Effective assessment in an online course is not easy to achieve. Courageous developers have tackled online quizzes. It is interesting to look behind the scenes and see the challenges. Welcome to an interview with Sameer Bhatia, founder of ProProfs.com.1. What is your name and your involvement in e-learning? I am Sameer Bhatia, the founder of ProProfs.com, an online learning community. Prior to

by Jim Bumgardner CC-BY-NC-SAJoin me for a Center Hangout on Air this Wed, February 5th from 4-5pm PST with +Kathryn Damm and +Dean Patti Flanigan of Saddleback College as we dig into the important topic of:Faculty Websites: Why They're Important and How to Make One NowKathy and Patti will share experiences from their institution about why faculty are encouraged to create individual websites and I'll showcase how to create your own free educator account on Populr.me and adopt a simple and gorgeous template for your very own faculty website. You'll be amazed at what you'll create in just a few minutes!  RSVP to the Event and view the Hangout here: http://tiny.cc/FacultyWebsitesThe Center is a next-generation online learning community supporting California's 112 community college brought to you by @ONE. All Center events are free and open to the public.  Join The Center's Google+ Community:  gplus.to/TheCenterFollow The Center on Twitter:   @Center_Ed

Understanding how informal learning occurs is critical in e-learning. Welcome to an interview with Sarah Elaine Eaton, whose research has focused on how, where, and when people learn in informal settings including e-learning and mobile learning. 1. What is your name, affiliation, and connection with e-learning?Sarah Elaine Eaton, Principal Consultant of Eaton International Consulting Inc. and

In case you're wondering why you should register for Sloan-C/MERLOT's 7th Annual International Symposium of Emerging Technologies for Online Learning in Dallas this April 9-1, 2014, here's 7 darn good reasons.Early bird registration closes February 10th. Hope to see you in Dallas!

Lifelong e-learning is essential in one's professional development and career trajectory. Much of the ongoing training and development is available in a situated learning context, which is facilitated by the existence of integrated technology and content. Bringing the elements together is often challenging, but has been made possible because of the vision and sense of mission of individuals who

College degrees and certificate programs are constantly evolving to meet the ongoing and emerging needs of people seeking to keep their skills up to date. The recent economic crises, combined with an awareness of human impact on the environment have led to a new surge of innovation and new programs. Here are new directions in degrees and certificates programs.Environmental LeadershipEven before

Yesterday's Center Hangout was fabulous so I wanted to share the archive front and center on my blog.  This topic relates curiously to a post I wrote back in June of 2010.The Value of Open-Web Faculty Websites  +Dean Patti Flanigan , Dean of Online Learning, and +Kathryn Damm , Professor of Psychology, both from Saddleback College spent some time discussing the values of open-web faculty websites.  "Open-web" differs from content pages that faculty create and post inside an LMS. Content stored in an LMS requires students to have a password to access or at the very least (in the case of a course that is set to "guest access") requires a particular set of skills be understand how to locate the information. Open-web faculty websites are simple links that become most valuable when they are woven into the fabric of the student enrollment experience. Increasing student access to instructors and courses before registration occurs, improves student preparedness and satisfaction, especially in a social, web 2.0 world where most students rely on anonymous Rate My Professor reviews anyway.Weaving Faculty Websites into the Student ExperienceTo demonstrate this, Patti and Kathy discussed the faculty profile system developed at Saddleback which provides a basic webpage to each and every faculty member.  This basic page is linked directly into the online class listings. As a student is scanning for classes, she simply may click the link to learn more about that profess. Now what is on that page certainly varies but, as Kathy demonstrates in the video, a faculty member may choose to include a link on the profile page to his own personal website (which may be institutionally hosted or not). Kathy, for example, developed her website using Google Sites. What's important is that the site be accessible to everyone -- students (remember, videos must be captioned) and the instructor (there should be no barriers to making edits to one's webpage).A Strategy for Improving Student Success?Patti reflected on the higher than average online retention and success rates that Saddleback College has, which, to me, is admirable.  While statistically there is no way to validate a causation between the faculty websites and the higher rates, I am certain I could find a steady flow of online faculty who do not have this type of fabulous support system that would argue there is a correlation.  When classes are in short supply -- as we know they are at California Community Colleges -- doesn't it make sense to allow a learner to understand the personality of the instructor (through a video on a website), the requirements of the class, and other essentials before registering?  Time and time again, I see students drop my own class upon gaining access to the course materials.  Replicating this Saddleback model, which includes supporting faculty with both a place to link a website within the class registration system and an institutionally provided webpage that may be augmented by a faculty member with an external website link, and researching its impact on student success seems like a worthy experimentIn the second half of the Hangout, you will see me demo how to create your own beautiful faculty website using a brand new tool called Populr.me. Here is a link to my own faculty site created with Populr.me. The video will show you how to make one just like it!Sign up for your free Populr.me PRO educator account here:  http://populr.me/coupons/poppinteacherWant to chat about this topic? Join in on a #CCCLEARN Twitter chat on the topic of Faculty Websites next Thursday, February 13, 2014 at 3pm PST.

New degree and certificate programs that focus on sustainability and sustainable business continue to gain traction in the economy, particularly as there continues to be a need for energy efficiency, cost-savings, and positive public relations.Many of the online schools require capstone projects and extensive research papers. For example, Anaheim University offers a graduate diploma in

I continue to be in awe about the options educators have today for simple, free tools that allow us to create video content in minutes -- with no video editing or recording skills whatsoever.Seriously...it's amazing!Not too long ago, I had heard about Movenote, an emerging tool that enables a user to upload PDFs and images and record video from her webcam at the same time. The video is sync'd with the slides, providing an incredibly simple method of creating a straightforward recording of a presentation.Yesterday, I received a pleasant Speakpipe voice message from one of Movenote's representatives who had seen me Tweet about their product. They told me about cool new feature they had just released that integrates Movenote with Gmail. I was intrigued. Here's the deal - if you use Chrome and Gmail, you can install the free Movenote Chrome app for Gmail and it will install a button directly in your Gmail interface that, when clicked on, will launch Movenote. From there, you can upload your content, record your video, and paste the URL directly into an email and send it. BAM! Integrated workflow. Nice.  Click here to see a video of the new Gmail to Movenote workflow.As for me, I still needed to experiment with Movenote. So I created a tutorial -- hhmmmm, what to share? What to share? I know! Yesterday, I was excited to see how simple it had become to launch and share either a Hangout on Air or a good ol' plain Hangout (which is basically a group video call) in Google+. To me, this process has been confusing for awhile and it especially took me quite a bit to understand how to invite people to my Hangouts if they were not in my Circles. So, I created a tutorial about "A Simple Way to Start a Hangout." This tutorial does not cover Hangouts on Air, only Hangouts (there is no recorded or public element in Hangouts).  I hope this is useful in understanding what Movenote looks like, as well as learning how to start a Hangout!Rule of thumb: When created any video, aim for 5 minutes in length. If you go over by one or two minutes, you're ok. If you are closer to 10, you should probably cut that content into two videos.In short, I found Movenote incredibly easy to use. The thing that took me the longest was creating my slides (simple annotated screenshots I made with the help of my friendly essential, FREE tool companion, Jing).  After I recorded with Movenote, the video processed quickly, I had the ability to copy the link, I was provided with embed code in different size options, simple social sharing buttons, analytics to see the number of views through each share method, and there is also an option to download my Movenote video to a non-watermarked .mp4 file. So I could use Movenote to create my video content and upload the videos into YouTube ... which, honestly, is more my workflow.  Once videos are in YouTube they can be captioned using YouTube's online captioning tool (listen, pause, type, repeat).I don't see any negatives here, folks.  Are you using Movenote? What are your experiences?I think this would be a great tool to have students generate simple, videos too.

For many -- not just those with special needs -- participating in an online course is very difficult without assistive technologies. Augmentive and alternative communication products can help students with disabilities. It is useful, however, to look at some assistive technologies as effective for learners who have specific learning preferences and who may benefit from being able to access