Archive for the ‘Higher Education’ Category

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Improvements to Scotland’s Glow

Friday, October 28th, 2011

Scotland has a very technologically forward thinking way of incorporating Information and Communication Technology, or ICT, into its educational system: an intranet.  This intranet is referred to as “Glow” and it is the national intranet used by Scotland’s educational community.  According to Education Scotland’s website, “the main purpose of Glow is to enhance the quality of learning and teaching in the classroom by fully supporting Curriculum for Excellence (CfE). It is proving to be an essential tool, and provides a platform for the educational community to build capacity and ensure a first-class education for Scotland. Using the national directory, Glow users can find others with similar areas of interest or expertise, collaborate across the country and make connections with others to improve learning and teaching.”  If you would like to learn more about Glow, you can review an article about it that we posted in July.

Glow has received very positive reviews by educational staff and students alike since its inception in 2007.  Recently, some exciting improvements were made to Glow based on user feedback and additional research.  Some of the new features and enhancements Glow users will be enjoying are as follows:

Glow Wikis

Glow Wikis are online spaces for classes or individuals to share information and collaborate on class projects, schoolwork, or simply build a body of knowledge about a specific topic to use as a resource.  Glow Wikis also allow teachers to create and plan lessons as a team, no matter how far apart they are geographically.  Practically anything can be shared using the Glow Wiki medium including text, images, video, audio, or links to other valuable online resources.

Glow Forums

Glow has added a Forum feature in which users are able to interact with each other in a style much like a message board.  Glow Forum users have the ability to create and facilitate discussions, conduct polls, and gather feedback.  The Glow Forums are a great resource for student and staff support.

Glow Groups

Glow Groups are user created groups of students and educational staff with similar ideas and interests.  The Glow Groups feature allows users to share ideas through discussion boards, chat rooms, document servers, image galleries, and a web conferencing feature called Glow Meet (which is another new Glow enhancement).  Glow groups are easily created and maintained by Glow users themselves.

Glow Blogs

Glow has added a blogging feature called Glow Blogs.  This feature will allow students and educational staff to create blogs much like the typical blogs seen all over the Internet today.  Glow Blogs can be used in conjunction with specific assignments or as an ongoing showcase of student work and achievements.  As with traditional blogs, users of the Glow Blogs feature have the ability to update content and publish images, text, and other resources to be shared with classes or entire school sites.

Other exciting enhancements to Glow include Glow Search, Glow Personal Profile, Glow Favorites and Glow Light.  If you would like to learn more about these new features or about Glow in general, you may visit the Education Scotland website at www.ltscotland.org.uk .

eLearning Resources: Institute of Education Sciences and the What Works Clearinghouse

Tuesday, October 18th, 2011

In the field of education, you will often hear the term “best practices” when it comes to teachers and policy makers creating curriculum.  This term essentially refers to the interventions that have been proven to be successful by research and case studies.  While wading through the vast amount of education research can be daunting, implementing best practices on a classroom or school-wide level can often bring about significant improvements in student learning. To make sifting through all of the education research easier, we would like to share one great resource for finding these best practices: the What Works Clearinghouse.

The What Works Clearinghouse, or WWC, is a centralized compilation of credible and reliable education research, put together by the United States Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences.  According to the WWC website, the WWC is an initiative of the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) that was created in 2002 to offer the following benefits:

•       Central. We want to be the place you turn to when you want to know about education research. We have reviewed thousands of studies on hundreds of education programs, products, practices, and policies.

•       Trusted. We strive to provide accurate information on education research. All of our procedures and policies are publicly available, and our goal is to provide transparent reviews of the research literature.

•       Scientific evidence. In order to tell you what works, we conduct thorough reviews of the research literature and critically assess the evidence presented.

There is an excellent tool on the WWC website called “Find What Works”.  This is a tool that can help those in the field of education find interventions such as educational programs, practices, or policies to address specific needs.  The interventions are then summarized and their evidence of effectiveness is also presented.  The Find What Works tool is basically a searchable database of education research studies that have been reviewed by the IES for reliability.  There are also publications about the research written by the IES available for users to download and read.

The vast array of search options on the Find What Works tool makes pinpointing specific interventions easy.  You can enter a search term in a free form field and then narrow your search results by outcome domains such as academic achievement, dropout prevention, language development, social development, or subject matter.  You may also refine your search results by grade level or student population type. Once your intervention search results are returned, viewing the research is equally easy.  Simply click on the link for the intervention you would like to explore and you are taken to a summary of the research report.  If you would like to read even more detailed information on the research based on the summary offered, there is a Download Full Report link that will allow you to either view the report in your browser or download a PDF of the full report.

The WWC offers an efficient and convenient way for educators to quickly find research-based interventions.  If you would like to explore the WWC for yourself, you may wish to begin with their help section that will walk you through the process of using the WWC website.

Stanford University Plans for Expansion, Physically and Virtually

Thursday, October 13th, 2011

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg is soliciting proposals for science and engineering education facilities.  Bloomberg and the city of New York aim to expand the city’s economy by increasing its range of business sectors.  New York City already has a strong footing in the finance, media, and arts industries and would like to add technology to that list.

Stanford’s idea for an applied sciences center for teaching and research is proposed to be located on the southern end of Roosevelt Island in New York City.  Stanford has no other major campuses outside of their main Palo Alto location, so this endeavor would be a first for Stanford.  This New York location would offer full graduate degrees, house approximately 2,200 graduate students and cost up to $1 billion.  This campus would employ around 100 faculty members and include labs, offices, recreation facilities, academic buildings, cafes, retail shops, and public amenities.  The facility in its entirety is expected to eventually reach 1.8 million square feet.  The Stanford in New York City website claims “Stanford, with its culture of innovation and entrepreneurship, offers New York City a partner experienced in offering world-class education and research, transferring innovation to the marketplace and graduating successful business leaders.”

Equally noteworthy is the expansion taking place at Stanford on another level.  Sebastian Thrun, a highly respected Stanford professor, is offering his “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence” course online at no cost.  Thrun is an expert in robotics whose claim to fame is leading the team that built Google’s self-driving car.  Thrun’s online course will offer distance-learning students the same lectures, assignments, and exams as the students who are paying full tuition.  It is estimated that this course has over 130,000 students signed up for this online course around the world.

Thrun would like to see a virtual university in which top professors disseminate their course material to tens of thousands of online students.  In an interview with Bill Keller of the New York Times, Thrun said,  “Literally, we can probably get the same quality of education I teach in class for about 1 to 2 percent of the cost.” He continues, “I’m not at all against the on-campus experience. I love it. It’s great. It has a lot of things which cannot be replaced by anything online. But it’s also insanely uneconomical.”  Thrun also feels like higher education will be completely disrupted once the issues of student cheating, student identity verification, and course quality assurance are adequately tackled.

Stanford’s president, John Hennessy supports Thrun’s vision but does not feel like the traditional face-to-face education delivery system will become completely obsolete.   Hennessy acknowledges the advantages of online courses, but sees value in different places with the full campus experience.  He believes the value of each model should be examined and the benefits of each system should be analyzed as to how they contribute to the overall efficiency and effectiveness of a program.  With both the “Silicon Valley II” proposal in New York City, and Thrun’s virtual university project, it seems as if Stanford has its bases covered either way.

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