I have been reviewing how best to strategic plan for higher education.  I have been involved in this process before at different places where I worked and planning is usually just second nature, an expectation if you will if you work as a manager, which I have for the last 15 years or so of my career.

First I would like to address, with little or authority or expertise to back this up, what is a strategic plan?  Well I went to the best authority on this subject that I know..Google.   And here is a bit of my findings from that search:

• Strategic planning is an organization’s process of defining its strategy, or direction, and making decisions on allocating its resources to pursue this strategy, including its capital and people. Various business analysis techniques can be used in strategic planning, including SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats ), PEST analysis (Political, Economic, Social, and Technological), STEER analysis (Socio-cultural, Technological, Economic, Ecological, and Regulatory factors), and EPISTEL (Environment, Political, Informatic, Social, Technological, Economic and Legal).  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_plan
• A comprehensive plan for accomplishment in relation to stated goals and objectives. Ideally, the plan should cover multiple years; include targets for expected accomplishments; and propose specific performance measures used to evaluate progress towards those targets.
• www.pewcenteronthestates.org/template_page.aspx
• A forward-looking plan that aims to map out the means to achieve longer-term goals and to plan a response to unforeseen problems and opportunities.
• www.mvp.cfee.org/en/glossary.html
• A road map that outlines the long-term goals of an organization or program and details how these will be achieved by adopting specific strategies, approaches and methodologies. www.compass-malawi.com/cglossary.htm
• Strategic plan – A document used by an organization to align its organization and budget structure with organizational priorities, missions, and objectives. According to requirements of GPRA, a strategic plan should include a mission statement, a description of the agency’s long-term goals and objectives, and strategies or means the agency plans to use to achieve these general goals and objectives. The strategic plan may also identify external factors that could affect achievement of long-term goals. [GAO] Strategic planning is a systematic method used by an organization to anticipate and adapt to expected changes. The IRM portion of strategic planning sets broad direction and goals for managing information and supporting delivery of services to customers and the public and identifies the major IRM activities to be undertaken to accomplish the desired agency mission and goals. [GAO] www.ichnet.org/glossary.htm

Strategic planning is not an individual process but a collaborative process, if not done collaboratively, taking into account the different voices of an organization’s constituents then what is the point? The essence of strategic planning it to ensure that all stakeholders of an institution are heard, their needs taken into account, weakness of the institution are considered and addressed, and that the institution is progressive and innovative.   In addition to this resources and resource needs of the institution are also considered in developing the strategies, how the institution will get where it needs to be, to ensure a solid foundation for success.

In these times of fast paced change it is still  essential to have a strategic planning process that provides for input, efficient and effective outputs, and as a communication tool to stakeholders regarding the activities of the institution.  It is also a tool of communication that provides for input on the direction that the institution is travelling ..is it truly on the right course?

Other reasons for strategic planning from others:

5 reasons for its use:

1. Forces a look into the future and therefore provides an opportunity to influence the future, or assume a proactive posture.
2. Provides better awareness of needs and of the facilities related issues and environment.
3. Helps define the overall mission of the organization and focuses on the objectives.
4. Provides a sense of direction, continuity, and effective staffing and leadership.
5. Plugs everyone into the system and provides standards of accountability for people, programs, and allocated resources.  (retrieved from http://www.fpm.iastate.edu/worldclass/strategic_planning.asp )

All strategic planning deals with at least one of three key questions:

1. “What do we do?”
2. “For whom do we do it?”
3. “How do we excel?”  (retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_plan )

Such a (strategic) plan will help you to:

1. Take advantage of your company’s strengths.
2. Eliminate or reduce your company’s weaknesses.
3. Capitalize on opportunities and emerging trends.
4. Take defensive steps to reduce threats facing your business.
5. Bring together all your company’s resources, and direct them toward specific goals in areas such as sales growth, profit, productivity and service.
6. Prioritize and document all the goals your company wants to accomplish over the next three to five years.
7. Allocate resources and assign responsibilities.  (retrieved from http://www.sba.gov/idc/groups/public/documents/sba_homepage/pub_mp21.pdf)

Strategic planning enables you to answer the following questions:

1. Who are we?
2. What capacity do we have/what can we do?
3. What problems are we addressing?
4. What difference do we want to make?
5. Which critical issues must we respond to?
6. Where should we allocate our resources?/what should our priorities be?
7. Only once these questions are answered, is it possible to answer the following:
8. What should our immediate objective be? (See the section on Immediate Objectives)
9. How should we organise ourselves to achieve this objective? (See the section on
10. Internal Implications)
11. Who will do what when?  (retrieved from http://www.civicus.org/new/media/Strategic%20Planning.pdf)

Information gathering is essential to strategic planning.  This may include archival data, the history of the institution, the budget, surveys, needs analysis, and surveys are part of the information needed to design a strategic plan.   Pre-work needs to occur prior to the strategic planning process taking place.  This means having a steering committee that determines who should be involved in the process, how the planning process will take place, and the timeline for the strategic planning process.

Strategic planning is information gathering built upon artifacts of the organization.   It is based upon these documents, budgets, conversations, and surveys that the teams is able to develop a sound analysis of the current status of the organization.    I will post the next part on the details of what to review in your strategic planning initiative.

It’s human nature perhaps to start taking things for granted, not dig below the surface and really start to understand how we can really use things to our advantage..such is the case for Twitter.  I tweet..lots of  things that interest me and I hope interest others.  I also tweet things I do ..particularly in Second Life but other areas of my life too.   I will probably tweet this blog too.

“Tweeting” is a form of microbloggin which is defined by Grosseck and Holutescu, (retrieved from http://www.scribd.com/doc/2286799/Can-we-use-Twitter-for-educational-activities) as a Web2.0 technology, and a new form of blogging that let the users publish online brief text updates, usually less then 140-200 characters, sometimes images too.

Wikipedia provides the following defnition of microblogging:  is a passive broadcast medium in the form of blogging. A microblog differs from a traditional blog in that its content is typically much smaller, in both actual size and aggregate file size. A microblog entry could consist of nothing but a short sentence fragment, an image or embedded video.

As with traditional blogging, microbloggers post about topics ranging from the simple, such as “what I’m doing right now,” to the thematic, such as “sports cars.” Commercial microblogs also exist, to promote websites, services and/or products, and to promote collaboration within an organisation.

I have been tweeting religiously for over a year now and plan to do so for at least another six months or for as long as I believe Twitter serves a purpose for me professionally and personally. Twitter has served as the means through which I have created an online persona and identity and I feel it has served that purpose very well.

As I am going to continue to maintain this blog with a focus on certain tools that i use and I have applied the use of Twitter it seemed the logical choice for this posting.  Given that I decided to do some background research to see how others are applying the use of Twitter as educators and perhaps even contrast or compare that to how I use Twitter for information sharing.

My search brought up the blog of Alan Lew, dated 2007. So I checked on Alan to see if he was still using Twitter and he is, in fact, still communicating via Twitter.

I have summarized Alan’s suggestions for using Twitter:

1.  Communicating with students regarding homework, content, and summarizing meetings and conferences.
2.  Communication via a mobile phone
3.  Digital Reference services

Moving on in my search I next found Carol Cooper-Taylor’s 2008 blog with 50 ideas on using twitter.    I reviewed her blog and summarize her observations here:

Sharing links, be human, respond to others, highlight student activities, communicate with and encourage others in your institution to use Twitter to communicate, tweet in moderation, use twitter for instant meet ups, use twitter for facilitating a “backchannel” discussion in the classroom, and bring great minds together!

Ron Jones, in September of 2008, published the following in SearchEngine Watch magazine:

Using twitter to increase the discussion outside the classroom regarding the subject taught..(issue of the day/week?)
Other:  Instant feedback.

• Track a conference or seminar.
• Follow a professional or famous person.
• Public notepad.
• Writing assignments.
• Grammar.
• Maximizing the teachable moment.

The following researchers; Kerstin Borau Carsten Ullrich, Jinjin Feng, and Ruimin Shen, detail how twitter can be used in language learning to faciliate learning English.    In their article they noted that.. “ twitter was selected because it provides the Chinese students the opportunity to
practice the target language as well as their communicative and cultural competence.”

They identify microblogging as tools (that)  enable users to post short messages that are distributed within their community. Users can post messages from their mobile devices, a Web page, from Instant Messengers and desktop clients. The same channels are used for receiving messages.

They found the following three advantages of using Twitter in their classroom :

• First, Twitter is easily accessibly from almost everywhere, so the students can practice at any time by sending and receiving messages either on the computer or the mobile phone. They can also decide how much time they spend reading and writing these messages. This is an essential feature for busy students.
• Second, Twitter is suitable for any level of English because in writing the messages, the students can chose a topic and grammatical structure fitting their level.
• Third, the use of Twitter as an online learning community can help to integrate students in the community who could not attend classroom.

In my research for this blog I found this wiki on Twitter… Twitter Fan Wiki. Which provides a warehouse for a variety of uses of Twitter and how to use Twitter.

In this  2007 article by Tseng, Song, Java and Finin the term microblogging is defined as  a new form of communication in which users can describe their current status in short posts distributed by instant messages, mobile phones, email or the Web.

In the August 16, 2010 US New and Report article the following uses of Twitter were identified:

1.      Using Twitter to post and answer questions during a lecture.
2.    Build networks in the professional world

3.    Develop marketing plans for businesses as a class project.

4.    Tweeting during commencement graduation and other events

5.    A way of connecting with other students in spite of off campus obligations

6.    A way of faculty connecting with other faculty on best practices in teaching

7.    “Digital faculty lounge” for connecting with other faculty

Together we are are just better, we learn from each other and we can bounce ideas off each other, as pointed out in Laura Walker’s 2009 blog on twitter.   This process allows users to reflect upon and improve their practice in the classroom.    Twitter can, and does for me at least, serve as my newspaper and new alert feed.  I check updates on my Twitter stream daily, this is how I learned of the Gulf Oil Spill and other national events.

Academ Hack’s blog from January 23rd, 2008 identifies the following academic uses for Twitter:

Facilitating classroom chatter that may or may not be subject related,  creating a sense of classroom community, understanding the global community, tracking a word, tracking a conference, following a professional, teaching grammar, rule based writing, maximizing a teachable moment, public notepad and writing assignments.

The online daily mewsmagaizine, Inside Higher Ed, has published 73 articles, blogs, etc., on Twitter, the most recent on August 19,2010, which relates to cell phone use.   This article presents a new initiative in which a university provided the following:

Georgia Gwinnett College employed when it decided to offer its more than 300 full- and part-time faculty members cell phones and encouraged them to respond to any calls or texts from students within 24 hours
Is this not great or what?  Gwinnett is taking a great leap off the cliff into the future ….hopefully not an initiative ahead of it’s time !!  I am including this here because Microblogging and smart phones go hand in hand!

On July 26, 2010 Business Week published an article on MBA schools and Twitter. With increased use of Twitter and Facebook schools are adding courses on Social Media at a record pace.    Twitter is being used by many companies for marketing, and special offers, one of my favorites to follow is Dell.

As I was doing research for this blog I came across Rachel Rueben’s The Use of Social Media in Higher Education for Marketing and Communications: A Guide for Professionals in Higher
Education at the following link: http://files.meetup.com/1491352/social-media-in-higher-education.pdf

In her guide she conveys that higher education is using Twitter as follows:

Of the 42 responders reporting to have an official Twitter account for their college, 50% of them say it is updated by their marketing/communications/public relations office. 50% use it to communicate with current students, and the other half use it to reach out to alumni. The majority update their status 1-4 times/week.

On May 20,2010, Hend Suliman Al-Khalifa, conveyed the following uses of Twitter in an eLearn Feature Article. (the results are based upon a Faculty Focus survey of 1900 academics)

• collaboration (between colleagues, in group meetings)
• communication
  • between teacher and student, student and student, teacher and parents
  • as a conference backchannel
  • for job posting
  • to circulate department news
• tools
  • as a personal learning environment/personal learning network
  • as a virtual office
  • to post assignments
  • for language learning
  • for class participation
  • to track attendance
  • to stay abreast of current issues in a given field

In May of 2010 Pearson released the details of their survey on the use of Social Media in education and the findings are as follows:

• Most faculty respondents (59%) have more than one social network account; nearly 25 percent have accounts on four or more social networks.

More findings can be found on the Pearson website. An article in the May 4,  2010 of Inside Higher Education summarizes the findings of this survey.   In a nutshell though we can speculate that professors and students are not quite the luddites that they appear to be, that there is a purpose for  twitter and other social networking tools in the classroom and in higher education.

The articles notes that:   In the open-ended portions of the survey, a substantial number of professors said they do not currently use social media tools but expect they will in the near future — meaning that by next year, the rate of usage will probably be even higher…. What this means to me is that if the utility of tools such as Twitter provide a convenience in communicating with students, assist them to meet the learning outcomes, and connecting with the faculty it will be implemented!  If Twitter provides a means of effectively conducting administrative tasks such as keeping attendance it will be effectively applied by faculty and used by students.

Open Education Resources, Open Knowledge, Open Textbooks, Open Access, Open Source, Open Courseware,  these are all terms that define the revolution in how we access information, who has access, and what we access.  This revolution was driving by the technology that underpins the Internet and provides ubiquitous access to the world’s knowledge, information and resources.

I have spent that last couple of months discovering reports, websites, and journals that focus on “open” in the area of knowledge, education and information.  It was no surprise to me when the New Media Consortium cited Open Courseware as a short term trend in their 2010 Horizons report.   I have written about openness in previous blogs so I hope this posting does not prove redundant.

The history of providing information and access to information to the people has been well chronicled from the printing press forward.  Providing access to university course materials, academic lectures, learning objects and public domain materials via the web is, in my opinion another key milestone in our history.  The benefit is that giving the gift of knowledge to the world will allow for improvement in our lives, work and the world.  The mind of many is greater than the mind of one as other review, discuss and build upon our knowledge.

Providing access to courses via the MITs, Yale, Princeton, and others provides us all with a better perspective of what is excellent teaching, access to their courses to adopt (with proper credit of course) to improve ours. Access to this courseware has contributed to online institutions such as the University of the People and Peer to Peer University.

The purpose of open”ness” is not to give away the “work” of creating the open resources, but to provide open access to the knowledge base that is foundational to the creation of resources that improve learning, knowledge, and data. The analytical process of reviewing, synthesizing and presenting for discussion the work should not be free and should in some fashion be compensated by individuals and/or institutions.

Some of the reports, papers and research on open courseware I have found include:

• New Media Consortium 2010 Horizon Report
• Open Learn Research Report 2006-2008 William and Flora Hewlett Foundation
• Giving Knowledge for Free–Centre for Research and Innovation
• Open Educational Resources–Conversations in Cyberspace–Unesco
• International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning
• Open Educational Resources in Sub Sahara Africa–Examining Network Driven Models within the context of African Development
• Open Educational Practice and resources –OLCOS Roadmap 2012
• A Review of the Open Educational Resources Movement:   Achievement Challenges and New Opportunities February 2007
• Good Intentions Improving the evidence base in support of sharing learning materials
• Open Access in France. A State of the Art Report. 2010 report
• Report of the Working Group on Open Access and Open Educational Resources

Each of the “open” terms I listed above have varying definitions some of these are as follows:

Open Access is concerned with making digital content available free of charge
without restriction [Public Library of Science, 2006]

OAI is a new paradigm in scholarly publishing. It aims to promote models that ensure free and unrestricted access to scholarly & research journals, (retrieved from http://www.openj-gate.com/Footer/About.aspx)

Another offshoot of the openness movement is Open Knowledge: any content, information or data that people are free to use, re-use and redistribute — without any legal, technological or social restriction. We detail exactly what openness entails in the Open Knowledge Definition. The main principles are:

1. Free and open access to the material
2. Freedom to redistribute the material
3. Freedom to reuse the material
4. No restriction of the above based on who someone is (e.g. their nationality) or their field of endeavour (e.g. commercial or non-commercial)

Open education resources:  can be defined as free and open digital publications of high quality materials organized as courses that include lectures, related reading materials, snapshots of discussions, assignments, evaluations, etc. Access to these resources radically breaks down the barriers to quality education and allows everyone to access course material that is prepared and evaluated by expert.  (retrieved from http://www.knowledgecommission.gov.in/downloads/documents/wg_open_course.pdf)

Open Source:describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product’s source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology. Subsequently, a new, three-word phrase “open source software” was born to describe the environment that the new copyright, licensing, domain, and consumer issues created.

Southern Europe Open Access to Science Information

Journals:

Directory of Open Access Journals We define open access journals as journals that use a funding model that does not charge readers or their institutions for access. From the BOAI definition [1] of “open access” we take the right of users to “read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles” as mandatory for a journal to be included in the directory.

Revues.org is a portal of journals in the humanities and social open to journals wishing to publish online the full text. Revues.org is a complete e-publishing platform and built a space dedicated to the promotion of research, open access publishing tens of thousands of scientific papers.

Open J Gate:  is an electronic gateway to global journal literature in open access domain. Launched in 2006, Open J-Gate is the contribution of Informatics (India) Ltd to promote OAI. Open J-Gate provides seamless access to millions of journal articles available online. Open J-Gate is also a database of journal literature, indexed from 6787 open access journals, with links to full text at Publisher sites.

The Open Education Journal is an Open Access online journal which publishes original research articles, reviews and short articles in all areas of education research and on contemporary education issues and learning, including special education.

I will not attempt to enumerate the many institutions which offer opencourseware. There are many sites which do this much better than I could.  For example the blogThe .Edu Toolbox aims to be your one stop tool shop for all the resources you need to create the blueprint and build an impressive foundation in learning.

The OpenCourseWare Consortium is a free and open digital publication of high quality educational materials, organized as courses. The OpenCourseWare Consortium is a collaboration of more than 200 higher education institutions and associated organizations from around the world creating a broad and deep body of open educational content using a shared model.

Connexions is: a place to view and share educational material made of small knowledge chunks called modules that can be organized as courses, books, reports, etc. Anyone may view or contribute:

• authors create and collaborate
• instructors rapidly build and share custom collections
• learners find and explore content

The International Institute of Managment IIM;

The IIM Open Courseware (OCW) experiment project provides free access to some of IIM’s most popular educational materials.  The IIM’s OCW:

• Does not require that participants register
• Does not provide access to IIM faculty
• Does not grant degrees or certificates
• Allow free use to all, as long as you provide copyright reference to “International Institute of Management www.iim-edu.org ” with and active hyperlink (for online use)

Of course there are those colleges and universities known for providing opencourseware such as MIT, Yale, Tufts, John Hopkins, as well as companies such as Novell.

Over the last several years the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation have invested heavily in Open Educational Resources.  They stated that their intent was to catalyze universal access to and use of high-quality academic content on a global scale.

Lori Goetsh wrote in March 2010 that “open-access” repositories – that is,  (are) sites where scholarship and research are made freely available over the Internet. She went on to state that, “Open access helps achieve the fundamental mission of the academy – to disseminate knowledge…” (Goetsch, 2010, Change Magazine).

Is “openness” a disruptive innovation as put forth by Terry Anderson and Bridgette McConkey in the 2009 article Development of Disruptive Open Access Journals in The Canadian Journal of Higher Education.  Essentially the answer to that is yes.  Providing prevalent access to learning objects, course materials, and an understanding of how courses are designed (making education open and not a closed process).   Opening scholarly journals provides the authors with widespread access to their research allowing for a diverse review of their work, increased collaboration and further opportunities for collaborative research.  All of this allows for further innovations, innovations which will improve how we live, what we know, and how we work together…used appropriately ‘openness” and transparency improves our world, our lives, and the lives of future generations.

Feedback is consistent with the student able to monitor his / her progress.  Feedback may also come from peers and peer review.

Several reports or plans related to higher education, education technology, and online learning have been released in the last several months that indicate changes in how students learn, how they access their learning materials, and how that content is delivered.  In addition to this I will also give an overview of Millenials from the Pew Research Center.

In January 2010 the Sloan Consortium released their report on online education.  This report indicates that online experienced a growth of 17% in the last year.  Students in online classes comprise 25% of all students enrolled in higher education today, or 4.6 million students.    This 29 pages report found on the Sloan Consortium website presented the following information:

The issue of retention in online is also addressed in this report.   The question “Is retention in online harder than in  traditional face to face courses?”  This was administered via a survey of Chief Academic Officers which indicated that most were neutral on the question.  However those who agree outnumber of those who disagree.  Specifics on why this perception exists were not asked or provided.

Another report which was released by the US Department of Education is the:  Evaluation of Evidence-Based Practices in Online Learning: A Meta-Analysis and Review of Online Learning Studies.  I previously blogged on this report however what this report indicates is that online learning, can,  under certain conditions,  provide better learning experiences to students.

Another study with trends to watch in distance education is theK-12 Online Learning reportfrom the Sloan Consortium. this 37 page report, based upon a survey administered to over 10,000 school districts, with a5/4% return of valid surveys,  published in January 2009 indicates that:

Most significant in regards to this report is the growth in online education which is illustrated by:

Regulators Can Help Advance / Slow Mobile Internet Evolution.

For sharing videos with a distributed group you may want to check outSynchTube.
synchtube allows you to create rooms to share synchronzied YouTube videos.
This means everyone in the room is viewing the same video at the same time!                       The built in chat allows you to even discuss the best parts, or share other videos.
Watch videos with friends, or even DJ music with the social playlists — it is up to you

Masher looks like another great site to provide a “mash up” of your videos, photos, music or audio recordings.

These tools and many others like them can make your course development easier, allow you to move away from text based content to video and audio, and finally break that umbilical chord to the publisher’s power points.

These tools can also provide for greater student to student interaction, student to faculty interaction, and student to content interaction. (Tello, Louis, 2008; Lawlor, D., 2008;Disalvio, P. 2008) These interactions have also been demonstrated to be essential to student retention in the review of the literature and are also standards reviewed using the Quality Matters Rubric®.

Learners must balance life responsibilities with the demands of learning.

Learner are autonomous and self directed.

Learners have a tremendous amount of life experiences.  They need to connect the                  learning to their knowledge base.  They must recognize the value of the learning.

Learners are goal oriented and know for what purpose they are learning new information.

Learning is self-initiated and tends to last a long time.

Adults as learners take on a great deal of responsibility for learning themselves.  This greatly alters the role of teacher in the learning environments in general but virtual worlds specifically.

Collaborative learning or cooperative learning was another learning theory cited by respondents as most often applied to the design of the learning program in Second Life.  The lecture, listening and note taking lives along side other processes are are based in student discussion and active work with the course content/ materials.  The design of the course is to ensure an intellectual experience for the students and emergent learning processes are identified..however key to the learning process is the discussion. (Macgregor and Smith, 1992, retrieved from http://learningcommons.evergreen.edu/pdf/collab.pdf)

The interactive environment of Second Life lends itself very well to the application of collaborative learning.  The benefits of this learning theory is viewed as freeing up professors from lecturing and allow them time to collaborate with students, enables students to collaborate with other independent of time and geography and provides a new mode for the production of knowledge.   (Tapscott, Don and Williams, Anthony, Educause Review 2010, 45, 1, January 2010)

Those examples of collaborative learning include any activities in which students work together to achieve a common goal.  These learning opportunities maybe well suited to role play, creation of learning objects, and communication activities.   Second Life provides many tools which may support the student in achieving the learning outcomes of a collaborative learning activity these include the communication tools, any activity in which they can create content in world, and the use of the group tools to support and encourage group and team work.

Collaborative learning theory is built upon those tenets of quality that we review in distance education these include student to student communication, student to content, and student to faculty.  These learning activities are illustrated as below:

The model above identifies several avenues of social interchange which seems to support the respondents observations regarding social learning theory.  Bandura identified and defined social learning theory in 1977 as the, “importance of observing and modeling the behaviors, attitudes, and emotional reactions of others….further

In addition to this, due to the rich immersive experience of being in virtual worlds experiential learning seems to be a logical choice for designing learning activities in virtual worlds.  Kolb defined experiential learning as follows: “experiential learning theory defines learning as ‘the process whereby knowledge is created through the transformation of experience. Knowledge results from the combination of grasping and transforming experience’”(Kolb 1984, p. 41, retrieved from http://www.d.umn.edu/~kgilbert/educ5165-731/Readings/experiential-learning-theory.pdf, 2/10/10).  Fernwick, in 2007, identified the five dimensions of experiential learning as purpose, interpretation, engagement, self, and context.

Finally several respondents noted connectivism as a learning theory to be applied to designing course activities in virtual worlds.  Connectivism is a learning theory that should be at the forefront of learning in this digital age.  Defined by Siemens and Downes it takes into account the impact that advances in educational technology has had on how we learn.  (Siemens, 2005, retrieved from http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/connectivism.htm 2/10/10).

Siemens, 2005, further describes connectivism as the integration of eprinciples explored chaos, network and complexity and self organization theories.  He identified the following:

Principles of connectivism:

• Learning and knowledge rests in diversity of opinions.
• Learning is a process of connecting specialized nodes or information sources.
• Learning may reside in non-human appliances.
• Capacity to know more is more critical than what is currently known
• Nurturing and maintaining connections is needed to facilitate continual learning.
• Ability to see connections between fields, ideas, and concepts is a core skill.
• Currency (accurate, up-to-date knowledge) is the intent of all connectivist learning activities.
• Decision-making is itself a learning process. Choosing what to learn and the meaning of incoming information is seen through the lens of a shifting reality. While there is a right answer now, it may be wrong tomorrow due to alterations in the information climate affecting the decision.

Connectivism lends itself very well to the current wave of information, social networking, technology, and change that we experience on a daily basis.  How this theory will allow us as learners and teachers apply the appropriate tools that we need to in order to learn is critical to assisting learners in achieving their goals.  Applying the environment of Second Life to facilitate learning, achieve the aim of decision making as a learning process and making effective decisions  is critical, however those opportunities are there as one engages in the virtual environment.

Putting the onus of learning on the student in student centered learning versus teacher centered learning requires a more consistent method of providing a means for the student to gather feedback on his/her progress in achieving the learning outcomes.  It is the learning outcomes that are fundamental to the assessment process.  The feedback or assessment that should be consistent, constant, and non intrusive to the student accessing the content or activiites he or she needs, and allow the student with the opportunity to apply new knowledge as well as prior learning.

Even if an individual goes off on his/her own explorations in the virtual world he or she can maintain connections with their group, engaged in the environment and observing the creation of objects and how they were designed by others.  They can communicate their findings back to their core group, ask questions of the builder who designed the object, can evaluate the object, and monitor, based upon the feedback if their activities are achieving the course or program learning outcomes. Essentially successfully achieving the outcomes is demonstrated by how successful the student is in demonstrating what he/she has learned, how they communicate their activities, and how they can demonstrate what they have learned to real life and virtually.

It is apparent that those who design learning experiences in virtual worlds can identify those practices which lend themselves best to the opportunities provided in Second Life for education.  Understanding the basic fundamentals of learning theories helps the educator best craft a learning “blueprint,” which justifies and drives the learning activities for students.  This justification is critical for students to grasp immediately and thereby makes their experience that much richer.  Getting students comfortable in Second Life as soon as  possible is essential so they can get beyond learning the basic fundamentals of navigation, communication and the culture so they can quickly access what they need to learn is critical.

Bandura, A. (1977), Social Learning Theory, as retrieved from http://tip.psychology.org/bandura.html.

Fenwick, Tara J, & Gouthro, Patricia (REVIEWER). (2004). Learning through experience: troubling orthodoxies and intersecting questions Review of the Learning through experience: troubling orthodoxies and intersecting questions Alberta Journal of Educational Research, 50(2), 211-214.  Retrieved February 10, 2010, from CBCA Complete.

Holistic. (2007, February 22). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 00:25, February 11, 2010, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Holistic&oldid=110097300

Kolb, David A.., Boyatzis, Richard, Mainemelis, Charalampos, Experiential Learning Theory:
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Macgregor, Jean, Smith, Barbara; What is Collaborative Learning? retrieved from http://learningcommons.evergreen.edu/pdf/collab.pdf 2/10/10.

Siemens, George,Connectivism:A Learning Theory for the Digital Age, 2004, retrieved from Elearnspace, http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/connectivism.htm).

Tapscott, Don and Williams, Anthony,Innovating the 21st-Century University: It’s Time!.  Educause Review, 45, 1.

Virtual world. (2010, February 7). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 00:24, February 11, 2010, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Virtual_world&oldid=342452412

In their article in USDLA’s Distance Learning for Educators, Trainers, and Leaders Maria Puzziferro and Kaye Shelton ask questions regarding online education and distance learning that we as educators in online courses and programs should be asking ourselves as we review our courses and programs for quality.

One assumption that they question is “how do we define student or learning centered and students are in control of their own learning (pp 10).   this made me stop and think..it is easy to assume that this latest “buzz word phrase,” of the day drives the direction of online education today and education in general.  If we can say that our courses, programs and services are student or learner centered..then job done..we are meeting the needs of students.  But do we really know what this means?  does the student?  Does your educational institution or organization have a common agreement regarding what learning/student centered means and does it matter?   or are these just good PR buzz phrases?  Here are some various definitions of the terms and the institutions who use them…

In today’s economy and rising prices for everything cutting costs for students in areas where we can has become and will continue to be of paramount importance to students and their families in making a choice on where they can go to college.  Mainstream media has jumped on the bandwagon with various articles on free and reduced cost textbooks over the last couple of years.  These include articles in US News and World Report which provides an overview of available textbooks resources from free to reduced cost.

In September 14, 2008 the New York Times reported in an article on the various options of providing textbooks at reduced costs including  print on demand options such as Lulu and Flatworld Knowledge,  allowing free downloads in Word and PDFs versions of textbooks, and sites such as Merlot and Connexions.   In an LA Times article dated August 18, 2008 economic text author McAfee noted that it does take work to find online textbooks and resource.  More on McAfree’s work and rationale for open sourcing his textbooks can also be found in this Inside Higher Ed article.

There are some student run sites such as Textbook Revolution which provides:

Our approach is to bring all of the free textbooks we can find together in one place, review them, and let the best rise to the top and find their way into the hands of students in classrooms around the world…. links to textbooks and select educational resources of all kinds. Some of the books are PDF files; others are viewable online as e-books.

Another similar site to this one, but not student run,  is the Open Textbook Registry which is:

a registry of textbooks (and related materials) which are open — that is free for anyone to use, reuse and redistribute. It is run by the Open Knowledge Foundation.

Of course one must be concerned because the cost of textbooks seems to increase the likelihood that students will engange in illegal activities to get the books that they need for little or no cost as related in this article from Boston.com ..

“We think it’s a significant problem,” said William Sampson, manager of infringement and antipiracy at Cengage Learning Inc., a reference book publisher in Farmington Hills, Mich. Sampson said that in any given month, 200 to 300 of the company’s titles are posted illegally as free Internet downloads. Distributing books for free without permission violates copyright laws and deprives publishers of revenue.”

We will be evaluating the use of Merlot in the months to come, however it is important to note that Merlot plays a significant role in the affordable textbook initiative.  Membership in Merlot provides individuals with the opportunity to contribute learning materials, create a personal  collection, share online expertise, and receive peer recognition. The Open Textbook project for Merlot is found at this link on their website and contains 279 resources.   Of course membership is not required to access the resources on the website.  It is important to note that their resources undergo an peer review and are rated.

Do you use any of the resources below in developing your course content, if not why not?  If you favorite resource is not here would you note that in the comments?  If you do why?  What are the advantages? How are these received by students?

I posed the question regarding free/open source textbooks to the DEOS list serv,  this is a list serv for those who work in the field of distance education, and received information back regarding the Orange Grove. The Orange Grove was also profiled in Inside Higher Ed in September. The Orange Grove is actually an example of a university press providing course/textbooks online and downloadable for free.  Another good example is that Anthabasca Press http://www.aupress.ca/index.php/books/bySeries/2 which includes:

Anthabasca University Press is part of the growing collection of the Lois Hole Campus Alberta Digital Library (LHCADL). AU Press’s open access, digital collection of peer reviewed scholarly work provides valuable educational resources (e-books, journals, website publications and videos) that support Lois Hole’s vision of accessible research and learning.

Another example of efforts in promoting open access resources is this on e of an individual keeping a resource base of applicable web based resources on the Technology Training Center of Porterville College.  See this comprehensive list of resources here:  http://www.portervillecollege.edu/tlc/resources.htm#OER

Freetextbooks: This site seems to have a little of everything from lecture notes, to free textbooks, and other webbased resources.

Learnout loud:  your one-stop destination for audio and video learning.   Browse over 20,000 educational audio books, MP3 downloads, podcasts, and video.

Further examples of open education resource depositories include Wikimedia. Under the umbrella of Wikimedia is Wikiversity, Wikisource, and Wikibooks both provide accessible resources for textbooks and course content.

Wikiversity is a Wikimedia Foundation project devoted to learning resources, learning projects, and research for use in all levels, types, and styles of education from pre-school to university, including professional training and informal learning.

Wikisource is an online library of free content publications collected and maintained by our community. We now have 135,382 texts in the English language library.

Wikibooks a Wikimedia community for creating a free library of educational textbooks that anyone can edit. Wikibooks began on July 10, 2003; since then Wikibooks has grown to include over 38,399 pages …

Wikia Education; A list of University / Education Wikis

Wikiversity:  a Wikimedia Foundation project devoted to learning resources, learning projects, and research for use in all levels, types, and styles of education from pre-school to university, including professional training and informal learning. We invite teachers, students, and researchers to join us in creating open educational resources and collaborative learning communities.

Open Education Campaign Wiki:

An open university is one in which

1. The research the university produces is open access.
2. The course materials are open educational resources.
3. The university embraces free software and open standards.
4. If the university holds patents, it readily licenses them for free software, essential medicines, and the public good.
5. The university network reflects the open nature of the internet.

where “university” includes all parts of the community: students, faculty, administration. The Declaration was a joint statement of the community at the [Free Culture 2008 Conference] in Berkeley, CA.

Amser:  AMSER, Applied Math, Sciences Educational Repository, is a portal of educational resources and servicesCommunity and Technical Colleges but free for anyone to use. built specifically for use by those in

Private industry is also getting involved in the opencourseware initiative as well as indicated by the Novell Opencourseware site. They state that:  OpenCourseWare is a collection of educational materials developed by Novell Training Services for authorized courses and other customer training purposes. By making these materials available to the public, we hope to extend to all people worldwide the opportunity to access these high quality learning materials.

Open Culture University: Open Culture brings together high-quality cultural & educational media for the worldwide lifelong learning community. Web 2.0 has given us great amounts of intelligent audio and video. It’s all free. It’s all enriching. But it’s also scattered across the web, and not easy to find. Our whole mission is to centralize this content, curate it, and give you access to this high quality content whenever and wherever you want it. Free audio books, free university courses, free movies, free language lessons and other enriching content — it’s all here. (from their website)

Videos,  I Tunes v-casts, podcasts, etc., all provide the educator and student with access to a broad spectrum of educators in their field of discipline:

Ted Talks: TED.com, we make the best talks and performances from TED and partners available to the world, for free. More than 450 TEDTalks are now available, with more added each week. All of the talks feature closed captions in English, and many feature subtitles in various languages. These videos are released under a Creative Commons license, so they can be freely shared and reposted. (retrieved from their website)

FORA.tv helps intelligent, engaged audiences get smart. Our users find, enjoy, and share videos about the people, issues, and ideas changing the world.

We gather the web’s largest collection of unmediated video drawn from live events, lectures, and debates going on all the time at the world’s top universities, think tanks and conferences. We present this provocative, big-idea content for anyone to watch, interact with, and share –when, where, and how they want.

With our community of savvy users and an extensive, growing library of smart videos, FORA.tv is at the forefront of the ongoing integration – and transformation – of the traditional media, TV, cable, and online industries from mass-market to high-quality, high-value content. FORA.tv was founded in 2005 and is funded by a select group of investors including William R. Hearst III and Adobe Ventures.  (retrieved from their website)

Psychology/about.com About sites usually provide a detailed list of web based resources in a variety of areas.

LearnOutLoud audio and video resources for Psychology (from their website) Check out 10 of the top free online psychology audio books, lectures, & podcasts. For the past three years we’ve featured dozens of free psychology resources as part of our Free Resource of the Day Emails

EduFire:  Live Video Learning Online Classes Fit Your Busy Schedule Learning is easy with top instructors. Learn anytime from anywhere.. from their website they state:

We have a simple (but not easy) mission: Revolutionize education. Our goal is to create a platform to allow live learning to take place over the Internet anytime from anywhere. Most importantly…for anyone. We’re the first people (that we know of) to create something that’s totally open and community-driven (rather than closed and transaction-driven.

As you can see there is an endless supply of resources on the web and it grows daily.  If this is not enough for you or your class they can collaboratively create their own content via blogs, webcasts, wikis, and podcasts!  It’s a whole new age in education of self-created content, self learning to group activities, collaboration and building on or “meshing’ up the knowledge of other resources.