Creaking Open the Course

It has been a while since I gave this presentation — which was creatively named “Overview of Innovations in Online Courses”* — at the Stanford Digital Learning Forum.  In it I put forward some thoughts (not terribly eloquently) about blurring the boundaries we traditionally draw around a “course.” These are certainly not original thoughts (cf. …

Elevation Change

Holy moly…all I can say is that SOMEONE is going to have to hit the ground running. #whoa — Amy Collier (@amcollier) August 1, 2013 Corrected tweet: Holy moly…all I can say is that @ajsalts is going to have to hit the ground running. #whoa 🙂 — Amy Collier (@amcollier) August 1, 2013

Large Classes FAQ

My colleagues and I like coffee a lot and spend a good deal of time consulting with faculty who teach large classes. Thus, we developed the caffeine-o-meter to demystify the process of improving a large course.

Matching Pedagogy and Technology (or ‘beware of dog’ or ‘the great divide’)

Vanderbilt’s Center for Teaching recently highlighted an excellent POD article by Tami Eggleston about matching tried and true instructional design models (e.g., Bloom’s Taxonomy, the “7 Principles”) with affordances of technology tools. In addition, the TLT Group has long maintained an excellent web page matching the Seven Principles of Good Teaching Practice with technology tools and …

Social-Psychological Interventions in Education: They’re Not Magic

“Social-psychological interventions complement—and do not replace—traditional educational reforms. They do not teach students academic content or skills, restructure schools, or improve teacher training. Instead, they allow students to take better advantage of learning opportunities that are present in schools and tap into existing recursive processes to generate long-lasting effects.” (Walton & Yeager, 2011, p. 293)