Present trends in the mainstream adoption of educational technology coupled
to the increased acceptance and adoption of openness in terms of sharing
resources and open access force higher education into a radical rethink of
its structures and educational strategies. This article examines the current
shift in focus from the simple production and sharing of open educational
resources (OER) towards wider concepts such as open educational practices
(OEP) and cultures (OEC). OER involves mostly educators whereas OEP
and OEC demand the commitment of management, administrators and
politicians.
This openness is already spawning alternative types of peer-based
collaborative learning both inside and outside the formal education system.
In particular the increased awareness of the importance of informal learning has raised a clear need for
some kind of certification model and the current open badges initiative lead by Mozilla and several US
authorities is examined and discussed. In 2011 the OER university partnership announced an innovative
approach to combining formal and informal learning by planning to offer credible credentials for students
who have acquired the necessary skills through their own learning paths. The road to future higher
education may not be entirely behind the campus walls

This paper examines Koreans’ protests against U.S. beef imports by deconstructing online dynamics of news diffusion using data comprised of widely read blog entries created by Daum blog reporters between May and June 2008. The results indicate that Korean bloggers’ political positions on U.S. beef imports were polarized, which ultimately influenced their network positions and the way news was diffused to them. Using a qualitative examination of bloggers’ profiles, we found that bloggers who formed an independent group in order to run a collective blog, and journalists who worked in smaller media organizations contributed to enhancing citizen engagement with the issues at stake. Furthermore, we observed that there was a structural change in the online network between May and June.

Networking is a key skill in professional careers, supporting the individual’s growth and learning. However, little is known about how professionals intentionally manage the connections in their personal networks and which factors influence their decisions in connecting with others for the purpose of learning. In this article, we present a model of personal professional networking for creating a personal learning network, based on an investigation through a literature study, semi–structured interviews and a survey.

In a previous EDUCAUSE Quarterly article,1 we reported the results of quasi-experimental research on the University of Minnesota’s new, technology-enhanced learning spaces called Active Learning Classrooms (ALCs). That investigation found — after controlling for potentially confounding factors such as instructor, instructional methods, assessments, and student demographics — that teaching in an ALC contributed significantly to student learning outcomes. In addition, our findings indicated that the type of space in which a class is taught influences instructor and student behavior in ways that likely moderate the effects of space on learning. Finally, we found significant cross-sectional differences between different subsets of our student sample in terms of how they perceived the ALC’s contribution to their learning experience.

Here, we report on the next phase of learning-spaces research at the University of Minnesota (UMN), which had two components. First, to ensure that our earlier results were not simply fortuitous, we replicated the original investigation with a different instructor, student sample, and subject matter. Second, having shown that the type of learning space matters, we turned our attention to the pedagogy employed within the room. Using another quasi-experimental design, we investigated whether or not having our instructor adapt her instructional approach to fit the space would influence student learning outcomes and student perceptions of their learning experience.

Two specific research questions guided this phase of our research:

Holding the pedagogical approach constant, what is the relationship between the type of learning space and (1) student learning outcomes, (2) instructor and student behavior, and (3) student perceptions of the learning experience?
Holding the learning space constant, what is the relationship between the type of pedagogical approach and (1) student learning outcomes and (2) student perceptions of the learning experience?

This article examines how adolescents are using digital video production in school to express emotions, deal with personal and community problems and even draw on their multimedia compositions as a form of healing. In this sense, youth are using literacy to help them to make sense of their lives while attempting to make changes within themselves and their communities. The data for this paper comes from a two-year ethnographic study in two high schools. Field observations, interviews, video data, pre-production texts (storyboards, scripts, screen plays etc.) and student films were analyzed to understand what language and literacy look like when students use digital video production and distribution in school to tell stories. Drawing on a New Literacy Studies theoretical framework, I argue that the literacy practices in this study allow students to make sense of issues and emotions in their lives and cope with their life circumstances by showing their stories to real audiences both within and beyond their schools.

The developing field of academic analytics seeks to turn data from educational systems into actionable intelligence for the improvement of teaching and learning. This paper reports on the implementation of analytics in a new medical school with an integrated curriculum and clinical focus. Analytics addressed two challenges in the curriculum: providing evidence of appropriate curriculum coverage and assessing student engagement and equity while on clinical placement. This paper describes the tools and approaches used, and outlines the lessons learnt. These lessons include the risk of a simplistic use of visualisations, their potential to generate important questions, the value of a flexible approach to tool selection, the need for relevant skills, and the importance of keeping the audience central. Although there is much further potential for the school to realise, academic analytics have already been a critical enabler of educational excellence.

Il numero 2 di Bricks ha per tema centrale gli eBook, i “libri elettronici” di cui si parla sempre di più e sempre più spesso sia per la scuola che per l’editoria consumer, la letteratura e la saggistica. Abbiamo chiesto di dare un contributo all’argomento a editori, insegnanti, sperimentatori ed esperti, in modo da fornire ai nostri lettori una panoramica ampia e a-ideologica che consenta loro sia di farsi una propria opinione accedendo a punti di vista diversi, sia di cominciare a ragionare in concreto sulle effettive applicazioni del ventaglio di strumenti che vanno sotto l’ampio ombrello della parola eBook.

This paper examines how emergent technologies could influence the design of learning environments. It will pay particular attention to the roles of educators and learners in creating networked learning experiences on massive open online courses (MOOCs). The research shows that it is possible to move from a pedagogy of abundance to a pedagogy that supports human beings in their learning through the active creation of resources and learning places by both learners and course facilitators. This pedagogy is based on the building of connections, collaborations, and the exchange of resources between people, the building of a community of learners, and the harnessing of information flows on networks. This resonates with the notion of emergent learning as learning in which actors and system co-evolve within a MOOC and where the level of presence of actors on the MOOC influences learning outcomes.

This paper examines how student effort, consistency, motivation, and marginal learning, influence student grades in an online course. We use data from eleven Microeconomics courses taught online for a total of 212 students. Our findings show that consistency, or less time variation, is a statistically significant explanatory variable, whereas effort, or total minutes spent online, is not. Other independent variables include GPA and the difference between a pre-test and a post-test. The GPA is used as a measure of motivation, and the difference between a posttest and pre-test as marginal learning. As expected, the level of motivation is found statistically significant at a 99% confidence level, and marginal learning is also significant at a 95% level

The aim of the present study was to gain a better understanding of the content characteristics that make online consumer reviews a useful source of consumer information. To this end, we content analyzed reviews of experience and search products posted on Amazon.com (N = 400). The insights derived from this content analysis were linked with the proportion of ‘useful’ votes that reviews received from fellow consumers. The results show that content characteristics are paramount to understanding the perceived usefulness of reviews. Specifically, argumentation (density and diversity) served as a significant predictor of perceived usefulness, as did review valence although this latter effect was contingent on the type of product (search or experience) being evaluated in reviews. The presence of expertise claims appeared to be weakly related to the perceived usefulness of reviews. The broader theoretical, methodological and practical implications of these findings are discussed.