Outside Resources

To say there are resources on the web dealing with technology in education is an understatement. Here are some that are worth keeping an eye on.

General Educational Technology Journals

Educause Quarterly is a peer-reviewed practitioner's publication on using information resources in higher education. It is published in online-only format and includes links to many additional sites. Recent articles included "Engaging Students with Engaging Tools" and "Podcasting: A Stepping Stone to Pedagogical Innovation."

Campus Technology focuses more on "current events" and its writing resembles more of a news magazine. Nevertheless, it is a good place to learn about developing trends in higher education.

The Chronicle of Higher Education's Technology section is also, of course, a resource of news events in higher education. In many cases, you don't need a subscription to access the content in this section.

General Educational Technology Blogs

So who doesn't have a blog? Even our own Borra CTLE has a blog. Here are a few to watch from outside the Dominican community.

Raymond E. Schroeder, who is the Director of the Office of Technology-Enhanced Learning at the Center for Online Learning, Research and Service at University of Illinois at Springfield has several blogs, and he keeps every one of them remarkably up to date. His Techno-News Blog is a site that should be checked every day or be added to your RSS feed. Just visit this page, and you can get to Ray's other two major blogs, the Educational Technology Blog and (for you online educators) the Online Learning Update Blog.

The Chronicle of Higher Education has its own Wired Campus blog.

Finally, one that's proven extremely popular in the higher education community is Prof. Hacker: Tips & Tutorials for Higher Education. Anything and everything that plugs in, clicks, or reboots has been covered at one point or another in this entertaining blog.

Online Resources for Courses

The oldest of them all is the Project MERLOT site, which features resources placed online by your colleagues around the world—many of them reviewed. When you arrive at the site, click the Learning Materials tab.

Other private institutions have began placing their materials online free of charge. Leading the way in this area is the MIT Open Courseware site.

While not including course materials, the University of California at Berkeley has placed their webcasts online for free.

The Illinois Online Network has several areas on their website that may prove interesting. But their Pointers & Clickers: Technology Tip of the Month is especially worth checking out.

Finally, many schools are members of iTunes University, which is a goldmine of lectures and videos. All you need to do is first download the iTunes software onto your computer, and open the application and select the link for iTunes U from the menu on the left. You won't be able to share them with your students on one of our LMS sites, but you can at least point them to the proper area in iTunes.

Most of the above institutions--and many others--are, in turn, linked to from Academic Earth, a site which aggregates these sites into one, including a subject-based approach. 

Online Instruction Journals

You don't necessarily have to teach an online course to take advantage of some of the tips these journals offer, since some of the techniques outlined will work fine in hybrid courses.

The Borra CTLE has a group subscription to the popular newsletter Online Classroom, published by Magna Publications, the same folks who publish The Teaching Professor. Access is limited strictly to Dominican faculty members. To get information on how to retrieve issues of this publication, send an email from your Dominican Email address to Ken Black at kblack@dom.edu.

Many peer-reviewed journals dedicated to online instruction are available for free on the web.  These include the following:

eLearn Magazine: Education and Technology in Perspective (sponsored by Association for Computing Machinery) is an excellent publication. The articles are easy to understand and feature topics of interest to everyone. Recent articles include "Discussion Management Tips for Online Educators" and "10 Things I've Learned About Teaching Online."

Journal of Educational Technology & Society covers everything from policy to practice in its quarterly issues.

JOLT, or the Journal of Online Teaching and Learning is a quarterly journal devoted to the scholarly use of multimedia resources in online education.  Better yet, it's published by the same folks who run MERLOT (see above section).

Rubrics for Online Courses

The Quality Matters rubric remains the gold standard in online education. Although full service requires a paid subscription, the PDF document linked from this page at least gives you an overview of how an online course should be organized.

California State University, Chico, has an excellent rubric for online instruction.

Though aimed a bit more at community colleges, the Illinois Online Network's Quality Online Course Initiative has a rubric available as well.

Student Response Systems ("Clickers")

Derek Bruff, author of Teaching with Classroom Response Systems: Creating Active Learning Environments (Josey-Bass, 2009 and held in the BCTLE library) maintains an outstanding bibliography of material on using clickers in the classroom, organized by discipline.  A great resource! 

Derek Bruff also maintains a blog on using clickers.

University of Michigan's Center for Research on Learning and Teaching has a good page of tips featuring types of activities and types of questions to use with clickers.