我依然崛起

You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I＇II rise.     

Active Learning and Student-centered Pedagogy Improve Student Attitudes and Performance in Introductory Biology

We describe the development and implementation of an instructional design that focused on bringing multiple forms of active learning and student-centered pedagogies to a one-semester, undergraduate introductory biology course for both majors and nonmajors. Our course redesign consisted of three major elements: 1) reordering the presentation of the course content in an attempt to teach specific content within the context of broad conceptual themes, 2) incorporating active and problem-based learning into every lecture, and 3) adopting strategies to create a more student-centered learning environment. Assessment of our instructional design consisted of a student survey and comparison of final exam performance across 3 years—1 year before our course redesign was implemented (2006) and during two successive years of implementation (2007 and 2008). The course restructuring led to significant improvement of self-reported student engagement and satisfaction and increased academic performance. We discuss the successes and ongoing challenges of our course restructuring and consider issues relevant to institutional change.     

Interest in Educational Data and Barriers to Data Use Among Massive Open Online Course Instructors

Journal of Science Education and Technology - Higher education instructors constantly rely on educational data to assess and evaluate the behavior of their students and to make informed decisions...     

A hybrid recommender system integrated into LAMS for learning designers

In the constantly evolving field of e-learning, the Learning Design (LD) sector constitutes a critical success factor, as it has the potential to preserve and disseminate effective pedagogical approaches and enhance the quality of the educational process. Recognizing the LD process as demanding in terms of time and expertise this paper answers the research question of how to leverage Recommender Systems (RSs) and reuse pre-existing LD solutions in order to support teachers in the LD process. In particular, this paper presents the implementation and the first evaluation results of Mentor. Mentor is an RS that supports teachers in finding pre-existing LDs, which cater better for their needs and preferences, so as to re-design them. Mentor is integrated into LAMS, which is a well-known tool for designing, managing and delivering sequences of learning activities. The first user-centric evaluation experiment results are presented and confirm the underlying assumption that Mentor can facilitate teachers in the LD process. Further results concerning the user’s general perception and the perceived usefulness of Mentor are discussed.