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Showing posts from May, 2016

Being a student in the summer

Since the end of April I (and some fellow EDDE students) are working on a qualitative research methods course. While I've got familiarity with some of the methods of qualitative research under my belt, I thought that it might be fun to work through a review of some methods with fellow doctoral students. The price was right (nearly free!), and I had some time. The textbook has been read cover to cover, and it's only week 6 our of 13.  I am currently working on the more 'mechanical' part of the course, namely working on coding texts with NVivo and running queries to get familiar with the software, however I am keeping an eye toward assignment 2.  With Assignment 2 I've decided to work on an alternative option (i.e. not one of the 4 pre-set topics) - with permission of the instructor of course!  I've decided to try to work on as much of the methods section for my dissertation proposal over this summer.  I know that it's a little backwards in that you work on

Curriculum Management as a Supply Chain issue?

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I don't often write about my dayjob - as manager of an academic program. There are probably a lot of interesting and nuanced things to study academically in higher education administration and non-profit management, things that I also find interesting (from time to time) - but I tend to spend most of my time looking at EdTech, pedagogy, language learning, and the like (more so than higher ed administration. Recently I saw a blog post from a friend who is also pursuing a PhD that made me put on my management academician  thinking cap, and it got me in a reflecting mood as far as my dayjob goes. It also brought back fond memories of me being an MBA student in a supply-chain management. The successful running of an academic program is a complex dance between various external (to the academic department) actors, such as the admissions office, the registrar's office, the bursar's office, and the room scheduling office (if your program is on-campus). This is also in additio

Missed Conversation with Laura Gibbs

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A recent hangout I was on talking about online pedagogy with some really cool people :-) Note to self: Ouroboros as a pedagogical symbol...

Hidden Scholarship: reported achievements of academics

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It seems like forever ago since I've read this article by Maha Bali on ProfHacker on Hidden Scholarship †. It's actually been on my radar for a while, but between work and class the mind space for this was not available. In any case, if you haven't read this brief post on ProfHacker it's worthwhile reading. Maha writes about things that go under-reported, or not reported at all when it comes to scholarship by academics.  I think that a lot of things go under-reported, and I think part of it is that they aren't valued as much by our peers out there. One of the things that Maha mentions is peer review.  I am actually pretty happy that an academic social media platform (Publons) is working on this and their social network is based on creating some sort of record of peer review. You can see my profile here as an example. That said, it's really up to the peer reviewer to submit/forward their receipts from peer review systems and then the Publons system will wo

Social and Engaging Practices in Developing Research Skills

A brief presentation that my colleagues and I did last Friday at our university's Teaching & Learning conference (I still remember when we called it the "EdTech Conference" :-)  This time around I listed by credentials as EdD (ABD).  I felt a bit awkward putting my standard (BA, MBA, MS, MEd, MA) - it also wouldn't fit - so since I am close to being ABD I just wrote that.  I think that the two embedded YouTube videos didn't make the google docs-->powerpoint-->slideshare conversion.   Developing research skills for our students from Apostolos K.

Teaching Presence in MOOCs: Perspectives and Learning Design Strategies

Presentation presentation by Suzan Koseoglu at the 2016 Networked Learning Conference (Lancaster, UK) Teaching Presence in MOOCs: Perspectives and Learning Design Strategies from SuzanKG

Comedy meets science: John Oliver this week, on last week.

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I was catching up on my news comedy yesterday and I was delighted to see this as the subject of last week's "last week tonight"

Getting paid in exposure...not!

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One of the items I've wanted to comment on for a while was a blog post posted by friend and colleague Rebecca Hogue .  Rebecca writes that she teaches courses (similar, or the same courses as I do at UMB anyway) and these courses would be well served by a decent eBook that is published (and updated) for the course.  I wholeheartedly agree!  For the past half a decade I've been thinking about trying to put together an edited volume for the introductory course in instructional design†, or just write the book myself. I've been thinking that this should be open access, given my philosophical leanings toward open access for education, however - just like Rebecca - I am not paid to teach full time. I teach because I like it, and I like to mentor others. Writing a book (or putting something edited together) takes up a lot of time and effort, and of course that needs to be maintained.  Expecting that someone will do it for free is not realistic.  It's a good thing that I

Getting beyond rigor

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The other day I got access to my summer course on Blackboard.  With just under 25 days left to go until the start of courses, it's time to look at my old syllabus (from last summer), see what sorts of innovations my colleague (Rebecca) has in her version of the course, and decide how to update my own course.  I had some ideas last summer, but since then the course has actually received an update by means of course title and course objectives, so I need to make sure that I am covering my bases. Concurrently, in another thread, while I was commuting this past week I was listening to some of my saved items in Pocket, and I was reading (listening to) this article on Hybrid Pedagogy by Sean Michael Morris, Pete Rorabaugh and Jesse Stommel titled Beyond Rigor . This article brought me back to thinking more about academic rigor  and what the heck it really means.  I think it's one of those subjects that will get a different answer depending on who you ask.  The authors write that:

NRC01PL...anti-climactic ending?

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It's been a few weeks since I wrote anything about the NRC01PL cMOOC that was running last month, and that I caught up a bit on and wrote a few posts about.  The final week of the course was labelled applications and extension, but I didn't see any content for the course posted.  Not that one necessarily needs content (I think the Rhizo MOOCs showed that), however you do need something. This got me to thinking, and more specifically about Terry Anderson and his interaction equivalency theorem , which... In a nutshell the theory posits that if any one of student-student, student-teacher or student-content interaction is of a high quality, the other two can be reduced or even eliminated without impairing the learning experience–thus creating means of developing and delivering education that is cost affordable for all of us. Peer-to-Peer interaction was a bit problematic for NRC01PL from the start. It seemed that gRSShopper didn't really work, and I only got a few