Happy 50th anniversary to the Open University! As noted in this BBC article marking the anniversary, [The Open University] was set up to bring degree-level learning to people who had not had the chance to go to a traditional campus, and pioneered long-distance study. The university teamed up with the BBC to produce course programmes,…
The Changing Landscape of Online Education (CHLOE): Behind the Numbers was released on March 29th. The report by Quality Matters and Eduventures identifies institutional approaches to online learning. It will take me some to make my way through this report, but here is an infographic highlighting the contents. One area that jumps out is the…
Wishing my Aunt Barb a very Happy 90th Birthday today. We love you!!!
While it got buried in the news of yesterday, the Zoom initial public offering (IPO) went off with a bang. The video conferencing company’s stock price soared 76% in their first day of trading. My husband was surprised when I glanced at the TV yesterday and asked, “MY ZOOM!?!” Clearly, I’m not utilizing my BBA…
Designers for Learning currently has five teams of advanced instructional design students completing open educational resources for adults working to improve their literacy and other vital skills. One of the hardest aspects of their design challenge is becoming familiar with the needs, the learners, and the adult basic skills educational context. ProLiteracy, the largest adult…
My buddy posted a link to Quill.org, a website with free writing and grammar activities. While Quill is marketed to K-12, it’s valuable for adult learners working to build their literacy skills. To that end, CrowdEd Learning will be sharing alignments to the College & Career Readiness Standards for over 500 lessons, activities, and assessments…
Over the past few weeks, I’ve seen a couple of initiatives to round up interview questions that instructional designers are likely to face on the job hunt. There has been quite a bit of excitement around these projects, so I thought I’d take a second to highlight them here: Lizzie Crowston posted a link to…
As reported in this article from Inside Higher Education, lawsuits filed by the National Association of the Deaf against Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology will continue after requests to dismiss were denied. Central to the lawsuits are the obligations the universities have to caption content in their Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and other materials…
I often say that founding Designers for Learning was like dumping out a 1,000 piece puzzle and having to put it together without seeing the picture on the box. In truth, it’s like encountering THOUSANDS of puzzle pieces and having to figure out which go with MY puzzle and then trying to figure out what…