Article: The Impact of Online Learning on Students' Course Outcomes

The Impact of Online Learning on Students' Course Outcomes: Evidence From a Large Community and Technical College System
By: Di Xu & Shanna Smith Jaggars—Economics of Education Review, December 2013
Using an instrumental variable technique, the authors estimate the impact of online versus face-to-face course delivery on student course performance, as indicated by course persistence and final course grade. Click here for the link to the working paper.

Free Webinars from EdTechTeacher

EdTechTeacher offers free, live webinars throughout the school year aimed at helping educators integrate technology effectively in the classroom. This is a great opportunity learn something new as well as to network with other teachers from across the country and around the world.
Click on the link, EDTEchTeachers October Webinars, to register for one of the many professional development opportunities this month. The web page also provides links to archived sessions. Although many of the sessions are centered on K-12, the technology used in the classroom can certainly be applied to community colleges.

Blackboard's Inline Grading Tool for Assignments

What is Inline Assignment Grading?

Instead of requiring instructors to download student-submitted ‘assignment’ files to view or edit those submissions, instructors are now be able to view student-submitted files “inline,” i.e. in the web browser, without requiring any plugins, applets, or client-side applications. Annotation tools are included with the inline viewer, enabling you to provide feedback including comments, highlights, and even drawings/annotations directly on the inline view of the document. Supported document types that can be converted are Word (DOC, DOCX), PowerPoint (PPT, PPTX), Excel (XLS, XLSX), and PDF (PDF).

Known Issues: 1) Students cannot annotate documents, 2) This does not work with SafeAssign, and 3) Annotation sessions expires after an hour, so if an instructor takes longer than an hour to annotate a document, annotations made after that session expiration may not be saved.

 

For more information:

• Video: Inline Assignment Grading
• PDF: Inline Grading for Assignments

When Students Can't Compute

Interesting article by Dian Schaffhauser, and published by Campus Technology, about the technical barriers many community college students face that prevent them from being successful in online education. The article discusses access issues, availability of computer labs, broadband issues, and students who are digital non-natives.

"Online education promises learning opportunities for all, but too many community college students lack the tech skills--and the access-to take advantage of those resources."

Read the full article: When Students Can't Compute

SoftChalk Short Courses in October

Do you want to learn more about specific features of SoftChalk Create? Then these Short Courses are perfect for you! These live, one-hour webinars include a presentation and examples, as well as an opportunity for you to ask questions and receive assistance from the instructor.

Interactive Learning Activities - The Presentation Group: Monday, October 14, 1:30 - 2:30 PM EDT
Learn how to create and modify presentation learning activities in SoftChalk Create. Both text and graphics-based activities will be shown. Activities that will be covered include the Charts activity, Did You Know activity, Timeline activity and many more. You will also learn a method to place a PowerPoint slide deck as a slideshow activity within SoftChalk Create and how to “Import” a PowerPoint slide deck into a SoftChalk Create slideshow. Click here to register.

Interactive, Scorable Learning Activities: Monday, October 21, 1:30 - 2:30 PM EDT           

Learn how to create and modify the scoring learning activities in SoftChalk. Crosswords, Drag-N-Drop are only a few of what will be covered. Click here to register.

Creating, Importing and Modifying Tables: Tuesday, October 22, 1:30 - 2:30 PM EDT      
Learn how to create and modify tables in SoftChalk Create including how to import and modify a table from Excel or Word. Click here to register.

The StyleBuilder and eCourseBuilder: Thursday, October 24, 1:30 - 2:30 PM EDT              

Learn how to use the SoftChalk Create StyleBuilder tool to create your own personal “Style” including how to import and export your style and apply it to your lesson. You will also learn how to create an e-Course using the SoftChalk Create eCourseBuilder tool. Click here to register.

More Short Courses will be scheduled soon so keep checking their full Short Course schedule.

The National Center for Academic Transformation (NCAT) is pleased to announce that it will be offering three FREE webinars on course redesign in the coming months.

 Fall 2013 Webinar Series

 Each hour-long webinar features an NCAT Redesign Scholar, the project leader of a highly successful course redesign, describing the redesign project with a particular focus on its distinguishing characteristics. After a presentation, the lead faculty member is available to answer questions and provide additional specifics about the redesign. Each hour-long webinar will occur at 1 pm eastern time:

• October 8, 2013: Redesigning American History and European History at the State University of New York at Potsdam presented by Jim German, featuring the effective use of undergraduate learning assistants.
• November 19, 2013: Redesigning Principles of Chemistry at the University of Maryland Eastern Shore presented by Jennifer Hearne, featuring active engagement in science education at a historically black institution. 
• December 10, 2013: Redesigning statistics at Niagara County Community College presented by Dan Miller, featuring the transferability of a statistics redesign to developmental math.

Registration is required, but there is no registration fee. To register, go to http://www.theNCAT.org/Webinars/2013Webinars.html.

Videos of prior webinars may be accessed at http://www.theNCAT.org/Webinars/2013Webinars.html.

• Redesigning General Psychology at Frostburg State University
• Redesigning Computing and Information Literacy at Arizona State University 
• Redesigning developmental math at Cleveland State Community College, Chattanooga State Community College and Northwest-Shoals Community College.

NOTE: You will need to register before viewing each webinar.

SoftChalk Professional Development Opportunities

SoftChalk Short Courses now available!

Do you want to learn more about specific features of SoftChalk Cloud and Create? Then these Short Courses are perfect for you! These live, one-hour webinars include a presentation and examples, as well as an opportunity for you to ask questions and receive assistance from the instructor.

 Textpoppers, Images and Hyperlinks in SoftChalk Create

In this one-hour Short Course you will learn how to insert and modify pop up text annotations. You will also learn how to insert, optimize and modify images within a lesson page and within a text popper. You will also learn how to create and modify hyperlinks on a lesson page and within a text popper. You will see how easy it is to use the Media Search tool to look for and insert graphics, and you will see how to insert a graphic stored in the SoftChalk Cloud.

Monday, September 16                12:30 - 1:30 PM EDT         Click here to register.

Navigation Features and Sidebars in SoftChalk Create

Learn how navigation works within SoftChalk Create, including how to make a topic part of the navigation, how to change the appearance of the on-page navigation, create a table of contents and create new pages. You will also learn how to create a sidebar and place internal navigation within the sidebar

Wednesday, September 18         12:30 - 1:30 PM EDT   Click here to register.          

 
 More Short Courses will be scheduled soon so keep checking our full Short Course schedule.