Reading Apprenticeship

Reading Apprenticeship® Online for Community College Instructors

Who Should Participate

This 30-hour, 6-week online learning experience is geared toward currently practicing community college instructors from across the disciplines and is appropriate for instructors focusing on any subject area or level. There are no prerequisites for enrollment.

Key Ideas

Reading Apprenticeship professional development helps instructors to understand the ways in which they, as disciplinary experts, can "apprentice" students into proficient academic reading in their subject area. This course will teach instructors:

• how to think beyond their "expert blind spot" to uncover the strategies they bring to disciplinary reading tasks in order to scaffold these strategies for students
• how to introduce and sustain metacognitive conversation in their classes
• how to recognize and work with students' strengths as readers
• how to bring an inquiry lens to their own instructional practices.

Classroom tryouts and debriefs of key routines are integral to the course, providing instructors with concrete practice and close feedback.

How Students Benefit

Based on data and observations collected from over 200 community college instructors over the past five years, Reading Apprenticeship has been seen to have the following impact on student success:

• Increased retention and course completion
• Increased depth in reading comprehension and written work
• Increased willingness to persist through difficult texts

Sign up for an online course to begin in January of 2013. For more information contact Michele Lesmeister at mlesmeister@RTC.edu

Open Access Week: October 22 - 28, 2012

Time: October 22, 2012 to October 28, 2012
Location: everywhere
Organized By: SPARC http://www.arl.org/sparc/

Event Description:
Open Access Week, a global event now entering its sixth year, is an opportunity for the academic and research community to continue to learn about the potential benefits of Open Access, to share what they’ve learned with colleagues, and to help inspire wider participation in helping to make Open Access a new norm in scholarship and research.

Learn more and sign up at http://www.openaccessweek.org for access to all the support and resources you need, and to connect with the worldwide OA Week community.

Weirdness in the World of MOOCs

Minnesota Gives Coursera the Boot, Citing a Decades-Old Law

From The Chronicle Blog: Wired Campus
October 18, 2012, 4:56 am

By Katherine Mangan
 

Coursera offers free, online courses to people around the world, but if you live in Minnesota, company officials are urging you to log off or head for the border.
The state’s Office of Higher Education has informed the popular provider of massive open online courses, or MOOC’s, that Coursera is unwelcome in the state because it never got permission to operate there.

Read more...

How to Share Good Stuff wtih Creative Commons and Free Online Resources

As my friend and colleague, Tom Caswell, Director of Instructional Design at Western Governors University, is found of saying, "Teaching is sharing."

As educators/teachers/instructors/facilitators of learning, we are all about sharing information, sharing skills, sharing experiences and sharing workload to help our colleagues and our students succeed. And, although almost every educator I know is eager to share ideas, strategies, and even curricula, lessons and assessment tools, much of this rich collection of resources never makes it into the hands of other educators.

The more educators we have contributing to the global collection of resources, the richer the collection becomes. So, why not make it a practice to share everything you create for your courses?

Here's a simple, 3-step process to make your work accessible to others:

1. Create your lessons, activities, assessments and so forth in an electronic format. Who doesn't, in this day and age, you might ask? Well, some items may not be easy to put into a Word doc. Maybe you could make a very short, non-edited, video of a demonstration. Or, record an explanation of a PowerPoint slide show.
2. Add a Creative Commons license to your work. This allows others to use your work, without asking you for permission, directly. You can control the level of permissions by choosing from several different types of Creative Commons licenses. The most broad license says to the world "I created this work, and anyone, anywhere is free to use it in its entirety, or in part, for any purpose they choose. Just give me credit for my work."
3. Post your work online in an easily found (read searchable) location. Where? A blog, wiki, or  website. Some easy-to-use (and ad-free for free, for educators!) examples are wikispaces, blogger and Google Drive (click on the orange "create" button to begin in Google Drive). Non-geeks will find these resources intuitive and there are multitudes of online resources to answer most questions you might have about how to make them fancy. As you can see from this blog, I have stuck to the non-techie, "old-fashioned" style of blog!

Have fun, and thanks for sharing!
PS Send me the links to your "good stuff" and I'll post them on this blog to share with others.

Accessibility Resources for Online Design ( CCBY )

From the Washington State Open Course Library Developer Resources section:

The how and why of Alt-tags: http://webaim.org/techniques/alttext/ The Alt-Tag Video from the Kick-Off: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3NbuDpB_BTc The How and Why of Styles: http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/how-to-use-styles-in-microsoft-word-to-save-a-lot-of-work/ How to make your links accessible http://webaim.org/techniques/hypertext/#keyboard How to caption YouTube videos: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOsEG6K53Is&feature=related   Learn more about Information Literacy, Open Education Resources, and Instructional Design... Unless otherwise specified, this work by Washington State Colleges is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. The Open Course Library is funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Washington State Legislature.

OER, MOOCs, and Big Data

Here's a trio to jump-start a discussion with your campus community, about the future of higher education:

 

• Watch this TED-talk about Coursera: http://www.ted.com/talks/daphne_koller_what_we_re_learning_from_online_education.html

           (If you’re just interested in skimming the video, skip to 15:00 on the timeline)

• Then, read this article in Campus Technology about MOOCs: http://online.qmags.com/CPT1012?sessionID=86270931BEE5408CD30543898&cid=2315771&eid=17522#pg2&mode1

• And, last, read this article in CT about Big Data: http://online.qmags.com/CPT1012?sessionID=86270931BEE5408CD30543898&cid=2315771&eid=17522#pg11&mode1

What are your thoughts about where we're headed?

Learning Analytics

Have you seen this TED talk video?

(Thanks to Liz Falconer, Renton Technical College, for sending it to me.)

http://www.ted.com/talks/daphne_koller_what_we_re_learning_from_online_education.html

It's about MOOCs (though the speaker doesn't use the term MOOC) and learning analytics. My husband and I just watched it and were puzzling over what the implications of this type of data collection and analysis might be, for higher education.

What will the role of colleges and universities be, ten or twenty years from now?