Am currently reading Faegri et al (2010) as part of developing the justificatory knowledge for the final ISDT for e-learning that is meant to be the contribution of the thesis. The principle from the ISDT that this paper connects with is the idea of a "Multi-skilled, integrated development and support team" (the name is a work in progress). The following is simply a placeholder for a quote from the paper and a brief connection with the ISDT and what I think it means for curriculum design and academic development....more...
Listened to this interview of Chip Heath, a Stanford Professor in Organizational Behaviour about his co-authored book Switch: How to change things when change is hard. My particular interest in this arises from figuring out how to improve learning and teaching in universities. From the interview and the podcast this seems to be another one in a line of "popular science" books aimed at making clear what science/research knows about the topic....more...
Over on the Remote Learner blog, Jason Cole has posted some information about a keynote by Dr Richard Clark at one of the US MoodleMoots. I want to focus on one key quote from that talk and its implications for Australian higher education and current trends to "improve" learning and teaching and adopt open source LMS (like Moodle)....more...
The following is a summary/reflection of Winn (1990), the abstract follows...more...
The following is at first a rambling diatribe outlining some of my reservations with instructional design as it is practiced. Then it is a summary/reflection on Winn (1990) - "Some implications of cognitive theory for instructional design". The abstract for Winn (199)...more...
Most university teaching is crap. Too general, too sweeping? Maybe, but based on my experience I'm fairly comfortable with that statement. The vast majority of what passes for teaching at Universities has a number of really significant flaws. It's based more on what the teaching academic is familiar with (generally based on the discipline experience) than on any idea of what might be effective....more...
I've bitten the bullet and have decided to use Wordpress blog to support the 6 hour orientation to course analysis and design I'm supposed to run next week....more...
The title to this post is included in a quote from Kane, Sandretto and Heath (2004)...more...
It's that time of year again, next week I get to run a session with 20 or so new CQU academics looking at course analysis and design. The session is part of a four day program entitled Foundations of University Learning and Teaching (FoULT). The session is run twice a year....more...
This article from a Training industry magazine raises a number of issues, well known in the research literature, about the significant limitations that exist with the evaluation of university teaching....more...
The unit I work with is undertaking a project called Blackboard Indicators. Essentially the development of a tool that will perform some automated checks on our institution's Blackboard course sites and show some indicators which might identify potential problems or areas for improvement....more...
The unit I work with is responsible for helping staff (and to some extent students) of CQUniversity with their learning and teaching. This is traditionally a fairly difficult task which is made more difficult at CQUniversity by a number of contextual factors. Perhaps the largest is the fact that staff and students are spread across at least 9 Australian campuses spread across almost the full length of the Australian east coast, a couple of overseas campuses and partners and throughout the world via distance education....more...
Much of what we do involves enabling academics (and students) to become familiar with particular technologies. Sufficiently familiar to think about how they can use it in their learning and teaching. We've had to do it with Blackboard and we'll have to do it with Second Life....more...
In a growing category of blog posts I'm expanding and attempting to apply my interest in diffusion theory and related theories to increase the use of course websites. A major requirement, as outlined in the previous post, in achieving this requires and understanding of what students find useful?...more...
In a previous post I laid out some rationale for an organisational approach to increase the usage of course websites. In this post I provide more detail on the rationale behind the pragmatic approach, which was described this way in that previous post....more...
CQUni has an interest in increasing the quality of the course websites, as part of a broader push to improve the quality of learning and teaching. This post is an attempt to engage with some of the issues and develop some suggestions for moving forward....more...
Theoretically the group I work with is charged with helping staff at CQU improve the quality of their learning and teaching. To improve the courses they teach. A task that is not particularly easy for any number of reasons. Including the one identifed by Farhad Saba in this post. i.e. that academics by nature are a fairly solitary bunch and aren't used to, or particularly like, work with other people to help improve a course. I know this from two perspectives, working where I am now and because I was just such an academic....more...
As I've mentioned before Myers-Briggs puts me into the INTP box, a Kiersey Archiect-Rational. Which amongst many other things I have an interest in figuring out the structure of things....more...
Apparently Accenture have discovered "user-determined computing" and associated issues....more...
For a long time I've felt disquiet about the "super-rational" approach to design and development. I'm including both for information systems development (my original discipline and interest) and curriculum design/e-learning (my current job)....more...