Aurasma 2-ways (or 3!) Register Here For The Region XI Presenation When a chef says, "shrimp 2-ways," my heart goes pitter patter.  Having options is always awesome!  Quite simply, when we invest choice in nearly anything, it makes that thing better.  Think about it: Neapolitan ice cream, Chinese buffets, betting on red or black, Republicans or Democrats (just kidding), or, more recently, iPhone 5c/5s. You get the idea! Life is better with choice.  Aurasma is a wonderful app that stands on its own (pitter), but it’s so versatile that you can add choice to it to make it even better (patter)!   We would like to introduce the idea of Aurasma 2-ways.  In the classroom, those additional options allow for  differentiation and learning at high cognitive levels with Bloom’s. In ALL cases you will be using the Aurasma app to view the images, videos, resources, lessons, etc.  We have layered over the following jpegs. This is "Layered Learning" at its best. This is the ARevolution! (Don’t forget that Aurasma works like Twitter: Tap the magnifying icon at the bottom of the screen, search for & follow the Thrasymachus, Compher Social Sciences, and Northwest HS Channels to view all of our "Auras"). As an aside, enjoy #ARevolution the magazine on Flipboard at http://flip.it/PdnzK Tourist and France 2-ways 1 way:  Use a map of France to immerse your students in a 3D Sphere/TourWrist visual of France.  This is at the Knowledge level for Bloom’s.  Check out the original 1 way France post here http://thrasymakos.wordpress.com/2013/06/07/combining-aurasma-and-tourwrist/. 2 ways: Add a link within the Sphere/TourWrist visual to extend learning. How would the scene just viewed be relevant to the Revolutionary war? How would this scene be a direct contract to the time period of the French Revolution? Write a narrative describing the type of person who would live in the place you just visited digitally.  Make sure to take into account the history lessons of the last week and explain how you justify your character with relevant academic vocabulary. There could also be questions that link the reading for the day to the augmented visual to model after the STARR in English and Social Studies. Imagine how helpful this could be for a new English Learner in your classroom.  You have now arrived at the application or creation level of Bloom’s.  BAM! Solar System 3-ways 1 way:  This one has over 24 layered placed on it. Each planet can either be single tapped or double tapped to send students to different videos or resources. Tap the bottom left hand corner for our contact information. Tap the black areas for special surprises!!! Check out the original post here http://thrasymakos.wordpress.com/2013/06/21/a-little-ignite13-extra/ Bloom’s = Knowledge Wow factor=HUGE 2 ways:  Student Centered Learning / Project Based Learning Divide the class into groups.  Have each group research each planet (body systems, biomes, states).  The team will create a webpage visual with their acquired knowledge.  NISD teachers have access to this within NetSchool (Moodle).  Bloom’s = CREATE! 3 ways:  Students can write questions on their task.  A third link (layer) can be added to the webpage that leads to a check for understanding.  The questions can be placed in adaptive mode in Moodle for inclusion students.  Bloom’s = CREATE! Register Here For The PresentationFiled under: In The Classroom

I’ve just attended the ICT education conference in Thurles, Ireland, affectionately known by the locals as the ‘Trip to Tipp’. I ran a one-day Learning Design workshop on Friday, with about 16 participants. There was lots of interaction and great discussions. The conference was held on Saturday with teachers from across Ireland attending. There were three keynotes - me, Catherine Cronon and Martha. The rest of the day was taken up by four parellel sessions. The junior minister for Training and Skills Cairon Connon gave an excellent talk at the beginning of the conference. It was clear that he had a passion for education and saw technologies as potentially having an transformative impact. It is a shame that more ministers and policy makers don’t attend these kind of conferences. I was particularly impressed that he stayed for a significant amount of the conference. Catherine Cronin’s keynote resonated well with the conference theme, she explored the concept of student voice and experience. She posed the question ‘How can we use ICT to facilitate a paradigm shift and enable learners to be creative users of technology?’ She traced the latter back to the work of J. Kozol in the early nineties, in terms of student voice: sound, presence, participation, power and agency. She showed a wonderful video created by a young student in Kinvara, with students talking about their preferred ways of learning (active, collaborative, group-based, inquiry-based. etc.) and what they didn’t like about school. It made me realise yet again how important the student voice is, and that we really need to rethink current restrictive educational practices and focus more on making learning engaging and meaningful. She also referenced Bonnie Stewart and Howard Reingold’s work on digital identity. It was great to meet Joe Dale who I follow on Twitter and as is often the case I felt as if I had known him for years. The highlight of the conference for me was probably his session on audio tools and Apps. He gave us a whistle stop tour demonstrating how to record and play back audio; lots of great things to explore. After the session I recorded him giving a summary of the session, using one of the tools he mentioned, Audioboo. Tools he demonstrated included: vacoroo, audioboo, qr code, croak.it, cue prompter tele script, audacity and soundcloud. More details are available at: Joedale.typepad.com. The conference had a Youth Media Team, who did a series of sessions with presenters. They live blogged these, along with pictures and their impressions of the conference. In the closing session, they reported back on their experience and showed a short visual presentation representing the conference. I was very impressed with them and it was lovely to hear their feedback. What particularly struck me was one of them saying that there was probably an App for anything you could find in a book! So overall an excellent conference and a great bunch of people. Thanks to Pam O’Brien for the invitation!

In this LMScast Joshua Millage and Christopher Badgett discuss how the LifterLMS WordPress learning management system plugin stacks up against the competition in online WordPress LMS reviews. If you are in the market for course development software, you will want to take notes on this LMScast to help you in evaluating your choices. The main focus of the LifterLMS development team is to know what our customers want by studying reviews and gathering direct feedback. We watch for trends in what people are looking for in a course design platform and build those elements into our frequent upgrades. A primary interest for course developers is ease of use and a minimal investment of time required for course creation. Online reviews indicate that users find the LifterLMS Course Builder interface extremely quick and easy for building their courses. They also like the overall visual and navigational design of the tool. When you choose your LMS, you want to make a good decision so that you won’t have to reconstruct your courses in a new tool if your first choice doesn’t work out. One of the best ways to make the right choice is to find a tool developed by capable, responsive people who are passionate about education, and are also diverse in their knowledge and experience, like the LifterLMS team. We sponsor a forum for users and monitor it consistently for feedback on new options our users want, and then build those capabilities into the platform upgrades. Another important consideration is scalability. You may only be interested in offering free courses at first, and most LMS platforms are fine for that. But what if your free courses do well, and you want to offer paid courses? Before you make a decision based on cost or immediate usability, think about what you might want to do with your online courses 6 months to a year from now. Make sure you choose a LMS platform that you can grow with and that is constantly evolving. User reviews also show that people love the LifterLMS eCommerce system, because it is easy for course developers to set up. More importantly, it is quick, simple, and seamless for students to purchase courses with its minimal interface. Ease of purchasing significantly boosts conversion rates. The LifterLMS platform also includes an abundance of options for customizing and integration that course developers enjoy, because they can create and expand on a variety of lessons, quizzes, certificates, media, and other elements that are unique, relevant, accessible, and attractive. You aren’t locked into fixed templates or bundled plugins with limited options, like you could be with other development software. The LifterLMS team encourages course creators to compare all other LMS development software to ours, because we are certain you will find LifterLMS to be the best course building tool on the market. You can read a variety of LifterLMS reviews in our recent blog post. We also offer a 30-day money-back guarantee if you buy the software and decide you don’t love it. You can try a demo of LifterLMS for free and see for yourself what it can do for you. Remember that you can post comments and subscribe to our newsletter for updates, developments, and future episodes of LMScast. Also, another thing is if you want to engage with us at a deeper level, you can go check out our Facebook group LMScast Confidential. Thank you for joining us. Joshua: Hello, Everyone. Welcome back with another episode of LMScast. I’m Joshua Millage, and I’m joined today with Christopher Badgett. Today we’re talking about WordPress LMS reviews. Chris, it’s on you, Man. My head is so into Lifter, I don’t even know what else is available. Chris: We’re starting to get a lot of WordPress LMS reviews for LifterLMS from people in the WordPress community, the WP community, and other bloggers and such. It got me thinking, because we try to really get inside the mind of our ideal customer, the person who wants a WordPress-powered learning management system. When I look at these reviews that other people are writing about our product or other WordPress LMS plugins and WordPress LMS themes, I’m just looking at what people are looking at, because a learning management system has a lot of pieces to it. What are these WordPress LMS reviews focusing on? And I’ve noticed some trends. One thing that people really like is our WordPress LMS system course builder. We have a video on YouTube about how to build an online course in 3 minutes. I can see people are really focusing in on how quick, easy, and painless it is to build an online course with our course-builder interface. I find that fascinating. That that’s kind of what people gravitate to first, it’s the actual course creation, maybe even more than the powerful eCommerce cart system. I just find it interesting, and other people, thing that people like is just the design. People are doing a lot of screenshots of the user interface. There’s a lot of different angles of looking at your student, at your course, at your lesson, at your quiz. People are taking a lot of screenshots and talking about that, with LifterLMS and other with WordPress learning management solutions. I just find it interesting in how people focus in WordPress LMS reviews. Joshua: That is very interesting to me. I understand why though. Because once you start down the path with a WordPress LMS system, it’s difficult to change. You don’t want to take the time to re-input content or anything like that, so you want to make a good decision on the front end. I would say there’s two things. I’m completely biased, and I’m not ashamed of it, but you want to work with a team that’s passionate about education, who’s pushing the limits of what WordPress can do. That’s us in a nutshell. Just look at our product offering versus the other options out there. The other thing I would say is that you want to look at where you’re headed in six months, where you’re headed in a year. Maybe you only want to do free courses, but what happens when you want to do paid courses? How easy is it to implement a paid course versus a free course? If you’re looking at free courses, I think the beauty of Lifter is little bit less, because you can accomplish things with other plugins if you’re just doing a free course. However, what do you want to do after that? What do you want to do next? Actually, I kind of take that back, because I’ve gotten so many emails this week about people saying, "I’ve tried Zippy Courses, or I’ve tried WP Courseware, or I’ve tried LearnDash, or I’ve tried Sensei, and your course-builder is by far the easiest to use and implement and structure. I created my course so quickly. It’s amazing. Thank you for creating it." They’re right, because it is the most awesome course builder ever. It’s interesting, even at the free level. I think people can really benefit from that. When you’re looking, and you’re reviewing yourself for a plugin, Chris, what are those things that you really look for? Chris: I think that’s a good point you bring up about the team. Another thing behind the plugin, and there’s a lot of great people behind the other WordPress learning management system solutions. One of the things that I really value and appreciate about our team at LifterLMS is how diversified we are. We’re not just one or two people. We’re a bunch of people with a bunch of different skill sets. They have to converge on solving this problem of building online courses and selling them and making them engaging. The team is really important, like you mentioned. The other thing is the rate of change in iteration. For example, I saw a WordPress LMS review go up the other day that someone had taken screenshots before our course-builder was in place. I was like, "Oh, they’re not showing the latest part of our course builder, but you know what? That’s okay. That’s our issue for just changing so fast. We’re just evolving the product based on customer feedback. I think that’s something that’s important to look at is how quickly are people iterating. Are they listening to customers? We have a whole forum dedicated specifically to feature requests. We can’t do every single thing that comes in, but we’re there looking for trends of like what do our customers want? Let’s build that. That is another part. Another part is the eCommerce system. If you want to sell online courses, it’s really important to make that user experience of purchasing a course or a membership that contains a collection of courses very easy. I love it. We were doing a demo of LifterLMS yesterday with somebody, and I was just proud when the eCommerce screen came up. We had the Stripe integration in the demo, and there was this simple little credit card box. I love WooCommerce, but there’s all these fields when you’re trying to check out. When in our demo when we were buying that course, it was just credit card number, the 3-digit code, the expiration date, done. If you’re into optimizing conversion and having a seamless, easy, user experience, I think it’s important to look at that sort of thing when you’re evaluating a learning management system. That carries over not just from eCommerce, but also to the lessons, to the quizzes, to all the LMS elements with certificates. How easy is it to use, but at the same time, in the WordPress learning management system ecosystem, people want customization. Everybody wants to do things differently. For example, in certificates, we make it so you can switch out your certificate background. You can put video in your questions in your quizzes. You can create your own badges. You’re not locked in. We built our own quiz system which can be further developed upon, whereas some other learning management systems out there, they just bundle in WP-Pro-Quiz plugin in it, so now you’re locked, and there’s a dependency. We have our own non-dependent system that’s clean and extendable without dependency. It’s all those types of things, and of course we’re biased towards LifterLMS. We encourage you to check out all the other options. Joshua: One thing I want to say is we’ve got a 30-day guarantee, money-back guarantee. If you come try it out, if you don’t like it, just send us an email, and we’ll refund your money. We refund as soon as we get a request, we refund it within 24 hours, unless it’s a weekend, and it might be 48 hours, but very quickly is my point. We’re not trying to keep money away, but we really want people to come and check it out and encourage you to really take it for a spin. Chris: Yeah. Do a Google search for WordPressLMS reviews and see what’s out there. Like Josh said, if you want to be really detailed and take things for a test drive, you’ve got to buy some stuff and set them up. Buy the different solutions. Try them out and see what you think. Joshua: Absolutely. Cool. This has been a fun episode, Chris. I just want to let everyone know they can check this episode out along with all the others at LMScast.com and we’d love to hear your feedback on this episode. It’ll be on the Home page. You can just click on it. Leave us a comment. Also, another thing is if you want to engage with us at a deeper level, you can go check out our Facebook group which I believe is LMScast Confidential. Chris: That’s right. Joshua: Cool. We have some fun discussions over there. Thank you Everyone for listening, and we’ll see you next week. The post WordPress LMS Reviews and LifterLMS appeared first on LMScast.

#Facebook Experiments With Disappearing Posts http://t.co/wiK0JENSTM #digcit #esafety #edchat #socialmedia #techblog — ICTPHMS (@ICTPHMS) September 12, 2014

CampTech Meeting at Region XI (Ft. Worth, Tx). Teachers are all about resources. We know our discipline and most of us know how to engage students in our discipline at high cognitive levels…now, give us resources to be even better instructors! Once a PLC/PLN cynic, I wholeheartedly see the necessity of trading ideas with other professionals. Even if those teachers challenge my approach to education (which is uncomfortable, but does induce self questioning and growth), the exchange of ideas with other serious thinkers produces a fertile firmament for units and lessons to grow out of. Via Twitter, workshops, conferences, and brief conversations our school’s hallways I look forward to exchanges. It’s fun, believe it or not! Recently, our IT team visited Ft. Worth, Texas for a "Camp Tech" put together by Region XI. We had a great time, met new people, and were introduced to innovated ways to do old things as well as some of the latest apps, websites, and approaches for ed-tech integration. Here’s what we got… http://www.esc11.net/site/Default.aspx?PageID=4719Filed under: In The Classroom Tagged: Ft. Worth, Region XI

http://tinyurl.com/nde72pc  EFQUEL are currently running a twelve-week series of blog posts on MOOCs,[1] I am due to write a post in a couple of week’s time, this blog post is a draft, comments welcome! This post argues that the current discourse around the concept of xMOOCs (primarily based around interaction with content and essentially adopting a behaviourist learning approach), and cMOOCs (which focus on harnessing the power of social media and interaction with peers, adopting a connectivist learning approach), is an inadequate way of describing the variety of MOOCs and the ways in which learners engage with them. It will introduce an alternative means of categorising MOOCs, based on their key characteristics. It will describe how this can be used as part of the 7Cs of Learning Design framework (Conole 2013), to design more pedagogically informed MOOCs, which enhances the learner experience and ensure quality assurance.   There are a number of general teaching and learning national quality agencies. Specifically, in relation to quality and e-learning, EFQUEL[2] is Europe’s professional body for quality in e-learning. EFQUEL’s mission ‘to promote excellence and innovation in education in order to achieve qualitative learning opportunities in Europe and beyond’.[3] A fundamental aspect of ensuring a good learner experience is the quality of the course. It is important to distinguish between three main aspects of quality: quality audit, quality assurance and quality enhancement. In general quality can be defined as ‘the standard of something as measured against other things of a similar kind; the degree of excellence of something: quality of life’.[4] Therefore arguably quality in e-learning is the degree to which it measure up to ‘good learning’ (although that might be construed as a somewhat contentious statement). It certainly points to the notion of excellence and worth. Quality assurance mechanisms are now requirements in most formal educational institutions and indeed many countries have a requirement for institutions to undergo externally reviewed quality audits on a regular basis. Institutional quality audit aims ‘to contribute, in conjunction with other mechanisms, to the promotion and enhancement of high-quality in teaching and learning’.[5] The Quality Assurance Agency in the UK describes quality assurance as  ‘the means through which an institution ensures and confirms that the conditions are in place for students to achieve the standards set by it or by another awarding body’ (QAA 2004), and quality enhancement as ‘the process of taking deliberate steps at institutional level to improve the quality of learning opportunities…. Quality enhancement is therefore seen as an aspect of institutional quality management that is designed to secure, in the context of the constraints within which individual institutions operate, steady, reliable and demonstrable improvements in the quality of learning opportunities’  (QAA 2006). Ehlers et al. (Ehlers, Ossiannilsson et al. 2013) argue that quality is very much the condition which determines how effective and successful learning can take place. They go on to pose the following questions in relation to the quality of MOOCs: What are MOOCs actually aiming at? Can the quality of MOOCs be assessed in the same way as any defined university course with traditional degree awarding processes? Or do we have to take into account a different type of objective with MOOC learners? Are the learners mostly interested in only small sequences of learning, tailored to their own individual purpose, and then sign off and move to other MOOCs because their own learning objective was fulfilled? Discussing MOOCs and quality, Downes argues that: When we are evaluating a tool, we evaluate it against its design specifications; mathematics and deduction tell us from there that it will produce its intended outcome. It is only when we evaluate the use of a tool that we evaluate against the actual outcome. So measuring drop-out rates, counting test scores, and adding up student satisfaction scores will not tell us whether a MOOC was successful, only whether this particular application of this particular MOOC was successful in this particular instance (Downes 2013). Therefore quality is a fundamental facet that needs to be considered in relation to both the design and delivery of MOOCs. We need to develop better metrics to understand the way in which learners are interacting with MOOCs and hence their experience of them. Whilst mechanisms to ensure quality are well established in formal education institutions, such mechanisms are not in place, certainly not in any formal sense, for MOOCs. And arguably this is a key issue that needs to be address if MOOCs are going to valuable and viable learning experiences and be sustainable in the longer term. As mentioned earlier, to date, MOOCs have been classified as either xMOOCs or cMOOCs. I want to argue that such a classification is too simplistic and in this section put forward an alternative mechanism for describing the nature of MOOCs. I want to suggest that a better classification of MOOCs is in terms of a set of twelve dimensions: the degree of openness, the scale of participation (massification), the amount of use of multimedia, the amount of communication, the extent to which collaboration is included, the type of learner pathway (from learner centred to teacher-centred and highly structured), the level of quality assurance, the extent to which reflection is encouraged, the level of assessment, how informal or formal it is, autonomy, and diversity. The last two are taken from Downes (2010). MOOCs can then be measured against these twelve dimensions (Table 1). The following MOOCs are shown to illustrate how different MOOCs map to these twelve dimensions: 1.     Connectivism and Connective Learning 2011 (CCK).[6] The course took part over twelve weeks. The course uses a variety of technologies, for example, blogs, Second Life, RSS Readers, UStream, etc. Course resources were provided using gRSShopper and online seminars delivered using Elluminate. Participants were encouraged to use a variety of social media and to connect with peer learners, creating their own Personal Learning Environment and network of co-learners. 2.     Introduction to Artificial Intelligence (AI) 2011 (CS221).[7] The course ran over three months and included feedback and a statement of accomplishment. A small percentage of participants enrolled registered for the campus-based Stanford course. The course was primarily based around interactive multimedia resources. The course is now based on the Audacity platform. 3.     OLDS (Learning Design) (OLDS) 2013.[8] The course ran over eight weeks, with a ninth reflection week. It was delivered using Google Apps, the main course site being built in Google Drive, Google forums and Hangouts were also used. Cloudworks[9] was used as a space for participants to share and discuss their course artefacts and to claim credit for badges against course achievements. 4.     Openness and innovation in elearning (H817).[10] The course is part of the Masters in Open and Distance Education offered by the Open University UK. H817 runs between February and October 2013 months, however the MOOC component of the course consists of 100 learning hours spread over seven weeks from March 2013 and is open to a wider audience than those registered on the OU course. The course adopts an ‘activity-based’ pedagogy. There is an emphasis on communication through blog postings and the forum.  Participants have the opportunity to acquire badges for accomplishments. 5.     Introduction to Openness in Education (OE).[11] The course tutor advocates that "learning occurs through construction, annotation and maintenance of learning artifacts," which is the philosophy that underpins the design of the course. Participant could acquire badges for various accomplishments. Table 1: Mapping 5 courses to the twelve dimensions of MOOCs Dimension Low Medium High Open   H817, OE, AI CCK, OLDS Massive OLDS, H817, OE CCK AI          Use of multimedia   CCK, OLDS, H817, OE AI Degree of communication AI OLDS, H817, OE CCK Degree of collaboration AI CCK, OLDS, OE H817           Learning pathway CCK OLDS, H817, OE AI Quality Assurance CCK AI, OLDS, OE H817 Amount of reflection AI OLDS, OE CCK Certification CCK[12] OLDS, AI OE Formal learning AI, CCK OLDS H817, OE Autonomy   H817, OE CCK, OLDS, AI Diversity   H817, AI, OLDS CCK, OE The table demonstrates that, in terms of the twelve dimensions, the five MOOCs illustrate examples of low, medium and high degrees of each. I would argue that at a glance this classification framework gives a far better indication of the nature of each MOOC than the simple classification as xMOOCs and cMOOCs. The MOOC criteria described in this blog fits under the Conceptualise C of the 7Cs of Learning Design framework. It can be use to plan the design of the MOOC against these twelve criteria. Table 2 shows how these criteria can be used to characterise a Continuing Professional Development course for Medics. The course is informal and is aimed at Medics in a local authority in the UK. Table 2: Example of using the MOOC criteria in the design of a course Dimension Degree of evidence Open High - The course is built using open source tools and participants are encouraged to share their learning outputs using the creative commons license. Massive Low - The course is designed for Continuing Professional Development for Medics in a local authority. Use of multimedia High - The course uses a range of multimedia and interactive media, along with an extensive range of medical OER. Degree of communication Medium - The participants are encourage to contribute to a number of key debates on the discussion forum, as well as keeping a reflective blog of how the course relates to their professional practice. Degree of collaboration Low - The course is designed for busy working professionals, collaboration is kept to a minimum. Learning pathway Medium - There are two structured routes through the course - an advanced and a lite version. Quality Assurance Medium - The course is peer-reviewed prior to delivery. Amount of reflection High - Participants are asked to reflect continually during the course, their personal blogs are particularly important in this respect. Certification Medium - Participants can obtain a number of badges on completion of different aspects of the course and receive a certificate of attendance. Formal learning Low - The course is informal and optional. Autonomy High - Participants are expected to work individually and take control of their learning, there is little in the way of tutor support. Diversity Low - The course is specialised for UK medics in one local authority. The 7Cs framework can be used both to design and evaluate MOOCs. The tools and resources associated with each of the Cs enable the designer to make more informed design decisions. The evaluation rubric under the Consolidate C enables them to ensure that the design is fit for purpose, hence ensuring the quality of the MOOCs and the ultimate learner experience. It is evident that there are a number of drivers impacting on education. Firstly, universities are increasingly looking to expand their online offerings and make more effective use of technologies. Secondly, there is increasing demand from higher student numbers and greater diversity. Thirdly, there is a need to shift from knowledge recall to development of skills to find and use information effectively. In this respect, there is a need to enable learners to develop 21st Century digital literacy skills (Jenkins 2009) to equip them for an increasingly complex and changing societal context. Finally, given the proliferation of new competitors, there is a need for traditional institutions to tackle new competitive niches and business models.[13] MOOCs represent a sign of the times; they instantiate an example of how technologies can disrupt the status quo of education and are a forewarning of further changes to come. Whether or not MOOCs will reach the potential hype currently being discussed is a mote point, what is clear is that we need to take them seriously. More importantly, for both MOOCs and traditional educational offerings we need to make more informed design decisions that are pedagogically effective, leading to an enhanced learner experience and ensuring quality assurance. Finally, the key value of MOOCs for me is that they are challenging traditional educational institutions and having to make them think about what they are offering, how it is distinctive and what the unique learner experience will be at their institution. As Cormier states: When we use the MOOC as a lense to examine Higher Education, some interesting things come to light. The question of the ‘reason’ for education comes into focus (Cormier 2013). Furthermore, UNESCO estimate that more than 100 million children can’t afford formal education,[14] MOOCs provide them with a real lifeline to get above the poverty line. This, and the fact that MOOCs provide access to millions. As Creelman notes: Whatever you think of them they are opening up new learning opportunities for millions of people and that is really the main point of it all (Creelman 2013). So for me the value of MOOCs to promote social inclusion, coupled with them making traditional institutions look harder at what they are providing their students, signifies their importance as a disruptive technology. For me therefore, whether they survive or not, if they result in an opening up of education and a better quality of the learner experience that has got to be for the good.  References Conole, G. (2013). Current thinking on the 7Cs of Learning Design. e4innovation.com. Cormier, D. (2013). Week 3 - Forget the learners, how do I measure a MOOC quality experience for ME! By Dave Cormier. MOOC Quality Project. Creelman, A. (2013). Make hay whilt the sunshines. The corridor of uncertainty. Downes, S. (2010). Fairness and equity in education. Huff Post Education. Downes, S. (2013). Week 2: The Quality of Massive Open Online Courses by Stephen Downes. MOOC Quality Project: perspectives on quality of MOOC-based education. Ehlers, U. D., E. Ossiannilsson, et al. (2013). Week 1: MOOCs and Quality - Where are we - where do we go from here …? MOOC Quality Project. Jenkins, H. (2009). Confronting the challenges of participatory culture: Media education for the 21st century, Mit Pr.                   [1] http://mooc.efquel.org/   [2] http://efquel.org   [3] http://efquel.org/aboutus/vision-mission/   [4] https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=quality+definition+elearning&aq=f&oq=quality+definition&aqs=chrome.0.59j57j0l2j60j62.4758j0&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#sclient=psy-ab&q=quality+definition+&oq=quality+definition+&gs_l=serp.3..0l4.2269.2269.0.2481.1.1.0.0.0.0.107.107.0j1.1.0…0.0…1c.1.14.psy-ab.oVQgVsASSAQ&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_cp.r_qf.&bvm=bv.46751780,d.d2k&fp=13e85b7e7d899dc&biw=853&bih=343   [5] http://www.qaa.ac.uk/Publications/InformationAndGuidance/Documents/eLearning.pdf   [6] http://cck11.mooc.ca/   [7] https://www.udacity.com/course/cs271   [8] http://www.olds.ac.uk/   [9] http://cloudworks.ac.uk   [10] http://www.open.edu/openlearn/education/open-education/content-section-0   [11] https://learn.canvas.net/courses/4   [12] Although it was possible to obtain certification from the University of Manitoba for completion of the course   [13] As a recent article states MOOCs are challenging traditional institutional business models  http://www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=20120831103842302   [14] http://enikki.mitsubishi.or.jp/e/event/index6.html

Do you dream of making a living from home? You can be a digital nomad like Tim Ferriss describes in his book The 4-Hour Workweek. In today’s LMScast Joshua Millage and Christopher Badgett outline from their own experience how to start a location independent business with online courses. You run a location independent business from wherever you are - at home, on the beach, or while traveling the world. The key word here is "business," because you must provide value that people will pay for to generate income. Fear of failure keeps most people from doing it. What kind of business could you successfully build? One option is to create and sell online courses using an eLearning development tool like LifterLMS. Your greatest hands-on involvement is in putting the courses and system together. After that is done, you automate maintenance, marketing, and sales through the software. Then you can be minimally involved while your courses generate passive income. There is work, time, and a lot of hustle involved. These activities can seem daunting, but the 4-hour workweek is undeniably a compelling idea. The impetus is the realization that you can do everything differently. The first step is to form relationships and build an email list of people who share the same interests as you. After enough interaction with those people, you will be able to create courses they want to take and are willing to pay for. Next, learn all you can about business, eCommerce, and website design. The more you learn, the more you can do yourself. You shouldn’t have to pay someone else for the services you need until your business really starts to expand. Once you have all that down, you can start creating your first course. Pre-selling your course is a great way to get started with customers ready to buy. A proven method is to offer a pilot course at a discounted price to a select group of interested students. The fact that you are only accepting a limited few will generate interest. Your benefit is that you will learn from that test group how to build a better course and work out the rough spots before you present a fully developed course. They in turn will have your attentive focus. Starting out this way you can realize $1,000 to $2,000 profit each month. Maybe not enough to quit your day job yet, but your earning potential will increase as your email list grows. The first course you complete successfully also builds your proof of concept, as well as your confidence. Being clear on why you are doing this is crucial. What do you want to accomplish in your life that your current work situation prevents you from doing? What would your daily life look like if you had a more flexible schedule working from home, or from any other place you might rather be? Having that mental picture is highly motivational. If you are having trouble deciding on the kind of course you want to create, look at courses that are already working at sites like Udemy. You will find lists of topics ranging from general to niche subjects. In fact, offering a niche interest course can be the best way to start. The most important part of establishing your location independent business is finding something that excites you enough that you are eager to share it with others. Our LifterLMS course development platform is designed to help you build your courses quickly and intuitively so that you can focus on your students and your subject. You can try a demo of LifterLMS and see for yourself what it can do for you. Remember that you can post comments and also subscribe to our newsletter for updates, developments, and future episodes of LMScast. Thank you for joining us. Joshua: Hello everyone, we’re back with another episode of LMScast. I’m Joshua Millage, and I’m joined today with Christopher Badgett, and today we’re talking about how to start a location independent digital nomad business with online courses. Chris, you are quite the digital nomad. Let’s kick it off for us. How do you do this? Christopher: Well, I think it’s important to define like what the terminology means, and they’re kind of related. Location independent business just means you can run it from anywhere. Joshua: Right. Christopher: Digital nomad is kind of taking into another level where you are like traveling around your country or the world while you run your business, so that’s the digital nomad part. I’ve done that before, it was like web agency work. It really doesn’t matter where I am. I spent last winter in Costa Rica. I was working with you for a while when you were in Thailand last year. That’s like the location independent part and nomadic while traveling, that sort of thing. When I was in Costa Rica, I didn’t stay in one place. I was in the rain forest, and then I was on the beach. The important part of this terminology here is also the word business. It’s one thing to like travel and be on tourism and that kind of thing and vacation, but business is where you’re still adding value and creating income for yourself and your company while you roll around. That’s what it’s all about. Online courses is a great way to create a business that is location independent, that does allow you to be a digital nomad and travel the world. Joshua: Yeah. I think like the cool thing about my life, and I’ve kind of reached the location independent digital nomad status, but I’ve done it with a web agency, and the challenge there is that it’s not as hands off as online courses, and I don’t want to say that online courses are hands-off or even … Christopher: They can be. They can be. Joshua: They can be. That’s more what I want to allude to is that you don’t have to engage at the level that I will engage when I start to do some of my courses, but you can. I think it’s really interesting to me to think about doing more and more courses. I have one project which is around Paleo cooking and food, and I really want to go and dive deep into that, and then I have another one that’s just more personal branding that I haven’t even really started, but talking about fear and entrepreneurship, and it all starts with building a community of people and then creating something that they want to purchase. There is a whole methodology. I mean I think the first thing if I would break it down for people would be, first things first would be take the time to really build relationships and build that email list. I mean even if you can get a 100 people on an email list, the success when you launch a course is like 10X of what it would be if you just launched it without anything, because you have the people that you’ve engaged with, but that takes time. That takes a lot of hustle, and I think a lot of people who want to live the kind of suitcase entrepreneur lifestyle or vagabond lifestyle, they don’t understand the work involved in that. Like I don’t know why, I think there are lot of people who read The 4-Hour Workweek, and they don’t see any work in that whole entire book. For those of you who don’t know, it was a fundamental just changing, life changing book for me. It kind of like pulled the scales off my eyes in terms of I was on the typical conveyor belt progression of life, like get the undergrad degree, get the master’s degree, find the wife, have kids, buy the house, buy the car, get the dog, pay for their education, and so forth and kind of move up the scale. That book said, ah you could do things differently, and so I did. Dramatically I jumped out and went to China, worked in manufacturing for a while, wound up sick, and I didn’t really have much of an option and had to figure out something to live, and so on my parents’ couch, I started my consulting company, and it started first things first educating myself with online courses. Second, started building relationships. I think if I could do it all over, I would actually flip that. I’d start with building relationships. Once you have the relationships, and you have some sort of education about how to execute a business and build certain things like a website and what not, and all that stuff is available for free online. You don’t need to go pay anyone to do the basics. To be honest with you, the pay should come at the more advanced levels. Then you can start thinking about building a course, and I think one of the most powerful things that you can do is go through this progression that I learned, and I’ve executed a million different ways, not a million, a handful of different ways, and it’s always worked, and that is pre-sell your course. Lot of people have a mental block with this, like how do I sell something that doesn’t exist? That doesn’t seem right, it doesn’t make sense to me. It does take a lot of grit because you can walk an unethical line. Like if you pre-sell something, and you don’t let everyone know that you’re pre-selling, I do think you can get into some pretty shady things, but the way I do it is, I say, hey, I’ve had a lot of requests for people who want me to build a course on X,Y, and Z subject matter, and I’ve been resistant to it, so I’m playing kind of the reluctant hero. I say what I’m going to do is I’m going to offer a four coaching spots, and I’m going to coach four people for a month, and out of that I’m going to build a course from what I’ve learned from working with these four people. What I do is I actually for the people who sign up to be coached, they’re getting a lot of special attention for one, and you’re playing on a lot of different triggers. You’re playing on scarcity, only four people or ten people, whatever you want to do. Only certain amount of people are allowed in, and there’s like this early investor narrative, which a lot of people know, especially if you’re in the United States. There’s this idea if I get in early, it’s going to be better for me. If I invest in the company early, it’s better for me. If I buy a certain type of car earlier, generally I’m going to get a better deal. Like for instance, I bought a Scion tC the first year it came out, and I got a way better warranty. Then like three years later, the Scions were probably a little bit better cars, they worked their kinks out, but the warranty wasn’t as good. That is just like this like underlying things like as an idea that if I can get in early, I will benefit. Our LifterLMS VIPs, they have not paid for anything outside of their license for LifterLMS. I mean they’ve gotten everything for free, and we’re rewarding them for taking action early. You reward this group for taking action early by giving them focused attention. You give them the course that you create when it’s created afterwards, and you have kind of a laboratory to create your course. Then once you create your course, you just launch it to your list. This is like the abbreviated version, but you take this progression to heart. I’m breezing through it in 10 minutes here, but you can create a business that average estimations of income, I mean you could at least start out with something that’s allows you to have at least the 1,000 or 2,000 dollars extra cash per month, and that will start you on a pretty good progression. Then, you’re at a point of scaling, which really comes back to creating more relationships. Yeah, sorry for the ramble Chris, but that’s … Christopher: That’s good stuff. Joshua: It’s been the way that things have worked for me, and so I want to make sure I share that with people. Christopher: That’s awesome. Well just to give you guys a couple of tips on how to start a location independent business and become a digital nomad with online courses, there’s a couple things just to keep in mind. One is like Josh said, an extra 1,000 or 2,000 dollars a month can be a good goal. You don’t have to like flip a switch and immediately quit your job or do drastic change. Like try to get some traction and get the confidence, and then you can focus on scaling and maybe if you want to do exclusively online courses for your income, but I recommend not just like quitting your job and being like I’m going to go and create a online course or membership or a BuddyPress course for a social network. Take your time, get some proof of concept like Josh said, pre-selling is good. You can ease into it basically. The other thing is to get really clear on your "why." For some people, it might mean sitting on a beach somewhere with passive income landing in their bank account. For other people, it might just be being able to work from home with your kids. It’s not like just because you become location independent or a digital nomad, it doesn’t mean you have to travel the world and create courses while you fly around the world, although that’s terribly possible, but for some people your "why" is really important. Maybe you just want to be able to have the flexibility. Let’s say your parents are getting old, to be able to be have that location flexibility to move around and be with the people you care about. So get in touch with your "why." The other is the lot of resistance people have is like, what kind of course can I make? I think one of the best places to go to get ideas is actually like one of the big course market places like Udemy. Just go there and browse around. You’ll see some major topics like introduction to entrepreneurship, but you’ll also see some really niche courses about like, I’m just making this up, but like jewelry making for Turquoise, or something like super specific. I would encourage you to actually start with something really niche specific. Yeah, those are just some three tips to help you get going to start building your location independent business, and it gets you excited about the opportunity to becoming a digital nomad with online courses. Joshua: Yeah, that’s great. That’s great. Well until next time, we’ll talk to you then. The post How to Start a Location Independent Digital Nomad Business with Online Courses appeared first on LMScast.

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  I’m really excited about running our new Masters in Learning Innovation in October. The course will be available online and can be taken either full-time or part-time. There are four 30 credit modules on: Technology-Enhanced Learning, Learning Design for the 21st Century, Research Methodologies and Case Studies of Innovation, plus a 60 credit dissertation module. The course will give participants the opportunity to explore and critique a range of technologies and to consider the implications of these for their own practice, and more broadly for learning, teaching and research. We will draw on the latest research in the field, as well as tapping in to the wealth of great free Open Educational Resources now available and piggy backing on any interesting online events that occur, such as MOOCs and webinars. The course will give participants a rich overview of new technologies and how they can be used to foster more engaging learning experiences, but also will consider some of the implications of these technologies, both for individuals and institutions. We anticipate that the course will appeal to a range of people with an interest in exploring how technologies can be used in both formal and informal learning contexts. We also aim to draw on participants’ own experiences and practice, to build a vibrant community of peers. As an incentive, the first twelve people who register for the full time course will receive an iPad Mini. So go on sign up - it will be fun! For more information on the Masters and our areas of research interest, have a look at our website  (http://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/beyond-distance-research-alliance), or contact me or Pal (pe27@leicester.ac.uk) for further details. 

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The way an online course is designed has a big impact on how engaged students will be with the material and whether they will complete the course. In this LMScast Joshua Millage and Chris Badgett discuss how to use the Fibonacci sequence for instructional design to set the pace for your course. Keeping students engaged and motivated can be a challenge for teachers, and your course completion rate could suffer if the cadence of your content does not match with students’ interest levels and how they naturally learn. If you deliver your content too slowly, students could become bored and lose interest. But if you deliver too much content all at once, students could become overwhelmed. Students are the most interested and motivated right after they’ve decided to take a course, and that motivation settles down as the course goes on and students are consuming your content. The Fibonacci sequence is a series of numbers where the next number in the sequence is the sum of the previous two numbers. Starting with 1, the sequence is 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, and so on. This sequence occurs frequently in nature, such as in the spirals of a snail’s shell and the arrangement of seeds on a sunflower. Using the Fibonacci sequence for instructional design will match well with the way students naturally learn and their interest levels. And you can build the sequence into your course by dripping content in this type of pattern, with more content delivered at the beginning of the course and then slowly spacing the content out a bit more as the course goes on. LifterLMS is a learning management system plugin for WordPress that has built-in functionality to handle drip content and engagement. You can use the system to space out your content, automatically email students to encourage engagement, and award badges and certificates for lesson or section completion. You can try a demo of LifterLMS here to see for yourself what it can do for you. To learn more about using the Fibonacci sequence for instructional design and to see a diagram of how it can be applied, you can sign up for a free LifterLMS course here. You can also post comments and subscribe to our newsletter for updates, developments, and future episodes of LMScast. Thank you for joining us. Joshua: Hello, Everyone. Welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m Joshua Millage, and I’m joined today with the very dapper Christopher Badgett. Less of the mountain man Christopher Badgett and more of the suave, debonair sort of … Is that a suit, Chris? Christopher: It’s just a suit jacket and a western shirt. I actually have three of these, that’s one of the things I do to mellow out on decision fatigue is I wear this shirt a lot. We were just at the Infusionsoft Conference. I don’t know if you realized, but I had two of the same pair of jeans and two of the same shirt. Joshua: There you go, Man. Why waste mental energy deciding what you’re going to wear? I think Steve Jobs did that, too. Christopher: Did he really? Joshua: Yeah. That’s his black mock turtleneck. That’s hilarious. Today we’re going to be talking about something kind of fun. It’s something that I’ve picked up on after going through tons and tons and tons of different courses, and it’s how to pace a course so that you leverage someone’s inherent motivation that comes with signing up for a course. I remember in college, the first couple of weeks of class you’re the most engaged and most motivated, especially if the teacher is bringing the heat in that sort of time frame, they’re telling you how the course is going to benefit you and help you and that sort of thing. So in looking at motivation in instructional design, I’ve picked up on a little math equation or sequence called the Fibonacci sequence, which is essentially a sequence that says, it’s like 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, it’s whatever the previous number is, you add it to the next number. 1 and then another 1, and then the next number would be 2, because it’s adding the previous two. The next one would be 3, next one would be 5, next one would be 8, and so forth. I have found that that sequence, that Fibonacci sequence, is actually a really good pace to do drip courses in a course. A lot of people I don’t think spend a lot of time thinking about the cadence of their content. They’d spend a lot of time just thinking about the content and that’s important, but even if you have great content and you don’t think about the pacing of it, the completion rate could suffer. I think that especially in the online world when you don’t have a lot of people surrounding you, you don’t have that community that can help motivate you and keep you accountable, it’s important to understand that people when they make that action, that buy action or that enroll action, that initial action, that is when they’re going to be the most motivated, because they’ve gotten over the hump and all the psychological whatever about the course, and they said, "Yes." They told themselves, "Yes. I’m going to take this course," on whatever it is. Knowing that, you want to give them a bunch of good stuff, a bunch of stuff that’s really actionable, really important to whatever the course is immediately. You can give it more in that moment than you can a week later. I have found that using that 1, 1, 2, 3 type of methodology works with days or weeks depending on the length of your course, but I’ve even seen it with a couple really all-star web entrepreneurs who create courses. Eben Pagan does a really good job in his Wake Up Productive course where when you buy the course, you get an hour and a half video that goes through the entire where we’re headed, where we’re going, then you get the next five days, you have five fast-start videos, and then after you have the five fast-start videos then you have twelve weeks of one video a week. Christopher: Settles down. Joshua: It settles down quite a bit, but that’s manageable. I was motivated that first day, and I’ll consume an hour and a half in that first week, I’ll go through every day, and then I’ll pace out and I’ll actually want to … I like to look forward to the next video instead of like, "Oh man, this is just a mountain of content I got to mole through, and there’s so many exercises and so many quizzes and so many things." It’s more of, "Wow, that was really good. I’m going to put that into action. Wow, I’m getting benefits. Aw man, the next video’s going to be awesome too." Christopher: That’s awesome. That’s thinking like a learning management system and less like a membership site. Joshua: Yeah, yeah. That’s the thing, like when this episode goes out, what should the URL be? We’ll do lmscast.com/ … What’s a fun word? Christopher: Fibonacci. Joshua: That’s a hard one to spell though. Let’s do pace. Christopher: Okay. Joshua: Like the salsa. Christopher: All right. Joshua: That’s an easy one. If you’re listening to this in your car, you can head over to lmscast.com/pace, or if you’re on the YouTube video just look at the link in the description. What we’ll do is we’ll have a layout of what this looks like in terms of like a diagram, but I’ll also host a webinar to show people how they can build this Fibonacci sequence into their courses using LifterLMS, because our feature with our engagement functionality allows you to set this up really easily. You don’t have to do anything else, you can … Christopher: In our drip. Joshua: Yeah. You can drip the content, and then you can actually send emails out based on when that drip content goes out and say, "Hey, this video’s available now. This video’s available now. Or this course or this lesson or whatever it is is available now." I think people will see a dramatic increase in completion of their courses and engagement throughout their course, because they’re not overwhelming people. Christopher: LifterLMS has the badges and the emails and the certificates that can happen, so maybe part of that too is like, it’s okay to be a little heavy on the engagements earlier in the course, but then maybe back off as it goes, so that people don’t feel overwhelmed like, "Whoa. I’m getting too many emails from this person." That’s really fascinating. I just want to bring up in nature if you’re looking for a visual of the Fibonacci, the way the shell of a snail forms in that spiral is calculated … You see the Fibonacci sequence in nature all the time. It’s also the way the florets or the head of the broccoli form. It’s just one of those universal sacred geometry, if you will, things that exist in nature. It’s totally natural that that would make sense for learning as well. Joshua: Yeah. I found that all the courses that I seemed to enjoy and get through and implement have some sort of pacing that follows this sort of structure. They give a lot of information on the beginning, and then it kind of tapers out over time. Based on engagement though, the cool thing is you get to reset this if someone decided to sign up for another course. It’s like in email marketing, the Fibonacci sequence works really, really well for email marketing, where if someone initially signs up, you can hit them with a few extra emails than you would later down the road, but if they opt in for another eBook or another lead magnet or something else later down the road, then they’re showing, "Hey, I’m raising my hand again. I really like what you’re doing, I’m interested again." You can email them a little bit more again and then taper it back based on behavior. Christopher: That’s really awesome. In a learning management system, it’s not just about the tool, it’s about that fourth dimension of time, and that’s a really powerful rubric or metric you’re giving us to think about how to deal with time and how the learner learns and how they want to be engaged in a natural way. That’s awesome, Josh. Joshua: Yeah. I think it’s a really important concept to take ahold of, because everyone has gone through a class I think at some level where it just seemed to drag on. It was really, really boring, and that sort of thing. You could actually hide the lessons that are not so exciting when you use this, because you’re not blasting people with content, you’re not overloading them with content. You can take a lesson that’s not as fun, and you can put it into sequence maybe at the beginning where people are most motivated or later down the road, but you’ve given some people some time to digest the previous lesson, so when they get to that one, they’re ready to go. Tony Schwartz says it best, we grow through periods of intense focus, and it’s like exercise, you grow through intense weight lifting or whatever you’re doing and then rest. Then you engage again and rest, and that pendulum swing, that back and forth is really important, especially in learning, because sometimes I’ll read something, and whatever it is, marketing or spirituality or whatever subject matter that I’m reading at that point in time, and doesn’t sit in until months later. The thing about that kind of begs a question is, would I get more out of that content if I read it and chewed on it, or if I just continued to move from the next book to the next book to the next book and just pound it in my brain with more information. I find that it’s just really important to take time to process and write your thoughts out about the material and that sort of thing. That’s when the pendulum swings, and then I’m ready for the next chapter or the next book or whatever it is. It’s exciting stuff, I really like motivation when it comes to learning, because I don’t think that in the post-industrial era we’re doing a good job of … I don’t think we’re doing a good job yet of understanding how the human mind works and how we can actually observe that and then utilize that for increased learning and education. You experienced that too with your daughters, right? I mean, they’re unschooled, and they’re very motivated around what they want to learn and they take it in, right? Christopher: Absolutely. In that model, the child leads the learning. They show what they’re interested in, and like you’ve mentioned, there’s these periods of intense fascination with power tools or hammers or certain types of gardening methods or identifying plants or picking flowers, and then it kind of wanes out, but it doesn’t go away, it just continues to evolve, but definitely at the moment of introducing a new thing to get excited about, which they often find on their own, there’s this intense focus where it goes really deep, and it’s almost … I think it’s one of the things that the traditional education system doesn’t handle very well, because it’s more like a set curriculum, 1’s and 0’s, student enters the machine and so on. That’s a really cool insight you’re giving there. Joshua: Yeah. I’m sure when they first get interested in something, you can throw everything you have at them, and they’re fine with it. Christopher: Yeah. Joshua: When they start to wane, it’s like, "Well, what’s the point?" Christopher: You don’t want to force it. Joshua: Yeah. Christopher: Make the negative space for something else to come in and enter the quiver of experience and knowledge. Joshua: Yeah. Absolutely. I’m going to definitely do a webinar around this and lay out a whole step-by-step system that people can implement and use LifterLMS to pace their courses in this way. You can find information about that at lmscast.com/pace. P-A-C-E, just like the salsa. So, Chris, do you have any final thoughts for the crew here? Christopher: I think you had a really good point, just like a pro tip … There’s this expression to sell people what they want, but give them what they need. Whenever we’re teaching something, there’s often these unsexy or less exciting elements that you need to get in there to round out the learning. That maybe, like you were saying at the beginning, if there’s a few of the more busywork or less fun things to do, squeeze that stuff in at the beginning, get it out of the way when motivation’s the highest. If you’re going to put it in later, trickle it in a little bit at a time. Joshua: Yeah, like this Wake Up Productive course I’m talking to you about, he had all these quick starts or stuff that I don’t really want to do. I don’t really want to sit around for twenty minutes and write everything that’s jumbling around in my head. I don’t really want to prioritize the top ten things I need to get done in the next ninety days. I don’t. I don’t have any interest in doing that. It’s not that I don’t see that it’s important … Christopher: You just started the program. Joshua: I just started the program, so I’m doing it. You ask me in a couple weeks, I’d be like, [negative sound effect]. Then the consistency that I had with the cadence is off, and that’s no good, so I really respect Eben in what he does in terms of how he paces and designs his courses, and I think it’s really important, very important to do the same. Cool. Well, that’s it for this episode. Until next week, we’ll talk to you then. The post How to Use the Fibonacci Sequence for Instructional Design appeared first on LMScast.

These are our multiple examples built around Bloom’s Taxonomy meant as a jumping off point for our imaginative and brilliant staff to use. ***Please Visit Our Other Aurasma Resources By Clicking Here*** The scene: N.H.S. Library about seven days ago. The Players: Cara, Jill, and Charles Enter Cara Cara: Hey Charles, check out this new app. It’s called Aurasma. Cara places her iPhone over an image and a video immediately pops up. Charles: ——-> (Not talking because his mind has melted as he thought about the billions of possibilities) Later that day… Charles: Hey Jill, look at what Cara just showed me. Jill: —- (Mind proceeding to melting) What is Aurasma? It’s not a QR code. It’s a QR code on steroids! Take a picture of any image and layer another image or video on top. Further, if you get an Aurasma Studio account, you can stack a website on top of the video or image you’ve attached to the original picture. Aurasma turns any recognizable image into an engaging virtual reality tool for the classroom!!! The Standard Based Bulletin Board you saw at the top was put together by @Thrasymachus, @JillCompher, and @CaraCarter. Bloom’s Taxonomy was used as the frame for the project so we could appeal to instructors on what ever level they wanted to begin using this wonderful new App. The right side of the bulletin board was dedicated to increasing school spirit. Follow us on Twitter for suggestions, tips, etc. Interested? 1) Download Aurasma. 2) Scroll through the "How to view" introduction 3) Tap the "A"-like icon at the bottom center of your screen. 4) Then touch the magnifying glass icon. 5a) In the search field, type in and search for Northwest High School’s Channel and follow. 5b) Type in and search for "Thrasymachus" channel and follow 5c) Type in and search for "Compher Social Sciences channel" and follow Good, now you can see our "Auras" below. The following examples are on our Bloom’s Taxonomy Bulletin Board. Go ahead and follow and like our channels, while you’re at it :)! Open Aurasma and point your device at the following images. Keep in mind additional actions can be taken by either single or double tapping the videos or images once they’ve been triggered. 1) Uses in Math - Double tap the image to bring the video to the forefront. Single tap the video to access a practice problem the kids can work on after they’ve checked their answer with the teacher’s example. 2) Gerrymandering/redistricting - Double tap the video to bring it to the fore. Single tap the video to access the online redistricting game that students will be assigned after the video. 3) Dachshund Narcolepsy - Double tap the poor little puppy that can’t stay awake. Single tap the now enlarged video to access the assignment. 4) Shakespeare’s "To be or not to be" soliloquy - Double tap the video to enlarge it. Single tap the video to engage the student in an assignment. Has your mind melted, yet? NO! Not mind-meld…mind melted!!! The last example is used in a different, but none-the-less important fashion: students performing a self evaluation. Double tap the video to bring it to full size and single tap to access the poll. The Google Docs poll engages viewers of the bulletin board by having them become participants in an otherwise passive tool. I’ve used a larger image of this picture because of its, sometimes, erratic nature. Your "trigger image" must have enough unique features for Aurasma to recognize the image as unique. This one, because of the small text, is a toughie to recognize…but usually works.

I have just finished reading Fahrenheit 451, I can’t believe I haven’t read it before now! It is put in the same category as books like 1984 and Brave New World. It centres on a future where firemen don’t put out fires, but instead burn books, which are considered dangerous. It is a world dominated by mass media and pointless communication, where being the same as everyone else is what counts; intellectuals and academics are not well thought of, neither is original thought or creativity. The main character’s wife is particularly scary, she lives a hollow existence, mindlessly watching three screens of TV, with pointless dramas that she can’t even remember. Written before the Internet the book in many ways mirrors what we are seeing today, i.e. a world highly interconnected, with information coming from every direction and a danger of channel hoping and surface browsing, rather than critical reflection and engagement. You can’t walk down the road today without seeing people staring at their phones whilst walking, indeed in the taxi this morning, the driver kept checking his phone for messages, as a result missed a change of lights! Of course the rich media we now have available at our fingertips offer a fantastic variety of ways in which we can interact with materials and communicate and collaborate. I just think we need to be mindful of the dangers of over simplification and remember that we need to develop the appropriate digital literacy skills to harness their potential and we need to be critically reflective on how we engage with them and what this says about our digital identity. 

Offer Webinars and Classroom Training through 360training.com Do you have some great "in person" training that you’d like to sell as a webinar or classroom course? With webinars and virtual classrooms, you can keep the human touch and ability to respond to particular learner questions, while providing training to avid learners around the world. Or perhaps you’re looking for a way to get key content in front of learners early, before transforming it into a full-scale online course? Early feedback on content and approach can help you hone your message and create the best training. Great news! 360training.com now has a quick way for you to make webinar and classroom content available to millions of learners. Just fill out the form and tell us the name of the course, what it’s about, how much you want to charge for the course, and when you want to deliver it. For optimal results, be sure to submit your course at least two weeks in advance. We’ll pass the proposal on to our Product Line Managers based on the industry you selected. They’ll review your proposal, and, if accepted, request some additional information we’ll need so that we can pay you when your course sells, and add your course to the libraries served up by 360training.com. Reach out and make a difference—with webinars and classroom courses. - Laura and the 360 Authoring team. …

Nothing Bothers Me No, Really.  Nothingness Keeps Me Up At Night. Stanley Rosen, Friedrick Nietzsche, and I have something in common. We’re all concerned with squirrels, or rather, a world without squirrels. Ok, to be more specific, a world without context (squirrels being the context here). When I was a kid I came to the conclusion that the biggest philosophical gap in the universe could be found in the relationship between the numbers zero and one. I was in my back yard in a lower-middle income suburb of Dallas when I noticed how many freaking squirrels we had running around. One or two squirrels are fun, but close to a dozen and you might as well call it pestilence. A really cute, sometimes funny, pestilence. A cute, funny pestilence that dodged every rock I threw at it. I wanted there to be zero squirrels in my back yard. As I am wont to do, as we who are haunted by philosophical whispers are wont to do, I was caught off guard by an insane dilemma. What stopped me in my tracks was this idea that zero squirrels isn’t really close to anything. Zero was something, but also nothing. No objects, no scents, no textures, no sounds, no…things. Even when you think of complete blackness you are thinking of a color or, at least, a thing. One squirrel is closer to a billion squirrels than one squirrel is to no squirrels. Decades before I ever heard of the man, I accidentally stumbled something that Nietzsche had illuminated (note the sarcasm) a century earlier in his book, The Gay Science: We have left the land and have embarked. We have burned our bridges behind us—indeed, we have gone farther and destroyed the land behind us. Now, little ship, look out! Beside you is the ocean: to be sure, it does not always roar, and at times it lies spread out like silk and gold and reveries of graciousness. But hours will come when you will realize that it is infinite and that there is nothing more awesome than infinity. Oh, the poor bird that felt free and now strikes the walls of this cage! Woe, when you feel homesick for the land as if it had offered more freedom—and there is no longer any "land." I was like that poor bird who, when contemplating how I wish there were no squirrels, focussed more on the "no" than on the "squirrels" part of that thought. I yearned for a land that was now long since gone. Just as you can’t unsee certain things, you also can’t unthink certain thoughts. I was contemplating the infinitude and freedom of nothingness and desired the land that limited my freedom and served as my anchor. "You were aware of the number zero" you may softly remark from your Starbucks sofa. Yes, of course. What I came to realize was that the word zero was itself, ironically, a something. Zero or "nothing" are terms that point to an impossibly empty void. So we cover up this void with a something and then pretend like that something that points to a nothing is an adequate stand in for the void. We cover over the Fear and Trembling that awaits us in the the void of nothingness with a something. We don’t want to peer at the nothingness and fully contemplate it, so our manhole cover is a word that shields us from the pit. The shield makes us feel better because we’re good at pointing at things. After all, God spends six days essentially dividing things and naming them. Later on in the Book of Genesis, Adam is allowed to name all of the animals. Naming is a way to divide one thing from another and, in a sense, conquer it. Using a much less exalted example, when we call people names or label them, we’re making an attempt to have some sort of power over them. Its the same with the void. We call it zero, nothingness, a void, etc. in an attempt to pretend that we understand it. Like Wittgenstein suggests, we like to cover over the chaos that is reality with words that anchor the instability. When you take away the facade of zero, there is no horizon or context to that emptiness. For example, when you say that you have zero cans of soda your context is "cans of soda". You aren’t saying you have nothingness in your fridge. You’re only saying that within this context of things, there are none. So the context anchors down the meaning and your sanity to allow you to move on to the next event in your day. Take away the horizon or context and contemplate zero and you get an infinity of barely tangible zero-ness. It’s truly frustrating! Even as I write about "zero-ness" I seem to be covering over the thing I’m trying to reveal. It seems that the emptiness also empties whatever tries to fill it. Socrates says something similar in the Phaedo when he considers that a short stick gets its "shortness" from being compared to a longer stick. Place that same short stick to an even shorter stick and it becomes long. Its shortness and longness are found within its existence…its very being. But what if the "short stick" was the only stick in the universe. Without the context of other sicks, that stick would lose many of its characteristics including its shortness (at least as it related to other sticks). Now take away sticks altogether. When a stick loses its "stickness" you can begin to see my insanity. A non-stick is much like zero. Its a something that points to a nothing. It’s a covering up of the chaotic foam that is the foundation of all thought and being. It is Heidegger’s Being (capital B) because it is everything and nothing. It is what the painter tries to both paint over and point to by painting over the blank canvas. That blank canvas, when left blank, embodies all possible paintings, but it is also blank. The second we commit ourselves to painting, we limit the message but also make it more "real". We seem to need parentheses over every inch of our lives because they allow us to focus on what might be. But when we’re confronted with a thing without a horizon and without a subject (like zero) the mind begins to reel. It really bothers me and when I go to my favorite philosophers, they don’t seem to help. They just seem to substantiate my cluelessness. Since all language seems to be self-referential, a (non)concept like "nothingness" pokes a hole in that system and the string begins to unravel. …which reminds me of how much I hate those squirrels that got me on this train of thought to begin with so many years ago. Filed under: In The Classroom Tagged: adam, Book of Genesis, Gay Science, god, limits of analysis, Nietzsche, Phaedo, phenomenology, philosophy, plato, Squirrel, Stanley Rosen, Starbucks, zero

So I have now been using my iPad mini in earnest for a month. It has already become an essential tool that goes everywhere with me! I use it for most things, browsing the Internet, reading blog posts, and of course answering emails. The SpringPad App is fantastic as a way of curating and organizing materials. I am finding that I am reading more blog posts as a result and have categorised things for different purposes (blog posts, videos and audio, teaching materials, etc.) I can’t imagine now how I coped without it! It is funny how we integrate technologies into our practice and how this sometimes takes time, before one has that ‘Ah hah’ moment. I think iPad minis have fantastic potential in a learning context; enabling learners to learn anywhere, anytime, as well as for use in fieldwork, etc. The range of Apps available is simply staggering and the interface is good, very easy to read from. The big advantage over the iPad is the size and weight; the iPad is just too heavy to my mind. Also it has great battery power, another plus. For me this is truly a disruptive technology (Christensen 1997), a game changer, something that fundamentally changes things. It will be interesting to see what emergent research work on the used of these types of devices shows. Terese Bird in our team has just completed a JISC-funded project PLACES evaluating the use of iPads in our Criminology Masters. The evaluation was very positive and showed the benefits of these types of devices, in particular enabling the students (who are often working in dangerous parts of the world, with little or no Internet access) to have access to all their course materials. I think iPads/iPad minis also have hugh potential for professionally based courses, for example Medicine. Here are some useful links on using the iPad for learning:  EDUCAUSE report on 7 things you should know about iPads  Learning with iPads The iPad as a tool for education - a case study Educational use cases from a shared exploration of e-books and iPads  References Christensen, C. (1997). The innovator’s dilemma: When new technologies cause great firms to fail. Harvard, Harvard University Press.              

Getting Where You Want to Go. Are you into creating things that help people learn? Would you like to create these learning experiences online, so that people all over the world (or all over your office) could use them? Are you looking for an efficient way to make great online courses? Then read on! You might have come across this term before, Learning Content Management System (LCMS), but never given it much thought until now. Not to worry, this blog can help explain you the meaning, importance, and capabilities so you can be the judge if an LCMS is what you need.   What is a Learning Content Management System (LCMS)? A learning content management system is a piece of software that not only helps you build online courses quickly and easily, but provides a centralized framework to organize and re-use all the great stuff you built for one online course, but might like to also use in another. Because LCMS software is centralized, multiple people can collaborate on the same project. Hosted LCMS solutions like ours are accessed over the internet, giving you on-demand enterprise-grade systems without the headaches and hassles.   Who uses Learning Content Management Systems (LCMS)? Learning content management systems are used by people who want to build online courses. These include trainers, managers, subject matter experts, veterans in their industry looking for ways to share their knowledge, authors, instructional designers, and e-learning professionals. With an LCMS, you can package up content into interactive online courses and deliver a fun and effective learning experience. As you are the judge of how the content should be assembled and delivered, you can personalize each module based on your course learning objectives and training needs of your target audience.   Why do they use a Learning Content Management System (LCMS)? Top reasons for using a learning content management system include the desire to efficiently create and maintain a lot of content. This is important both for organizations, and for subject matter experts looking for ways to extend their reach and possibly establish their own brand and online store for training. …   How do I get started? Download one our free or freemium packages. Install the content builder. Then log in with your username and password. An internet connection with standard bandwidth is sufficient to run our LCMS. Be sure to check out the movies and manuals to help get started.   How long will it take to build a course? Many people believe that building a course would require much time and effort, but this is not necessarily true. If you’re using our learning content management system, building a course is easy and simple and can take just minutes to build. The content builder has pre-defined scene templates and course configuration templates to help get you started quickly. There is no limitation to the scenes and content you can add in your course. You can import power points, video, flash objects, audio clips, and graphics in LCMS and use them whenever you want. You can associate these assets to multiple course(s), which makes life easy and saves a lot of time. Our assessment engine makes it a snap to build quizzes and exams. We offer a choice of over 100 course policies that can be turned on or off with the click of a button—giving you plenty of power with zero programming required. The fun part is when you have all your scenes and content plugged in the given placeholders—and it’s time to preview your creation. The learning content management system also allows you to preview your course as many times you want and when you want. You can have a firsthand look at how your course would look when complete and you can always go back and make changes, if needed. Once you are satisfied with the course, you can publish your course to your learning management system and your own employees, or you can "make an offer" to have a vendor like 360training.com market and sell your courses, or you can publish those courses to your very own storefront. So whether you are looking to create online courses for your organization, sell these courses for royalty, or sell the courses in your own storefront, the LCMS has all the necessary tools and features to serve up an amazing online interactive course. - Wesley Leal and the 360 Authoring team.

Timelines aren’t simply for history class.  In any lesson where change occurs in a somewhat organized sequence of events, a timeline can be implemented to make the student’s thinking incarnate/visible. For example, in English Language Arts teachers can use timelines to see inside student’s heads concerning a story they are reading in class.  Having  students use one of the timeline sites below will allow a visual representation of how the students perceive the arch of action and character interaction.  Even if they’re haven’t completed the book, they can use the latter parts of the timeline to make predictions. Chemical reactions, cause and effect, predicting a response to a variable, water/life cycles (put in a linear form) and so many more instances of scientific inquiry can quickly be placed on a website based timeline for quick evaluation.  Further, timelines can act as a review tool for students right before a test on the aforementioned topics. I was inspired by Mrs. Saunders, our reigning Teacher of the Year at Byron Nelson HS,  and her U.S. History classes.  She instructed her students to flesh out an assignment where they will present a certain facet of the 1920s decade.  I was called in to introduce some tech-tools and during our discussions the idea of layering timelines on top of each surfaced.  Allowing students to see how seemingly separate events occurred simultaneously is a great way to study a decade from an interesting perspective. For example, one group of students can do "Supreme Court Cases of the 1920s" another group can put together a "Women’s Rights Movement Timeline" and a final group of students can work on "Women’s Rights In Other Parts of the World in the 1920s" timeline.  Once completed, students can present all three timelines to show the complexity of a single issue or time like the 1920s, gun rights, character development in play, weather systems, etc. Here are some good online timelines: 1) www.tiki-toki.com - (featured above) This is my favorite timeline, by far.  You have 2D and 3D options and the background looks like really nice.  Uploading images and videos does time a little bit of time, but it’s totally worth it. 2) www.timetoast.com - It’s a nice basic timeline with a nice basic look.  Very easy to use. 3) http://timeglider.com/ - Another free online timeline…but you only get to make 3. 4) www.dipity.com - Another basic timeline that’s quick and easy to use.Filed under: In The Classroom, Technology Tagged: classroom tech, classroom technology, education tech, instrucitonal technology, line, lines, teacher, teacher tech, teacher technology, time, time lines, timelines

Source: ictevangelist.com See on Scoop.it - Educational News and Web Tools

As educators we may teach various and sundry disciplines, one thing we all have in common, however, is that there aren’t enough hours in the day to get everything we want done.  Saving time without sacrificing your focus on student achievement is key. That’s why every time you use the "Assignments" (resource) in netSchool you should also utilize the ability to create a rubric to make grading easier, but still authentic and meaningful. If you click on "Add an activity or resource" at the bottom of each section in netSchool/Moodle, you’ll find the "Assignment" option at the top of the pop-up box.  The dialogue to the right of the radio button states: The assignment activity module enables a teacher to communicate tasks, collect work and provide grades and feedback.  Students can submit any digital content (files), such as word-processed documents, spreadsheets, images, or audio and video clips. So adding a rubric to this resource can save time grading, not only essays or written work, but ANYTHING your students create and upload!  The grade and comments will be digitally documented so students, parents, and teachers see exactly why Johnny earned the grade he received. Here is the Mr. Gatlin (and his fruit fly buddies) inspired tutorial: Filed under: In The Classroom, Technology Tagged: classroom technology, edtech, education technology, innovate, making it legit, moodle, Netschool, NISDNOV8, rubric, teacher technology, thrasymachus, thrasymakos

50% off software for teachers, trainers, and instructional designers June 1-15, 2014          |          PROMO CODE:   LS360summer14 With 360training.com’s summer software sale, now is definitely the time to try something new! As always, our award-winning LCMS and LMS software are yours for FREE. At 360training.com, we’re committed to the idea that a price tag should never get in the way of creating great learning experiences for your students. If you haven’t already tried them, download the FREE software pack and take them out for a spin! For a sneak peek of just a few of the things you can do, check out the movies on our support page. Then get ready to create! Add on your favorite easy-to-use activity and game templates to take your online training to the next level—or go with a starter pack to save even more. You can even get your own store! At 50% off our normally low software prices, helping people learn was never easier or more affordable. When you get to the cart page, just put   LS360summer14   in the PROMO CODE field, click update, and watch prices get cut in half.   Make a difference this summer. Teach what you know. Your students are waiting. - Laura and the 360 Authoring team. …

Last week I gave a talk to our new staff about teaching. The night before, I asked the good people of twitter for their input: It caused a bit of a discussion! So I thought I would elabora… Source: classteaching.wordpress.com See on Scoop.it - Educational News and Web Tools

Cue Movie Voice-Over Guy: Imagine a world where student work can be graded and immediately sent to their email in-box.  In the future, students will have feedback on everything from presentations to Socratic discussions to "exit slips" waiting for them instantaneously.  That future is here! It is a fairly easy endeavor to set up a Google Form to act as a rubric.  Now, if you follow the steps in the video below, you can add a further functionality to that rubric.  The second that student presentation is done, for example, and you tap the submit button… they have their evaluation waiting for them in their inbox.  The same can be done so parents receive these evaluations as well. If it looks too tricky for you (and it’s really not) call me in and I will help you set up the form    Filed under: In The Classroom, Technology Tagged: classroom tech, classroom technology, easy grading, edtech, education technology, email, evaluation, feedback, google docs, google form, google script, grading, instant, iPad, ipad mini, iPhone, quick grading, rubric, teacher tech, teacher technology