Online courses: A liberating and inspiring ally to residential education

Distance learning courses have been around for a very long time and have often been treated by mainstream academia as the step child to residential face to face classes. However, all of that is changing as advances in technology have made online education an excellent way to learn as well as enhance the residential experience.  The president of MIT recently said, "Online education is not the enemy of residential education but rather a profoundly liberating and inspiring ally." I wrote about this "ally" back in 2007 in the following post, University 2.0 - Online Classes Enhance Universities.  Within that blog entry, I posed the following comment and questions, "Online information and communication is changing the way the world interacts and learns...What are universities across the world doing about this information revolution? How are we demonstrating to our future students that we are not only a part of this human network but that we are leaders in the movement?" Read entire post here.

Now in 2012, we are beginning to see how some of the most prestigious research and discovery universities are answering that question. It will be interesting to see how this effects the current higher education ecosystem.

Here is what Harvard and MIT are doing.

Canvas LMS: Technology that facilitates good pedagogy

All LMS's (learning management systems) are not created equal. The design of the LMS must be done right to facilitate good pedagogy.  It needs to be easy enough for the  non tech person to use, yet it must do very sophisticated and complex things in the background to facilitate the learning process. I would also say that pairing a faculty member with an instructional designer/academic technologist at the onset, will yield the best courses possible.

The Canvas LMS does design right and consequently facilitates good pedagogy.  That is the key, because all LMS's say they do the same things, but Canvas does them right, which makes it a tool that improves, not hinders the learning process. Here are just a few reasons:

• Easy and efficient access to content, instructor, and students
• Content is easily mapped to learning outcomes by instructor 
• Assignments can be assessed using rubrics you can easily create in canvas (HTML5 anyone?)
• Canvas makes grading assignments very engaging and efficient. Instructors can leave feedback (text, audio, or video) in the rubric or as a side comment. Students can comment back seamlessly (text, audio, or video).
• You can easily pull learning outcomes into rubrics to ensure mastery of content

More to come in my next post...

Have you used Canvas yet? How would you compare it to other LMS's you have used?

Reverse the lecture paradigm

Rather than teachers lecturing (sometimes poorly) and kids doing homework at home (sometimes poorly), kids watch world-class lectures at home and do exercises in class with their teachers, who are best for such personalized interaction. Agree or disagree?

The Power of Blogs: Read The Comments and Participate in the Conversation

A blog article that provokes people with differing perspectives to comment and discuss is something to be valued. For example, check out the Endgadget article and video titled, "The iPad is taking away American jobs, Jesse Jackson Junior's sanity (video)" -- The video itself is kind of funny as JJ Junior comes off sounding like a technophobe, but the content of what he is saying can make for some really good debate on the economy and the interplay of technology and society. Any prof that teaches a course on Technology and Society should ask their students to read and comment on the blog. I initially read the article because I thought it would be funny but found myself really engaged in the comments section of the blog. By looking at a complex system from multiple angles and perspectives, I become more informed in my own opinion of the topic. Educators should constantly be on the lookout for blog articles that evoke multiple perspectives and then encourage their students to comment and be a part of the conversation.

Khan Academy is Tip of the Iceberg in Education Reform

The first time I learned about the Khan Academy about a year ago, I thought, "this is just the tip of the iceberg in reforming education." I posted Sal Khan's TED talk a few posts ago and I recommend checking that out if you are unfamiliar with his story. Free, easy to follow, online educational videos in subjects such as math, history, science, languages, etc will equip schools like never before. Instead of getting lectures and lessons in class and getting homework at home, we flip that around. We get the lectures at home via free video tutorials and online lessons and we get hands on learning, active discussion, and assistance from the teacher during class in real-time. The online videos actually make it easier for the student to learn as they can pause, rewind, and fast forward the videos. The Khan Academy is loading thousands and thousands of curriculum based videos to the web for free along with assignments, quizzes, and even games that encourage achievements in learning. Khan says his method of learning, "will liberate teachers from the standard "one-size-fits-all" lesson plan and help to "humanize the classroom." I think these videos represent just a fraction of the potential that can be harnessed in online and blended learning. The fact that one guy made thousands of educational videos that are actually pretty good, will give schools something to think about regarding how they can use asynchronous learning to improve the educational system. These are exciting times. Check out this article - http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/04/04/the-khan-academy-and-educ_n_844390.html

Speaking at the WCET Conference - Best Methods of Collaboration in Inst. Design

Best Methods of Collaboration in Inst. Design
November 13, 2010, 8:00 AM-9:00 AM - Pavilion
WCET Conference - http://wcetconference.wiche.edu/

Presenter: Terence Armentano
Presenter: Michael Edwards

In today's connected world, instructional designers and content experts have multiple ways of collaborating on projects. From video conferencing and social networks to blogs, wikis and simple emails, options for collaboration abound but can almost be overbearing. This roundtable will focus the discussion on how best to select and deploy the best and most efficient methods for effective collaboration in instructional design.

Powerful Lecture by Sir Ken Robinson on the Need For a Changing Educational Paradigm

I enjoyed both the content of this lecture and the creative way in which it was produced. I love how the art in this video engaged and connected my brain to the content of the lecture itself. I could see this communication method as a very powerful online learning tool where artists and teachers collaborate to engage the learners. Check it out

Did You Know 4.0

This is another official update to the original "Shift Happens" video. This completely new Fall 2009 version includes facts and stats focusing on the changing media landscape, including convergence and technology, and was developed in partnership with The Economist. For more information, or to join the conversation, please visit http://mediaconvergence.economist.com and http://shifthappens.wikispaces.com.

A few of my distance learning principles for success

First, you have to have a passion for learning new things. You can't ever be satisfied with the status quo, especially since we live in the "Information Age." My action steps for this principle are to start subscribing to prominent bloggers in your field today. And if you want to be looked upon as an expert in your field, start contributing to the conversations in your field by starting a blog and writing about issues in your own field that you are passionate about. This will open up a whole new world to you and lead to many new connections. This is one of the reasons I eagerly developed a University-wide blogging system for BGSU (https://blogs.bgsu.edu). Every student, faculty, and staff member can create as many blogs as they want. It has been awesome to see what happens when everyone at the university has a voice on the web. They create, communicate, and collaborate in ways not possible in years past. The day of hording information is over because information is ubiquitous and we have now entered the day of sharing information. It's those that know what to do with all the good information on the internet that will make a difference in the world. If you don't believe me, ask yourself why MIT has uploaded 1900 courses to the internet as well has hundreds of other schools. They understand that information is not the commodity, it is the interaction with experts and peers from a community of learners around that information. Second, if you are an online instructor, communicate, communicate, communicate, with your learners. Many people just entering the world of distance learning may think of it as a glorified correspondence course, however they could not be further from the truth. Online learning actually facilitates many new streams of interaction and communication and the best instructors leverage those streams in their courses (i.e. social networks, blogs, twitter, youtube.) However, they must use these technologies appropriately and with much wisdom, as they may end up just generating noise instead of true learning opportunities. It is for this reason at BGSU that we have an expert staff of educational technologists in the Center for Online and Blended Learning, to work with our online faculty.

The World is Open

News: 'The World Is Open' - Inside Higher Ed

Technology is changing higher education in more ways than can be counted. Distance education has become common. Leading universities are putting course materials or even entire courses online -- free. The Obama plan for community colleges envisions free online courses that could be used nationwide. Curtis J. Bonk, a professor of instructional systems technology at Indiana University, surveys this landscape in The World Is Open: How Web Technology is Revolutionizing Education (Jossey-Bass). Bonk responded to questions about the book in an e-mail interview.

A very fascinating read.  The open access to educational materials and experts is virtually limitless. What role do universities play in such an open educational world.  For example, in years past, one aspect of accreditation for colleges involved access to scholarly journals, but as the article reveals in the following quote, this has changed drastically in the information age, "When I was in primary school in the 1960s and 1970s, I had to walk next door to borrow the Compton Encyclopedia volume that I needed. They were free for me to use when the neighbors were home. Today, Yahoo! Education provides free access to the Roget’s II Thesaurus (260,000 synonyms and cross references), Colombia Encyclopedia (more than 50,000 entries and 84,000 hypertext cross-references between the content), and American Heritage Dictionary (definitions, word spellings, and word suggestions as well as more than 200,000 entries, 70,000 audio word pronunciations, and 900 full-page color illustrations). If that is not enough, there is the Encyclopedia Britannica, and yes, that trusty Wikipedia that is now the seventh most accessed Web site in the United States." After reading the article, "What are a few ways you expect these movements to change higher education in another 10 or 20 years?"

BLOGS.BGSU a Digital and Educational Revolution at Bowling Green State University

There is a lot more than meets the eye to BLOGS.BGSU.EDU, the homegrown blogging platform developed by Assistant Director of COBL, Terence Armentano. Blogs and microblogs such as Twitter have taken the world by storm. Why? Because they blast open the floodgates of communication. They give everyone a voice and anyone with an internet or even a mobile phone connection can listen in and talk back. Upon closer inspection of BLOGS.BGSU, one will notice it is not just about new technology, it's about a movement, a change in thinking, a paradigm shift, a leveling of the proverbial playing field. It's about what happens to a university when everyone has a voice. For the first time in history, we can leverage the collective intelligence of the university to potentially solve greater and more complex problems in the world. Think about the following scenario: Everyone at the university has unique life experiences and varying degrees of expertise in life. Some have much more life and work experience than others, but surely the sum is greater than its parts. For example, if we have around 20,000 faculty, staff, and students here at BGSU and the average age is 25 then we have 500,000 years of experience between us that we can learn from. BLOGS.BGSU is a great way to leverage such experiences as everyone can contribute. And this is just the tip of the iceberg.

BLOGS.BGSU is built upon the Wordpress platform, and everyone with a BGSU email account can login today and start blogging. However, upon closer investigation of the system, one will notice that it can be used to do more than blog. In fact, one will discover the nerve center of a web 2.0 revolution at BGSU in which students, faculty, and staff are creating, consuming, categorizing, and publishing content to the internet as well as networking, interacting, discussing, and critiquing each others posts. The system is so flexible it can be used to build everything from a simple news blog to a web 2.0 portal complete with static and dynamic web pages, blogs, podcasts, flickr integration, Google statistics tracking, and more. Depending on one's goals, the system can be leveraged to create websites, portfolios, tweets, podcasts, journals, news sites, and more. One of the best ways to understand this phenomenon is to view examples of how it is being used. The following are just a few of the creative ways in which people and departments at BGSU are using the system:

Center for Online and Blended Learning
Academic Technology
BGSU Strategic Planning Blog
Dr. Sue Mota - MBA 6070x
Brad's Art 101 Blog
Blackboard Video Tutorial Database Blog
MBA Blog
Jake Graving's Art 101 Blog
Music Library and Sound Recordings Archives News
Center for Teaching and Learning

News from the Curriculum Resource Center

The Rec Well Wire - Connecting Recreation and Wellness Enthusiasts
Dr. Natvig’s BGSU 1000 Blog -This blog is the main site for the music section of BGSU1000

SMC Blog - School of Media and Communication news/event blog
Second Life Virtual Campus
BGSU University Libraries News
Carolyn Kraut - Instructional Designer, COBL
Terence Armentano - Assistant Director, COBL

International Studies - The blog for International Studies majors at BGSU!
Dr. Gwen Evans - Companion site to Third Year Review
Language Learning

Interactive Communication Technologies Course Blog

Jordian Ross - Student Blog and Portfolio

Newsweek: Online schools are booming

The Newsweek article titled, "The Sound of One Hand Clicking:
Online schools are booming, thanks to their convenience, low cost, and improved quality" accurately captures the shift toward online friendliness in higher education. Universities are recognizing that students and working professionals are asking themselves, why go to college when college can come to us in a convenient, affordable, high quality way? A couple segments from the article:

Once targeted at older, working adults, distance learning has moved into the education mainstream at stunning speed over the past couple of years, as technology allows ever-richer, more-interactive learning experiences online—and as college costs continue to rise and classrooms are packed to capacity.For traditional brick-and-mortar institutions, that has meant a scramble to enter a lucrative market that used to be the exclusive territory of for-profit institutions such as the University of Phoenix and Kaplan University (which, like NEWSWEEK, is owned by The Washington Post Company).

"The stigma is gone," says Phillips (founder and CEO of Geteducated.com, a service that ranks online learning institutions) "Online learning has reached mass cultural acceptance. It's no longer the ugly stepsister of the higher-education world."

Using videos, podcasts, live chats, Webcams, and wikis, educators increasingly see online learning as a way to engage the videogame generation with pedagogy that feels more like entertainment than drudgery. Students in the new homeland-security master's degree program at the University of Connecticut this fall, for example, will have coursework that resembles Grand Theft Auto: dwelling in a cybercity called San Luis Rey plagued with suicide bombers, biochemical attacks, and other disasters.

Another important factor that has closed the prestige gap is the tight integration of online programs into their host institutions. When UMass launched UMassOnline in 2001, it used the same admission standards, the same faculty, the same curricula—and it awarded students degrees indistinguishable from those given to campus-going counterparts. The vision of UMassOnline as a seamless division of the university worked because "it fit with the culture of the institution," says Wilson, who was the CEO of UMassOnline until 2003, when he became the president of UMass. The venture has also been extremely profitable—UMassOnline earned $46.8 million in 2008.

US Department of Education Release Study Indicating Online and Blended Learning to be Most Advantageous

This is something that those of us in the field have known for quite some time. I think what is extremely important about this study is that the source of this study is the Department of Education. It can be quite time consuming trying to convince some people about the quality of online education, so this just adds more credibility to what we have been saying.

News: The Evidence on Online Education - Inside Higher Ed

WASHINGTON -- Online learning has definite advantages over face-to-face instruction when it comes to teaching and learning, according to a new meta-analysis released Friday by the U.S. Department of Education.

The study found that students who took all or part of their instruction online performed better, on average, than those taking the same course through face-to-face instruction. Further, those who took "blended" courses -- those that combine elements of online learning and face-to-face instruction -- appeared to do best of all. That finding could be significant as many colleges report that blended instruction is among the fastest-growing types of enrollment.

President Obama, Community Colleges, and Online Education

I am still processing this article which outlines Obama's big plans to give billions of dollars to Community Colleges; $500 million of which is dedicated to building free online credit based courses. Wow! What a paradigm shift in education. One thing is for sure. People are realizing that information is no longer at a premium. Almost all human knowledge is floating around in the air around us and all one needs to do to access it is download it via an internet connection. However, good teachers that can translate information to knowledge, and especially one's that have adapted to teaching online effectively, ARE AT A PREMIUM. Just because someone is a good brick and mortar teacher, does not mean they are a good online teacher. They should consider questions such as: Do the courses take advantage of the Internet's multiple modes of communication and engagement such as video conferencing, discussion boards, blogs, wikis, etc. Verily verily, building a high quality online courses is less about uploading content and more about organizing the content, and engaging the content, the student, and the community.

My brain is swimming in questions as I ponder what systemic effects big government backing of Community Colleges and Free Online courses will have on our educational system as a whole. Ask yourself, "what is the purpose of our educational systems?" (Feel free to comment below). In the end, my gut feeling is that individual people are the ones best able to choose the learning institutions that best meet their needs AND the learning institutions that flourish will be the one's that are able to identify those needs, adapt quickly to those needs, and meet those needs effectively. This should prompt Universities to work harder at giving prospective students the best "inside look" at the University when students are shopping for their higher ed future. This must go beyond getting a facebook and youtube account for universities. What do you think it will be? (Feel free to comment). Also, one final thought...When a university becomes too dependent on government money for survival, they become less agile to adapt, so those jumping into new monies should do so with razor sharp calculations and a bit of caution. How do you think Obama's proposed plan will affect the Educational Systems in the US? I'm still processing.

"Blended Learning" More Effective than Face-to-Face

"Blended Learning" More Effective than Face-to-Face (Source: Education Week, 2009)

source: United States Distance Learning Association (USDLA)

Download Report:Evaluation of Evidence-Based Practices in Online Learning
http://www.ed.gov/rschstat/eval/tech/evidence-based-practices/finalreport.pdf

A new report http://www.ed.gov/rschstat/eval/tech/evidence-based-practices/finalreport.pdf released today by the U.S. Department of Education, which analyzed 46 studies comparing online learning to face-to-face education, concluded that "blended learning," or programs that include elements of both face-to-face and online learning, is somewhat more effective than either approach by itself. The study also found that, by itself, online learning was more effective at raising student achievement than face-to-face instruction exclusively.

"This new report reinforces that effective teachers need to incorporate digital content into everyday classes and consider open-source learning management systems, which have proven cost effective in school districts and colleges nationwide," said U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan in a statement. "To avoid being caught short when stimulus money runs out, school officials should use the short-term federal funding to make immediate upgrades to technology to enhance classroom instruction and to improve the tracking of student data."

I'm sure online education advocates are thrilled at the conclusions drawn by this report. But while it does put online education, especially in a blended environment, in a favorable light, there are a couple of significant disclaimers.

Researchers found that blended learning environments often included additional learning time and incorporated more instructional elements, which "suggests that the positive effects associated with blended learning should not be attributed to the media, per se," said the report. Also, the analysis found very few studies conducted specifically with K-12 schools, therefore "caution is required in generalizing to the K-12 population because the results are derived for the most part from studies in other settings (e.g., medical training, higher education)."

In fact, the report goes so far as to say, "the most unexpected finding was that an extensive initial search of the published literature from 1996 through 2006 found no experimental or controlled quasi-experimental studies that both compared the learning effectiveness of online and face-to-face instruction for K-12 students and provided sufficient data for inclusion in a meta-analysis."

That's a pretty sad statement on the amount of research, or lack thereof, on K-12 online learning

Download Report: http://www.ed.gov/rschstat/eval/tech/evidence-based-practices/finalreport.pdf

The Tower and the Cloud

Bullet points from Richard N Katz's keynote presentation - Vice President of Educause

• Powershift in Higher Ed- 1100-? (popes>princes>professors>people)
• Stanley Katz - don't mistake a tool for a goal
• Martin Trow - information technology is embedded in, and used by, institutions that have a history.
• Higher Ed shift from public good to private investment
• We are in the information age and we are in the information business
• The cloud is big! How is the cloud growing to envelop our Universities? How is the University using the cloud to extend it's presence? How might the cloud alter the form of our social institutions?
• google search of "professor" takes you to wikipedia and ratemyprofessor.com
• Emergence of the Collective - wikipedia, citizen journalism, seti
• Exponential growth looks like nothing is happening until it explodes - Ray Kurzwell
• We live in a knowledge revolution, but colleges are not at the center of that revolution.
• Increasing access to knowledge does not equal increasing literacy or numeracy.
• The context of IT does not equal the context of higher ed (we do not serve all who can learn, we have not made higher ed more efficient, we have not yet transformed learning)
• Really Neat IT does not equal student engagement and success ( high rates of attrition, evidence of declining engagement, high need of remediation, the vanishing student)
• Everything digital, everyone online, does not equal privatizing of knowledge
• YET Great IT = Great Research
• Open Education is surprising us!
• Cloudy Future: School of Athens?
• We are now a consumer goods.
  
  
  
• Since technology is so high quality, the time is now to ask what is the "idea" of the university? What is the university trying to do? what does the institution really need to do well to manifest its intent? What are the information infrastructure, environment, and services that will enable(or drive) this?
• Do we have a strategy and an infrastructure to: discover, engage, attract, and develop talent? Re-think scholarly communications? Promote scholarly literacy, engagement, and global citizenship? Make the institution influential on local, regional, national, or world affairs.
• Universities are aggregaters of talent.
• Do our policies and incentives reinforce what our infrastructure, services and resources enable?
• Summing it up -- IT has gotten better. So good in fact, it allows us to change things. Profoundly. IT allows others to change things as well, making our task more urgent and more complex. Our challenge is less technical and more one of institutional purpose, adaptability, and will. The needs of our stakeholders are changing. Soon virtual environments to support learning and discovery will rival and surpass "built" ones, in certain cases. The successful university of the future will know its values, have clarity of purpose, and an IT capacity to reflect and extend those values and purposes globally.

Colleges consider using blogs instead of blackboard: Getting closer, but not completely thought through, in my opinion

The article titled, "Colleges Consider Using Blogs Instead of Blackboard" in the Chronicle of Higher Education, gets some things right and some things wrong, in my opinion. I want to keep this somewhat short because I could write a novel on this topic. First, they understand that paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for Blackboard might not be the best technological solution to facilitate learning. Second, they have experienced the sheer power of the Wordpress blogging platform, which can be used to develop websites that facilitate online learning, eportfolios, blogs, and more... PLUS it's OPEN SOURCE. Yes, it's license free. "What? Something must be wrong with it then." Nope, only one's inability to understand open source software and how it works. We have implemented Wordpress at BGSU as the foundation of our web 2.0 learning landscape. The platform enables the brilliant minds of our university to easily consume, collaborate, communicate, and create content. It facilitates the publication of audio, video, images, and presentations quite easily. In fact, I am giving a presentation on our Wordpress project at the 2009 Moodle Moot/ Sloan-C Conference in San Francisco. In essence, the Wordpress Platform is very powerful and customizable and could be used to deliver great content. If the only thing they wanted a learning management system to do was to present content and provide an interactive platform for learning, then it would meet their needs just fine, but the Learning Management System must do more than that. Wordpress, without tons of customizations to the core, cannot and does not provide the same functionality that a Learning Management System can provide. A better direction for CUNY to go would be to continue to support Wordpress because it is an amazing teaching and learning platform, BUT ALSO look into implementing Moodle, an open source learning managements system, to replace Blackboard if they are unhappy with Blackboard. I personally think Blackboard and Moodle are equals with very different price tags. Either way, the technological infrastructure of Moodle and Blackboard is designed to do different things than the technology in Wordpress. For example, Moodle and Blackboard both have grade books, test creation tools, advanced discussion forums, assignment drop boxes, and they interface with a variety of Student Information Systems for enrollment management. To draw an analogy from a brick and mortar classroom, Moodle/Blackboard would be a classroom with a locked door equipped with chalkboard, desks, computers, projector, and other cool teaching and learning tools. Wordpress would be like equipping all the computers in the classroom with state of the art technology that enables the teachers and students to take teaching and learning to another level that neither Learning Management Systems can provide on their own. Yes, they will both claim to have blogging features, but as I stated before Wordpress is much more than a blogging platform. My point is that CUNY would be better off looking at Moodle and Wordpress as an open source alternative to Blackboard instead of just Wordpress.

Wolfram Alpha - Making the world's knowledge computable - Now What?

See ya later great knowledge memorizers of the world, and hello great knowledge appliers of the world. Is it me or are the people inhabiting this third rock from the sun, connecting, computing, and collecting knowledge like nothing we've ever seen before. Well, except for maybe the time we humans tried building that Tower of Babel, which ended up not working out so well. Introducing.... Wolfram Alpha, a powerful computational knowledge engine that seeks to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable by ANYONE. Connect this to a mobile device and we become walking and talking systematic knowledge carriers. We've had access to knowledge via the internet for quite some time, but this immediate access to systematic knowledge is something a little newer and worth pondering. I wonder if teachers will FINALLY stop creating tests that assess our students ability to memorize facts and start testing the application of those facts to solve real world problems. I'm especially looking at Universities to take up this challenge. With tools like Wolfram Alpha and Google Squared available to us, educational institutions should start building curriculum with the highest levels of Bloom's Taxonomy in mind. Maybe instructional designers could start with the fact that humans have access to just about all the available knowledge in the world and build from there. It sounds kind of funny, but it's true. This doesn't mean everyone understands the knowledge, but for the first time in history we do have easy access to it. Therefore, it is crucial we teach students where to find the knowledge, and then help them develop the skills to apply, analyse, synthesize, and evaluate it. We need to re-think assessment and skill acquisition for this day and age in this Knowledge Economy. It's time for schools to build curriculum that challenge us to really engage in the application of knowledge and not the memorization of definitions, forumulas, and factoids. That's lazy instruction. Yes, there is a place for memorizing in education...It is a good idea for teachers to memorize their students' names and interests. Personally, I don't care how great of a memorizor my accountant is. I want to know if that person can think about whole systems and solve financial problems that can save me money. What does it mean for you to have access to the world's systematic knowledge? How will you apply it? What does it mean for schools? How can they apply tools like Wofram Alpha and Google Squared to their curriculum. What does it mean for businesses? What do you think?

Awesome list of free math books

Awesome list of free math books | Education IT | ZDNet.com

I know, I know, this hardly constitutes light reading over Spring Break. However, e-booksdirectory.com features an incredibly useful list of 260 freely downloadable electronic books (largely in PDF) that could drive entire courses or act as much-need supplements to a standard textbook.

The books are primarily college-level texts, but many could serve graduate students or high school students. High school students in particular looking to extend their studies, prepare for specific college coursework, or engage in independent study for which their schools may not have a textbook could especially benefit from these texts. Many of the books would also serve as useful reference tools for high school mathematics and computer science teachers who want to ensure that their course content is adequately rigorous for college preparation.

BGSU's Huber honored for online textbook

Here is nice article about one of BGSU's own faculty creating and teaching from an e-book. I like that Dr. Huber not only recognizes the value in saving paper and the students money, but also that the e-book platform offers a more interactive experience with the material. Huber says, "The material in an animal behavior class is highly visual by its very nature and loses much of its student appeal when it gets reduced to simple lines in a printed textbook. "The same idea can be applied to teaching fully online courses as well. There are so many online tools available to engage students in the material that teaching online, when done right, can be an extremely affective means of education.

Creating a free, online textbook used by students in his Animal Behavior class has earned Dr. Robert Huber, a professor of biology at Bowling Green State University, one of the inaugural 10 Faculty Innovator Awards from the University System of Ohio (USO).
Huber and his fellow recipients were honored March 24 in Columbus, where they received the $1,000 cash award for using technological innovation to reduce the cost of textbooks to students. They were recognized by Gov. Ted Strickland and the Ohio House and Senate, as well as by Eric Fingerhut, chancellor of the Ohio Board of Regents.
In addition to the textbook posted at Wikibooks, Huber "provides additional course material at no cost to students, including online media and lecture-note archives," the USO pointed out in its commendation... read entire story