innovation
ONLINE EDUCA BERLIN 2013: Call for Proposals now open
What role does technology play in promoting creativity and innovation? How is the world of learning changing, and how can technology help us change the world? Proposals are now being accepted for this year's Online Educa Berlin 2013, which will focus on these questions.
Proposals are being accepted from now until June 3 for Online Educa Berlin 2013, to be held December 4-6 in Berlin. This year's event will encompass:
eLearning Papers Call for Papers on Changing schools and creative classrooms: 21st century teachers and their new roles
eLearning Papers seeks submissions for the issue 30 Changing schools and creative classrooms: 21st century teachers and their new roles. This issue explores the new role of teachers in 21st century learning contexts, focusing on the challenges they face and the changes in teaching practice caused by the rapid spread of educational technologies and the evolution towards creative classrooms and open educational resources. Deadline: 10 August 2012.
We are interested in contributions that address: national policies, methodologies, new tools and resources, the teacher-student relationship or class organization, among others. Guest editors: Hans Laugesen, GL - the National Union of Upper Secondary School Teachers. Jim Devine, JD Policy, Projects Innovation, EDEN Fellow (and former President, IADT, Dublin)
Click here to read the complete Call for Papers
HoTEL project: Emerging Technologies Landscape report
The “Emerging Technologies Landscape report” authored by the HoTEL project presents the analysis of a set of trends and technologies (already adopted/successfully piloted/emerging) to support new forms of learning in higher education, corporate training and individual, social network-based professional networks.
The report firstly includes the identification and clustering of the most researched technologies within the European Union, the analysis of the areas of learning where these technologies can be applied, and also the evolution of the research over the last years. Secondly it spots generic ICT that can be –among other uses- also utilised for supporting learning and specific technologies and applications specially designed to support/enhance learning in one of the three contexts targeted by the project. And thirdly, it presents the results of the assessment of the relevance of those technologies and their possible impact on the learning practices in each of the educational sectors addressed by the project.
Opening Education through Competency Based Assessment
This paper, originally published on the blog on Open Education 2030 of the Joint Research Centre, Institute for Prospective Technological Studies, suggests Competency Based Assessment may be the key to unleashing a wave of innovation.
Although Open Educational Resources and Practices, and other innovations contain huge potential to transform lifelong learning, there are unnecessary regulatory barriers, and Competency Based Assessment may be the key to removing these barriers and unleashing a wave of innovation.
There are two things you need to innovate. Competition and the freedom to innovate. There is no shortage of innovation in teaching and learning in the world today and Open Education Resources and Practices are among the most significant of these. Indeed, access to information is now so easy that the best of these practices can spread very rapidly. However, the surprisingly slow rate of change has shown that there are barriers, and one of those is the regulation of teaching and learning methods.
Competency Based Assessment has the potential to break through that particular barrier by giving both students and providers much more freedom to choose their preferred learning methods. This will lead to a huge increase in competition and innovation in higher education and in particular, lifelong learning within higher education, that will both improve standards and drive down costs. In such a scenario of massive disruption it would be unwise to try to predict what the outcome would look like in 2030, except to say that it would look quite different to what we have now. In this essay, I will argue that a small change like Competency Based Assessment could have huge implications for Lifelong Learning within Higher Education.
Report on good practice innovative applications of learning theories in Technology Enhanced Learning
The HoTEL Support Action aims to contribute to more effective, holistic and faster innovation cycles in European Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL), focusing on the design, testing and validation of a new innovation working method.
Survey shows that social media has graduated to academia
The 2012 ETNA (Enhanced Training Needs Analysis) survey, carried out by the Jisc Regional Support Centre (RSC), shows that social media, and particularly YouTube, has firmly entered the learning environment as teaching and learning tools, with its use growing significantly year on year.
Presented at the Jisc RSC Scotland Annual Conference on 7 June, this new survey reveals that nearly three quarters of academics in further education agree that social media tools enhance the quality of the learning experience. YouTube is by far the most popular tool, while Facebook and particularly Twitter, lag well behind. However, the survey also identifies a strong need for staff training in the use of social media.
The 2012 ETNA survey is the fifth of its kind in Scotland, with ETNA surveys having been carried out for more than a decade across Scottish colleges, analysing technology in further education and able to show trends over time. In 2012, 1,700 staff took part, including more than 700 academics across 40 of the 43 colleges.
Together with responses from admin and support staff, managers, learning resource staff, learning technologists, and technical and network staff, this report provides a comprehensive picture of technology in the learning landscape.
Of those surveyed:
- Academic staff seemed most in favour of social media: 70% agreed that its use enhances the -quality of the learning experience and 69% agreed that students were at ease using it
- Some academic staff felt that social media is a distraction to learning
- Around half of all middle managers said their department uses social media tools for learning and teaching
- Fewer than 10% of staff in any category, however, had received training in social media
- More than a third of staff identified a need for staff training.
Of the media channels:
- Other media lagged far behind, with Facebook used by only 15% of academic staff and Twitter used by just 3%
- Blogs and wikis sat just behind Facebook at 14% and 13% of academic staff
- Emerging platforms such as Pinterest and Flipboard were used by just 1% of academics and not at all by managers
- Facebook was more popular among admin and support staff, learning resource staff and learning technologists than it was among academic staff
- All social media access was still completely blocked by a significant minority of colleges.
Open Praxis volume 5 issue 2
Open Praxis is an online magazine published by the International Council for Open and Distance Education (ICDE) which aims to be an open forum for global collaboration and discussion of issues in the practice of distance and e-learning, focusing on research and innovation on open education and learning.
Volume 5, No 2 of Open Praxis, published in June 2013, includes the following articles:
- The use and production of OER & OCW in teaching in South African higher education institutions (Case Study), by Igor Lesko
- Pedagogical quality enrichment in OER based courseware: Guiding principles, by Pradeep Kumar Misra
- The Openness of the University of the Philippines Open University: Issues and Prospects, by Maria Fe Villamejor-Mendoza
- From resistance to acceptance and use of technology in academia, by Sofia Matrosova Khalil
- Comparing communities of inquiry of Portuguese higher education students: one for all or one for each?, by Jose António Moreira, António Gomes Ferreira, Ana Cristina Almeida
- Networked curricula: fostering transnational partnership in open and distance learning, by María Luz Cacheiro-González, Patricia Mata-Benito, George Ubachs
- Review of A-VIEW 3.5 software, by Mandar Lakshmikant Bhanushe