by Lauren Krznaric
CourseSites Exemplary Course MOOC Week 2 Round-up. Guest Blog Post from Kimberly Seeber. Kimberly lives in Bloomington, Indiana, US. She is a licensed elementary teacher and a graduate student in the Instructional Systems Technology residential master’s program at Indiana University. Her interests include technology integration in the K-12 environment and online learning.
In Tony Robbins’ Ted Talk, he says humans need “certainty, variety, significance, connection, growth, and contribution” in order to feel satisfied and fulfilled. Online course instructors can incorporate these needs when creating an online environment thereby empowering students to experiment with new ideas and share their perspective. Students will engage and succeed in an online course when they feel respected, valued, and understood. Week Two’s discussion in the Designing an Exemplary Course MOOC uncovered insightful ideas that communicate the message, “You belong here.”
by Travis Sowders
The student voice is a necessary and defining opinion in marketing and determining future initiatives on college campuses. For most universities, elections are held in order to democratically decide the representative to speak for the student population. After several years of limited turnout and lackluster campaigns, officials at West Lothian College decided to take advantage of the mobile student body and emerging mobile technologies by conducting student elections using the Blackboard ConnectTxt service, allowing student to vote for their candidates via text message.
by Klaire Marino
Right now educators are back in the swing of school, whether it is the Fall or Spring semester in higher education or the beginning of 2012-2013 school year in K12. Around the world teachers are busy teaching with Blackboard Learn™ as a vital tool.
At Blackboard we are also busy working with institutions on testing and improving our software. I have blogged in previous posts about Blackboard’s beta programs in which clients have the ability to try out the software and provide Blackboard valuable feedback before it hits the market. We have so many exciting initiatives going on at Blackboard – our upcoming release of Blackboard Learn has already hit test servers across the world and is planned to be available for clients to use as early as their next academic term. Eighty-five client institutions are involved in testing the release through the beta program. This also includes our amazing Blackboard developers and partners who are testing their building blocks to ensure everything works smoothly when clients put it into production.
by John Dennett
Are French fries the same as French toast? Is chocolate milk the same as chocolate cake? Just because two items share similar names (and are delicious), does not make them the same.
Such is the case with Social Learning and Social Media.
I agree with @dpeter who tweeted:
Why does this matter in the classroom? Social learning and social media can exist separately in the educational setting, or can co-exist in support of social learning, but they are not one in the same. Want to dig a bit deeper into the world of Social Learning? Here are some good resources to get you started.
We’re myth-busting. Click here to read on: Social Media Is the Same as Social Learning
by Lauren Krznaric
In honor of the recent launch of our new MOOC powered by the CourseSites Open Course Series on Designing an Exemplary Course, we are excited to invite you to join us for a Tweet Chat to discuss best practices of building a dynamic course on Oct 11th at 1pm EDT. We are fortunate to have Dr. Torria Bond, a leader in Instructional Design for California Baptist University, an instructor in the CourseSites MOOC and last year’s Exemplary Course Winner, as our special guest.
