, Barbara Bullard, who's taught full- and part-time at Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa, Calif., for more than 43 years. She stops short of calling the music a digital version of drugs, as iDosing enthusiasts claim.
Binaural beats usually involve a synchronization of tones that
take advantage of headphones to stimulate the mind in specific
ways.
Some scholars and publications say their effects are being used
to create druglike "highs" in the human brain.
But...
July 23, 2010, 09:00 AM ET
Online Course Construction Gets a 'Do-It-Yourself' Web Site
A new player entered the field of open online education last week: Nixty, a Web site that allows any user to take and create courses for free.
The new learning platform started up with over 200 course offerings culled from open-source content already available online, such as courses from the Khan Academy and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's OpenCourseWare Project. Nixty's users have begun developing about 120 new courses since its launch, said Glen Moriarty, the company's chief executive.
Nixty comes with all the trappings of most course-management systems: a grade book, testing, discussion boards. Mr. Moriarty used to head and is still in the leadership team at Scholar360, which develops course-management software. But right now, Nixty is meant to help make educational content free, open, and easy to access.
Other sites exist that put together the open-source educational ...
Read MoreJuly 14, 2010, 05:09 PM ET
Latest Attempt to Hawk E-Textbooks: Make Them Easier for Professors to Use
It has been hard to get most professors excited about e-textbooks, but publishers continue to try new ways to sell them on the format. The latest strategy seems to make the e-textbooks even easier for professors to use, by integrating them more tightly into the course-management systems they are already familiar with.
Today Blackboard announced deals with a major textbook publisher— McGraw Hill—and two college bookstore chains—Barnes & Noble College Booksellers and Follett Higher Education Group—to sell textbooks through the tech company's course-management system and to tie online assignments from the e-texts directly into existing online gradebooks.
And earlier this week, CourseSmart, which distributes electronic editions of books by major textbook publishers, announced a new feature that better links its e-textbooks with the leading course-management systems.
CourseSmart calls...
Read MoreJune 28, 2010, 05:40 PM ET
Springer Announces New Open-Access Journals
The Springer publishing company today announced that it is setting up a new open-access journal program. Called SpringerOpen, the program will initially include 12 new online-only, peer-reviewed journals in science, technical, and medical fields.
The Chronicle sat down with Eric Merkel-Sobotta, Springer's executive vice president for corporate communications, and Bettina Goerner, the company's manager of open access, to talk about the program. (They were in town for the annual meeting of the American Library Association.) They emphasized that all SpringerOpen journals will be published under a Creative Commons Attribution license, which allows reuse of articles as long as the authors are given credit. So if you're an instructor who wants to use a SpringerOpen article in a course you're teaching, "you can include it in course packages without e-mailing Springer's rights department," Mr. ...
Read MoreJune 3, 2010, 04:00 PM ET
Canadian Education Groups Seek Changes in Newly Proposed Copyright Law
Some professors and students in Canada are grumbling about a new copyright-reform bill that was introduced there Wednesday, saying that it would lead to new restrictions on the use of media in classrooms, distance learning, and libraries.
The proposed law is designed to make it easier to go after commercial pirates while allowing individuals to copy legally obtained content from one device to another and to make backup copies. But critics say the bill's protection of so-called digital locks—encryption that publishers place on music, movie, or software files to keep them from being illegally copied—could make it impossible for users to do things that are technically legal, like making copies for educational use.
"The government has struck some pretty good compromises over all, but the one place where they didn't compromise at all was with digital locks, and that's incredibly...
Read MoreMay 26, 2010, 03:05 PM ET
A New Digital Repository for Sociology Instructors
"Within the confines of the lecture hall, no other virtue exists but plain intellectual integrity," wrote Max Weber.
That may be so. But some of Weber's intellectual grandchildren—i.e., the leaders of the American Sociological Association—believe that it also helps if instructors bring to their lecture halls a well-designed syllabus and a decent idea of how to engage students with the material.
To promote those smaller virtues, the association has just unveiled Trails, a digital repository where sociologists can post syllabi, lesson plans, bibliographies, and other teaching resources. The site already holds more than 2,700 items, and its doors are open for new submissions.
Not every submission will be automatically archived. Materials will be assessed by peer-review committees for their fidelity to a set of principles of high-quality teaching that have been identified by the...
Read MoreMay 21, 2010, 04:45 PM ET
U. of Michigan Professor Designs Software for Student Engagement
Perry Samson, a professor of atmospheric science at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, liked the concept of personal "clickers" in class, but he felt that they weren't dynamic enough for the kinds of questions he wanted to ask in his meteorology courses. So he created Web-based software that combine personal-response technology with other kinds of interactive tools that students can use on their laptops in classrooms.
Lecture Tools, the system Mr. Samson created, lets students use their computers during classes to pose anonymous questions, mark up lecture slides, and answer questions posed by the instructor in real time. For meteorology courses, students can answer questions by pinpointing a location on a weather map on their screens, and the answers all show up—anonymously—for everyone to see. He started using the system about five years ago, and now 30 other instructors at...
Read MoreMay 6, 2010, 01:46 PM ET
Online Evaluations Show Same Results, Lower Response Rate
Students give the same responses on paper as on online course evaluations but are less likely to respond to online surveys, according to a recent study.
The study was conducted at Kansas State University's IDEA Center, a nonprofit group that tries to improve how colleges use course evaluations. It examined data that the center collected from classes at nearly 300 institutions between 2002 and 2008, of which 89.9 percent used paper surveys and 10.1 percent posted surveys online. The study analyzed student ratings data from 271,727 classes that used paper surveys and 13,101 classes that used online surveys.
The only meaningful difference between student ratings completed online and on paper was that students who took online surveys gave their professors higher ratings for using educational technology to promote learning.
Seventy-eight percent of students enrolled in classes with paper ...
Read MoreApril 27, 2010, 03:00 PM ET
Skipping Class? Sensors Are Watching
Students at Northern Arizona University who hope to skip large lecture courses may have more trouble doing so this fall: The university is installing an electronic system that measures student attendance.
The university is using $75,000 in federal stimulus money to install the system, which will detect the ID cards students are carrying as they enter large classrooms, The Arizona Republic reported on Tuesday. (The cards can be read by an electronic sensor.) Faculty members can choose to receive electronic attendance reports.
Karen Pugliesi, vice provost for academic affairs, says the project will help improve attendance, which is key to higher academic performance.
Research, she says, shows a real link between good attendance and student achievement. She says the system will improve student engagement and participation, putting more students on track to graduate.
"We want every one...
Read MoreApril 15, 2010, 01:58 PM ET
Lehigh Professor Advertises Course on YouTube
Jeremy Littau wanted to generate some buzz about the multimedia
reporting course he’ll teach next fall at Lehigh University, so he
made a YouTube
video about it. Mr. Littau, an assistant professor of
journalism and communication, put the video up last week, before
registration started. So far the advertisement seems to be
working.
A browse through YouTube suggests that relatively few instructors
promote their classes there, and that many of those who do are
teaching online courses. In
some
videos, professors talk straight into the camera and give an
overview of the course. Others show still
and moving pictures of the subject matter. Mr. Littau’s video uses
interviews with current students about what they learned and
footage that they produced in the course.
Mr. Littau e-mailed the video to journalism majors and posted a
link to it on Facebook and Twitter. He still sends copies of
the...
Each day on Wired Campus, The Chronicle's technology reporters highlight key IT developments and put them in perspective.