Transforming from a commercial textbook to free and open educational resources allows day-one access for all students, encourages course retention, and saves students money.
Affordable Learning Georgia will be providing a free introductory workshop to any interested USG faculty and staff on open educational resources (OER), open textbooks, open licenses such as Creative Commons, and the pedagogical and instructional issues required to transform your commercial textbook into no- or low-cost resources in Athens at the UGA Center for Continuing Education on Thursday, April 9th from 12:00 to 5:00. The workshop will begin with a joint lunch with the USG Teaching and Learning Conference; while offered in conjunction with the conference, the workshop can be attended as a stand-alone event.
Price: Free for USG faculty and staff, limited number of seats available.
To register for this event click here.
Presenter: Ben Wright, Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College
Students pour countless hours into coursework only to see the product of that labor result in a paper or exam which is either discarded or filed away in cabinet. This talk proposes that we consider ways to turn student learning into enduring monuments of achievement. Taking this approach can dissolve the boundaries of the classroom and enable students to make connections between their academic work an the wider world. Ben Wright has taught a series of courses that ask students to produce websites that archive and present student learning. Drawing on his experience as the editor of abolitionseminar.org, a NEH funded digital seminar for K-12 educators, Wright has worked with students in creating websites for a course on the rise and fall of Atlantic slavery, viewable at riseandfallofslavery.wordpress.com and the history of global apocalyptisicm, viewable at historyoftheend.wordpress.com. Hear more about his experiences and consider how you can integrate these models into your own classrooms.
Register
The University System of Georgia is launching a multi-modal online collaboration experience through D2L, designed to develop future scenarios and to explore and describe the factors critical to the success of student, faculty and postsecondary institutions in 2030. The initiative is part of the System’s New Learning Models 2030 (NLM 2030) program.
The free two-part, seven-session process targeted at Higher Education Stakeholders, will also be open to other interested individuals and includes video lectures, readings, and discussions.
Please join if you want to take part in shaping the dialog answering the question: “What are the factors that will be critical to the success of the University System over the next 15 years?”
This fall, during the first part, the collaborative process will “Invent the Beyond” — identifying the driving forces and critical uncertainties confronting institutions of higher education. Building on input from all registered participants, a range of alternative possible future scenarios will be crafted.
In the spring, participants in the “Explore the Beyond” component will examine and identify the factors critical to the success of students, faculty and institutions in those scenarios looking toward 2030. The resulting crowdsourced framework will generate sharable models, materials, and best practices allowing the fine-tuning of new scenarios that address the unique needs and contexts of different types of institutions.
To register and for more detailed information go to https://opencourses.desire2learn.com/cat/
The Invent/Explore the Beyond Schedule:
| Invent the BEYOND |
Module Duration/Start Date |
| ONE: Why Invent the Beyond: Driving Forces & Uncertainties |
SEPT 14-OCT 5 |
| TWO: Building the Scenarios and Narratives |
OCT 12-25 |
| THREE: Future Scenarios |
NOV 9-21 |
| Explore the BEYOND |
Module Duration/Start Date |
| FOUR: Students in 2030 |
JAN 18-30 |
| FIVE: Faculty in 2030 |
FEB 1-13 |
| SIX: The Institution in 2030 |
FEB 15-27 |
| SEVEN: The Future of Learning in 2030 |
MAR 1-13 |
Webinar via Blackboard Collaborate
Presenter – Thomas C. Reeves, PhD, The University of Georgia
Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and other forms of open education are viewed as positive disruptive innovations by some and as threats to traditional education by others. The discord over MOOCs is especially evident in the higher education sector. This presentation examines the evidence for and against MOOCs, especially with respect to the quality of the learning accomplished by participants. The presentation also describes inconsistencies in learning assessment in MOOCs, and suggests innovative assessment strategies based on authentic tasks. Finally, recommendations are made for advancing the efficacy and impact of MOOCs through educational design research.
To register for this webinar please click here or for more information go to:
http://www.usg.edu/faculty_affairs/workshops/category/academic_year_2014_2015
To access previous year’s sessions, please go to http://itunes.usg.edu/
Gainesville Campus, Nesbitt Building, Room 3110
To attend this event please RSVP here.
This event will introduce participants to the fundamentals and some higher-order issues in the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL), including the varied approaches, designs, and methods, as well as the roles of qualitative research, models of collaboration, and markers of quality.
Nancy Chick serves as assistant director at the Center for Teaching at Vanderbilt University and on the faculty of the English Department. She is also founding co-editor of Teaching & Learning Inquiry, the journal of the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (ISSOTL), and co-editor of and author in two books on signature pedagogies (Stylus 2009, 2012). She has published a variety of SoTL articles in other books and peer-reviewed journals and served on the ISSOTL Board of Directors from 2005 until 2012. She presented the opening keynote address at the SoTL Commons Conference in 2014: “Discussions of Quality in SoTL.” She has also given keynotes for Annual Meetings of Federation of Post-Secondary Educators of British Columbia and the University of Wisconsin System Faculty College. She is regarded as one of the most important voices in the international SoTL movement.
Light lunch provided.
Gainesville Campus Map – click to enlarge Parking will be reserved in Sections J and I
