Finding effective ways to engage teachers and help them take advantage of new technologies, instructional strategies, and content is not easy. The conditions under which teachers are having to work are constantly in flux, and the assessments that teachers must prepare their students to take are often high-stakes, high-pressure. Dr. Angie McQuaig, Chief Academic Officer at Knowledge Delivery

New authoring tools can make creating flash components for customized applications, or shareable repositories of learning objects much easier to do. In this way, some of the early promise of learning objects and LO repositories can be realized, and the high expense plus time lags can be reduced. Welcome to an interview with Robert Penn of Suddenly Smart, an innovator in the area of flash-based

The Launch Pad (#LaunchPad)Sloan-C MERLOT Emerging Technologies Symposium for Online LearningApril 9-11, 2014 in Dallas, TXAs emerging technologies continue to open new opportunities for improving education around the world, increasing the interaction and learning between educators and edtech entrepreneurs becomes more essential.  The gap between the minds that conceptualize and create the tools and the minds who facilitate teaching and learning must be minimized to increase the quality of emerging technologies moving forward.  If constant efforts are not made to bridge this gap, edtech startups will well, in the finessed words of Reynol Junco, "suck."In the past several years, there have been an array of new "spaces" that have brought startups and educators closer together including Educause's Start Up Alley, SXSW LAUNCHedu, and the no fluff, no frills (meant in a good way) events put together by the dynamic community at EdSurge which includes the upcoming K12 EdSurge Tech for Schools Summit in Silicon Valley scheduled for November 2nd.  Each of these events acknowledge that we are all learners.  Entrepreneurs are business people with a quest to be successful and, yes, be profitable but to do so with the goal of developing a product that meets the needs and interests of real teachers and students.  Educators are continuously learning about the newest tools available to them and seeking to identify how they may improve the learning environments they have cultivated for their students.Last year, the Sloan-C MERLOT International Symposium for Emerging Technologies for Online Learning (@ET4Online) stepped into the learning space, as well by crafting the Launch Pad.  It was a new, refreshing change for the conference and one that we are continuing again this year.The 2nd Annual Launch Pad is now open.  Early startups in the edtech space are invited to attend the conference and, this year, learn with top online educators and Michael Staton, of Learn Capital.  If you are an early startup with a product focused on improving online learning, consider applying for the Launch Pad. Applying is free.  Those who are selected will receive a deeply discounted rate to attend and a fabulous array of benefits (see site for details). The Launch Pad application period closes on January 31, 2014. 

Educator.com (http://www.educator.com/) is a site that responds to the needs for content in the high-stakes content areas where learners often need the most help: math, chemistry, biology, and computer science.With high-stakes standardized testing, No Child Left Behind, entrance exams, and outcomes-based assessment, the need for on-demand instructional materials, particularly in math and science,

Last spring I moved from being a consultant and part-time instructor to a full-time employee and part-time instructor and realized I really need to stay in the consulting and teaching arena. It's what keeps me passionate, happy, actively connected and learning.  I made that change in August and feel great about it.However, over a year ago I set up an automated job search using a meta-search job agent called Indeed. It delivers results to my email each evening. Sometimes I look at them, sometimes I don't.  You might ask yourself why on earth I'd bother looking at these job postings when I'm not looking for a job.  Well, because I consider it part of my active learning experience about higher education. I like to see what other types of jobs other colleges, universities, and states are hiring for. This provides a good indication about how other academic organizations are solving problems.  Last night I saw a posting that turned a light on for me.  Improving educational problems with emerging technologiesI teach online for a community college in California and I am thirsty to understand how to improve some of the big challenges the California community college system faces.  For one, how can we, as the largest system of higher education in the nation -- comprised of 112 colleges serving more than 2.5 million students and more than 50,000 faculty (most of whom are part-time) -- fully harness the potential that today's emerging technologies offer?  With about 25% of the state's headcount coming from online classes, the topic of teaching with technology is a provocative one and so are the topics of student success, retention, and access given the state's financial challenges. These are all factors that played into Governor Brown's recent support for MOOCs and the  controversial bill that would grant students credit at California's public institutions of higher ed for completing MOOCs (something that I wrote about here last spring).  All in all, I have been pretty silent about MOOCs through the whirlwind popularity they have experienced in the recent years. Mostly because they have done little to excite me, as a community college educator (read the word educator as "teacher").  I've observed little about a MOOC that can support the diverse needs of community college learners and they undercut the importance and value that student-teacher relationships play in the community college learning experience. Mt. San Jacinto College, one of California's community colleges and the college where I teach part-time, developed a MOOC titled Crafting an Effective Writer: Tools of the Trade this year. It was funded by the Gates Foundation and it was designed to support the writing skills of students as they prepare for college level writing courses.  That's a unique and fresh approach to MOOCs at the 2-year level, as it is clearly a self-directed journey through which a student travels on his or her own to success.But yesterday, I read about Bill Gates' message to more than 2,000 community college leaders at the Association of Community College Trustees' meeting.  He spoke about the benefits that flipped MOOCs could bring to community college students, serving to improve learning and increase access (as there is the possibility of employing this approach to slightly decrease the time spent in class and open more "seat time" for more students).  Ah...now we're getting somewhere.  Despite the intense disdain you'll read in the comments of the Chronicle article about Gates' idea, I think there's merit to this approach.In 2009, before the word "flipped" was ever used, I followed that nagging "itch" one gets when you know there's something about your class that needs to be changed, that just is not right, that is not reflecting your authentic teaching self.  I think we all get that itch but some of us can ignore it more than others.  Mine keeps me up at night when it gets really bad.Vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation It was painful to make the change; I fought it for well over a year.  It's really difficult to put into words how much college professors -- even those who relish risk taking, like myself -- resist the notion of letting go of "the lecture." And encouraging professors to let go of lecturing will be the issue at the the heart of the controversy of embracing the flipped classroom in higher ed.  It will be disguised as many other issues -- but, really, if we look inside ourselves, this will be what's driving the controversy.  I believe we need to address these concerns and talk about them, as ignoring them only makes them worse.  I was scared to death.  I have never felt more vulnerable in my classroom than when I announced to my students I would "not be lecturing...(gulp)."  But as Brene Brown has discovered in her insightful research, vulnerability is at the heart of innovation.  Seems to me we should all be following this itch, not pushing it away if we are truly committed to making changes in teaching and learning.Despite my deep-rooted insecurities, I decided to give it a try. In the spring of 2009 I finally chose to eliminate all the lectures from my face-to-face History of Women in Art class and had my students listen to (or read them -- they had a choice) before coming to class.  They also had to participate in pre-class formative assessments that I designed in VoiceThread.  There's much more to this model and I've presented on it many times and have produced an entire online ePortfolio about it, and it's detailed in the Introduction of my book, Best Practices for Teaching with Emerging Technologies. The flipped model is good teaching For those of you unfamiliar with the flipped model, it's fairly simple. It is based on the concept of making the time that students spend in class with their instructors more active and less passive. Active learning has been at the core of effective learning research for decades. This is key. The flipped classroom fundamentally embraces many of the tenets of good, effective teaching.  Classroom time is spent applying, analyzing, critiquing -- moving up the pyramid of higher order thinking skills.  The lower order thinking skills are fostered outside of class by building a foundation of background knowledge through listening to the lectures and completing a brief online assessment prior to coming to class. The assessment is really key, as it serves to ensure students completed the lectures and also gives the instructor a picture of the class's overall knowledge of key topics and concepts prior to the start of a class.  In the end, class time is spent digging into the topics that are not understood, while those that have been more fully mastered can be filtered out -- this makes all the difference.  Why teach the same thing to everyone everytime?Uses technology to support needs of diverse learnersThe flipped classroom also puts technology to good use by having students view brief videos, curated around key topics, prior to coming to class.  The format of video is important, as it provides students with the ability to pause, rewind, and replay -- features live lectures do not offer. These features are like built-in accommodations for students with learning disabilities like dyslexia, which are more common in student populations at public 2-year institutions.  I would advocate for these videos to come along with a text transcript, as well.  When I provided my students with the option to view a visual enhanced podcast or read a transcript, my evaluation of the students' learning at the end of the semester revealed that 40% chose to read the lecture, 15% listened to the lecture, 30% did both, and 15% toggled between reading and listening throughout the semester. What amazed me here is that 30% of the students chose to listen and read at the same time (view video of student data results overview here).  I noticed some of my students doing this before class and when I asked them why, they shared that it really helped them to remember the content when they could hear my voice and highlight the text or make notes in the margins simultaneously.As I reflect back on it, the results of this experiment were dazzling.  Not only did I feel more engaged with my class and passionate about my teaching than I had in many years but my students reported significant gains in deep learning and the multiple methods of representing the content (reading or listening to lectures and students completed formative assessments about the lecture content prior to class in VoiceThreads that were visual and supported voice commenting) helped students to meet the learning objectives more effectively. You can listen to a 20-minute audio interview with me and three of my students here.Moving from experimentation to focused pilotsBut little traction has been made to systemically research the effects of flipped classrooms at the community college level in California and, admittedly, expecting community college faculty to develop their own online lectures would be rough.  Few community colleges I know of are equipped with the instructional design staff needed to support faculty through this time of endeavor.  And there are benefits to curating a collection of existing videos from different subject matter experts for students to view.What does this discussion about my flipped classroom experiment back in 2009 have to do with looking for a job?Well, yesterday in my Indeed job search results I saw a posting for a position at Maryland University College's new Center for Innovation in Learning for an Online Learning Innovation Scientist. Key responsibilities include: Take responsibility for conceptualizing, proposing, and directing innovation pilots and/or assisting in collaborative multi-unit pilots.  For each pilot assist with a research and evaluation framework tied to adult learning and use scientific principles to support  (a) learning innovation, (b) technology tools to improve the efficiency or quality the learning experience; (c) evidence based non cognitive improvements for the comprehensive learning experience. Document and disseminate the results of research and/or development projects through publication and presentation.  Publication includes peer-review journals, peer-review conference proceedings, patents, books and book chapters, and other print media. Presentation may be at international, national, or regional conferences, and internal audiences. Create a culture of understanding learning science throughout the pilots and those collaborating units.As I reflect on these two methods of improving education through the use of emerging technologies (the example shared from Maryland and MOOC bill in California), there's a big difference between creating a center for learning innovations and staffing it with high quality researchers and educators who are dedicated and trained to examine and study the effects of emerging technologies on learning, while collaborating with regional/statewide constituents to collect, evaluate, share, and reflect on metrics than having politicians react to a national trend, create a bill at the state level, and expect institutions of higher education to follow suit.Thanks for reading. What are your thoughts about flipped MOOCs for community college students?

What is the snowball effect?  When there's a systemic problem within an organization that creates a particular way of thinking and prevents organizational members from seeing valuable opportunities for improvement.Today, I read an article at Education Week about the need to make schools "socioemotional places." I couldn't agree more with the main point of the article -- that education today has lost its focus on cultivating the socioemotional development of children, as standardized assessments have taken over the spotlight in the recent decade. I touched upon a similar topic in this related blog post back in April, 2012, which extends the relevance of this topic to college instruction.But what I disagree with is how the article snowballs online learning into this very broad problem.  The authors state, "[Online learning] has several potential disadvantages, including: removing or minimizing the human interactions that are important to real learning; taking the joy and camaraderie out of education; isolating and limiting students’ voices and involvement; and making education lifeless and dull."  I agree that this can be true...but it's true for any type of class, depending on how it is designed and taught.  I would argue that if an online class is designed effectively and taught by an engaged, active instructor, an online class holds more potential to foster the socioemotional skills for more students in the class than in a face-to-face classroom.  In an online class, all students have a voice and more shy, reluctant students are likely to blossom and flourish.  The words we use to frame topics are powerful and, as such, educators should recognize the interactive, human, and personalized learning experiences that online classes can bring to students -- experiences that may be difficult for some students to find in face-to-face classes.  This is a fragile moment in education and the conversations we have about online learning are critical.  Thirty two percent of college students is enrolled in at least one online class. Online class enrollments are increasing at the K12 level too, following the expansion we have seen in higher education. When an online class is designed with technologies that are collaborative and involve asynchronous voice and/or video interactions and facilitated by an active, engaged instructor who is visible, supportive, and provides frequent feedback to learners (in voice and video), learners are often more compelled to share, reflect, take risks, and feel like they are part of a connected community.Recently, I asked some of my online students, "What makes an online class feel more human?" Here are some of their responses (shared with permission):Join me for a free webinar this Wed, 10/9Humanizing Your Online Class 12pm Pacific/ 3pm Eastern Register here: https://events-na3.adobeconnect.com/content/connect/c1/1002564123/en/events/event/shared/default_template/event_landing.html?sco-id=1234175794

Finding the best way to incorporate social learning communities within an e-learning environment can be challenging. Dr. Tina Sartori, Turning Technologies, has addressed the challenge with a combination of robust instructional design and innovative technology.Welcome to an interview with Sartori, who addresses how to develop social learning communities that are effective in a variety of

E-Learning Queen readers may download a free pdf of E-Learner Survival Guide, a collection of articles, insights, instructional strategies, lesson plans, and more. For individuals who would like a printed copy, it is available in perfect-bound paperback at Amazon.com. This 325-page book has the low price of $26.95. E-Learner Survival Guide: This broad reaching collection of essays on e

I have presented many webinars in my life ... but yesterday's Inside Higher Ed webinar, Humanizing Your Online Class, was pretty special. I saw the attendance number tick past 600 at one point! The question stream was dynamic and the Twitter chat was fabulous too -- thanks to Whitney Kilgore for Storifying the Twitter chat here and to Academic Partnerships for sponsoring the webinar, as a kick off for their free Human Element (#humanmooc) micro mooc (learn more here). If you missed the webinar and would like to view it, the video archive is embedded below and may also be viewed here.Some of my takeaways from the conversation were the concerns expressed by faculty about the amount of time it takes to "humanize" an online class in accordance with the examples I showcased in the webinar. My examples exemplify the use of free to low cost and easy-to-use tools which, to me empower faculty who have little to no technology experience.  For example, creating a warm, friendly welcome video with a tool like Animoto is really something that can be done by anyone (really ... try it! and I bet you'll even have so much fun doing it that you'll make another one...maybe for someone you care about).As I reflect more deeply on the conversation in the webinar, I continue to ask myself one thing. Should the question at hand be, "How to humanize an online class?" or is the question we should be reflecting more deeply on, "Why aren't online classes more human?" Are the real issues lack of technological ability or lack of time? Or are these issues deeply entangled with more sensitive topics that are generally undiscussable? For example, how vulnerable professors feel when revealing our personal stories, "real" expressions, and relating to and with our students on a more equal level in asynchronous voice or video exchanges (all important to community building)? I don't have the answer to this question but it's one that I'm thinking a lot about right now. And it has me replaying Brene Brown's fabulous Ted Talk over and over in my mind, as I think all members of higher education (including students) need to embrace her research driven finding that vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation and creativity. Get the Goody Bag of web resources here. View the slides (with built-in videos) on Slideshare here. The link to the video is here.

Developing effective e-learning content and instructional strategies for deployment at a massive scale, such as that of Florida State College at Jacksonville, can materially change the lives of many students who otherwise would not be able to continue their education and training. There are challenges, though, and the endeavor requires planning, coordination, and a willingness to be aggressive