Six Paths to More Authentic Teaching

Most frequently, authenticity is described as being “real” or “genuine,” and the advice often given to faculty wanting to develop authenticity in their teaching is to “just do what comes naturally.” But obvious definitions and easy advice frequently obfuscate deeper complexities, and that is definitely the case with authenticity.

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Welcome to the Age of Active Learning: Echo360 Acquires LectureTools

Echo360 announced today that it has acquired LectureTools, Inc., a learning technology company that enables professors to make their teaching more interactive. Founded by a professor from the University of Michigan, LectureTools provides professors with an authentic and easy-to-use solution that enhances lectures with digital content, provides real-time feedback from students, measures learning and facilitates online collaboration. The LectureTools system will be seamlessly integrated with the award-winning Echo360 lecture capture and blended learning platform to provide a unique option for institutions seeking to immediately improve and extend their on-campus experience.

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McGraw-Hill Education Marks Year of Achievement in Adaptive Learning at 2012 EDUCAUSE Annual Conference

In 2012, adaptive learning became one of the most important and exciting trends in education technology, and in that year McGraw-Hill Education cemented its status as the adaptive learning leader, celebrating a number of milestones for McGraw-Hill LearnSmart™ – the company's industry-leading adaptive study tool – as it helped colleges and instructors improve student performance. As part of this year of achievement in adaptive learning, McGraw-Hill Education today announced at the 2012 EDUCAUSE conference in Denver that LearnSmart has surpassed one million student users since the product launched in fall 2009.

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ExamSoft Introduces Exam Intelligence Solutions

ExamSoft Worldwide, Inc., a technology leader that helps schools more efficiently create and administer direct assessments, and generate actionable data to measure and improve individual student learning outcomes, today announced the launch of its Exam Intelligence (E.I.) solutions at the EDUCAUSE Annual Conference in Denver.

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Sonic Foundry Partners with EDUCAUSE to Webcast Premier Conference for Higher Education IT Professionals

Sonic Foundry, Inc. (NASDAQ: SOFO), the trusted market leader for video management and academic, enterprise and event webcasting, today announced the company’s Mediasite platform will be used to webcast the EDUCAUSE 2012 Annual Conference this week at the Colorado Convention Center in Denver, Colo.

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Informal Writing Assignments: Promoting Learning Through Writing

The Writing Across the Curriculum movement has successfully introduced faculty across disciplines to a variety of writing, including very informal writing that faculty do not necessarily read or grade. The advocacy for this kind of informal writing rests on the old premise that practice makes perfect—that as long as students are writing something, their writing will likely improve.

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Blackboard Unveils Major Update for Flagship LMS

Blackboard unveiled a major new release for its flagship LMS Blackboard Learn™, marking a significant milestone in the company's effort to bring new innovation to its core teaching and learning products. The release brings a fresh approach to the user interface, an emphasis on social learning and significantly improved value for institutions and educators working to improve student retention.

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Pearson Announces Project Blue Sky: A Cloud-based, Content Service that Breaks Through to Open Educational Resources

Pearson today announced Project Blue Sky, a cloud-based, content service that provides instructors with easy access to Open Educational Resources (OER). Pearson is partnering with Silicon Valley non-profit Gooru, a search engine for learning materials, and will leverage Gooru’s powerful search capabilities to build applications that seamlessly integrate high-quality learning resources on the web, including OER, with instructor-created and Pearson content.

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Using Student Clickers to Foster In-Class Debate

Integrating technology with appropriate teaching strategies can help stimulate participation and create a student-centered atmosphere conducive to learning. One technology shown particularly successful in boosting student engagement is clickers (Martyn, 2007). In fact, a research study found that student test scores were significantly higher when clickers were used as part of an in-class lecture as compared to a different section of the same class that didn’t use clickers (Mayer, Stull, DeLeeuw, Ameroth, Bimber, Chun, et al. 2009).

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Instructor Characteristics That Affect Online Student Success

Which online instructor characteristics help students succeed? It’s a rather basic question that has not been adequately answered. We did a literature search to find if anybody had done any research from the students’ perspective on what constitutes a quality online instructor. There were perhaps 10 articles by professors speculating about what they thought defined quality online instruction, but nobody had asked students.

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