Engaging Employers and Other Community Stakeholders

Do you have ideas or examples of good practice of working with employers to promote workforce development? UK universities and colleges are under pressure to do “employer engagement” and some are finding it really difficult. This is sometimes due to the university administrative systems not welcoming non-traditional students, and sometimes because we use “university speak” [...]

Building a learning community online

I have been thinking about dissemination and adoption of knowledge as our organization (formerly WSU’s Center for Teaching Learning and Technology) is re-organized to become the Office of Assessment and Innovation (OAI). Our unit’s new challenge is to help the university develop a “system of learning outcomes assessment” in response to new requirements from our [...]

External Interest in Rain King from TLT Group

Program review rubric From: Stephen C. Ehrmann [mailto:ehrmann@tltgroup.org] Sent: Monday, October 26, 2009 12:06 PM To: Larry Ragan; Abdous, M’Hammed; Jim Zimmer Cc: Gary Brown Subject: Program review rubric Hi, I mentioned to each of you that Gary Brown and his colleagues were in the early stages of using Flashlight Online [TLTGroup's re-branding of the [...]

Whiteboards of the OAI web strategy

I say “web strategy” in the title rather than “web site” because the concept is a “red” section (photo of left portion of white board) that is the branded OAI website hosted by UnivPubs CMS. The Red Section, (nominally) a one page site, provides links off-site to the Assessment Innovation “blue” “social” site where there [...]

Beyond The University

I think there is evidence to believe a “reflective, self-organizing, constructivist and collaborative pedagogy” is already practiced by many people organized into communities that make use of “legitimate peripheral participation.” So, to paraphrase Shirky: It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a University industry, because the core problem Universities solve — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of building knowledge and making it available to the public — has stopped being a problem.

Not your father’s Portfolio

Understanding an ePortfolio should not focus on the technical survival of a specific thing at a specific URL. Thinking about a specific collection of artifacts in a specific system at the specific URL is too narrow a focus for our understanding of an ePortfolio. An electronic portfolio is both more durable and more tenuous than its paper predecessor. Its also more powerful. Its not a thing or a place, its a practice.

Crowd-sourcing feedback

David Eubanks commented on our recent Harvesting Feedback demo. I’ll save replying about inter-rater reliability to focus now on his suggestion of using Mechanical Turk and the very insightful comment about the end of “enclosed garden” portfolios. I think David correctly infers that Mechanical Turk is a potential mechanism to crowd-source the Harvesting Feedback process [...]

Harvesting feedback on a course assignment

This post demonstrates harvesting rubric-based feedback in a course, and how the feedback can be used by instructors and programs, as well as students. It is being prepared for a Webinar hosted by the TLT group. (Update 7/28: Webinar archive here. Minutes 16-36 are our portion. Minutes 24-31 are music while participants work on the [...]

Critical Thinking Skills Upgrade and Prezi

WSUCTLT has published in multiple places on its critical thinking rubric. Our work on ePorfolios, and Harvesting Gradebook have us thinking that the Networked Learner needs some skills not well represented in that rubric. We hesitate to use the 21st Centrury moniker, but we need to update for a new era. A while back, WSUCTLT [...]

Blackboard + Angel = reason for open learning

In response to the Wired Campus article about Blackboard’s acquisition of Angel Learning,  Scott Leslie commented about moving beyond the LMS to networked learning options. His comment led me to this 2005 post where he saw the social software light and a later post looking for help making the case for “fully open” content. I [...]