Education Commons^™

Designing For Deep And Meaningful Student-To-Content Interactions, Joanna Dunlap, Donna Sobel, Deanna Sands

Joanna Dunlap

Online education has skyrocketed in popularity. Every year, more universities are starting online programs. This increase is mostly due to institutional economics, and the demands of students who face a number of obstacles that make the on-campus format inconvenient. The University of Colorado at Denver and Health Sciences Center is no different. Over the last few years, there have been numerous institutional initiatives to encourage faculty to create new online programs or online versions of existing on-campus programs. As part of a program level effort to offer a fully online licensure program in the area of special education that would …

Making Information Accessible Part 1: Hypertext Links, R Grabinger, Joanna Dunlap, David Jonassen

Joanna Dunlap

No abstract provided.

Tweeting The Night Away: Using Twitter To Enhance Social Presence [Book Chapter], Joanna Dunlap, Patrick Lowenthal

Joanna Dunlap

Sociology of Organizations: Structures and Relationships is a timely and unique collection of both classic and contemporary studies of organizations. Designed around competing theoretical frameworks, this cutting-edge book examines organizations with attention to structure and objectives, interactions among members and among organizations, the relationship between the organization and its environment and the social significance or social meaning of the organization. This volume sheds light on some of the most interesting changes and challenges facing organizations today: the integration of new media, the implementation of diversity and inclusion, and the promotion of sustainable workforce engagement. Lively and provocative, this textbook is …

Rich Environments For Active Learning: A Definition [Book Chapter], Joanna Dunlap, R Grabinger, Joni Dunlap

Joanna Dunlap

About this book:

The use of new technologies in education developed rapidly in the 1990s, as, for example, with the Internet, whose impact on educational practice could not have been predicted seven years ago. Much is now expected of this technology, but has its adoption led to the development of genuinely innovative approaches to teaching and learning?

Originally published in the journal Alt-J, the papers collected in The Changing Face of Learning Technology illustrate how the field of learning technology has developed since the journal was launched in 1993. The volume is divided into four sections: design and evaluation …

Karma Points For Contributions [Book Chapter], Joanna Dunlap

Joanna Dunlap

About this book: "For those who think online learning can't be truly interactive, Patti Shank and her colleagues clearly demonstrate--in hundreds of examples--that it can. The real lesson in The Online Learning Idea Book is that technology doesn't build interactive learning; creative thinking and good, solid instructional design does. Using even a smidgen of the great ideas in this book will increase the learning effectiveness of any online program."--Marc J. Rosenberg, consultant, and author of Beyond E-Learning "Patti Shank has collected great ideas about online learning and teaching from all over the globe. If you are an online instructor or …

Anonymous Weekly Survey [Book Chapter], Joanna Dunlap

Joanna Dunlap

About this book: "For those who think online learning can't be truly interactive, Patti Shank and her colleagues clearly demonstrate--in hundreds of examples--that it can. The real lesson in The Online Learning Idea Book is that technology doesn't build interactive learning; creative thinking and good, solid instructional design does. Using even a smidgen of the great ideas in this book will increase the learning effectiveness of any online program."--Marc J. Rosenberg, consultant, and author of Beyond E-Learning "Patti Shank has collected great ideas about online learning and teaching from all over the globe. If you are an online instructor or …

Using Guided Reflective Journaling Activities To Capture Students’ Changing Perceptions, Joanna Dunlap

Joanna Dunlap

Many professions are increasingly emphasizing the role of reflection, encouraging educators to look for appropriate ways to help students engage in reflective practice during their professional preparation. Journal writing is an insightful and powerful instructional technology utilizing strategies that foster understanding and the application of concepts, enhance critical thinking, improve achievement and attitude, encourage student reflection and capture changes in students' perception. Examples from three different professional preparation courses illustrate the power of journal-writing activities as a way of encouraging students' reflective thinking, and giving faculty a way to assess students' reflective practice and perceptual changes. Based on the author's …

What Sunshine Is To Flowers: A Literature Review On The Use Of Emoticons To Support Online Learning [Book Chapter], Joanna Dunlap, D. Bose, Patrick Lowenthal, C. York, M. Atkinson, J. Murtagh

Joanna Dunlap

About this book: Emotions, Technology, Design, and Learning provides an update to the topic of emotional responses and how technology can alter what is being learned and how the content is learned. The design of that technology is inherently linked to those emotional responses. This text addresses emotional design and pedagogical agents, and the emotions they generate. Topics include design features such as emoticons, speech recognition, virtual avatars, robotics, and adaptive computer technologies, all as relating to the emotional responses from virtual learning.

Workload Reduction In Online Courses: Getting Some Shuteye, Joanna Dunlap

Joanna Dunlap

Instructors are a key component of any successful facilitated, asynchronous online course. They are tasked with providing the infrastructure for learning; modeling effective participation, collaboration, and learning strategies; monitoring and assessing learning and providing feedback, remediation, and grades; troubleshooting and resolving instructional, interpersonal, and technical problems; and creating a learning community in which learners feel safe and connected. Accomplishing these objectives is labor and time intensive, often requiring instructors to be constantly online. Besides being impractical, this can lead to questionable instructional quality and eventual instructor burnout. Fortunately, there are instructional strategies that can help achieve instructor presence without requiring …

Teaching Intricate Content Online: It Can Be Done And Done Well, Donna Sobel, Deanna Sands, Joanna Dunlap

Joanna Dunlap

Despite a plethora of online course offerings over the past decade, we continue to see resistance to this platform for course delivery, particularly with content that is ostensibly too sensitive or difficult to deliver in this format. This article describes an approach to online course planning and design, with attention paid to creating rich and meaningful student-tocontent interactions, as well as student-to-instructor interactions. The instructors approached the design of this course to address personalization (student-to-instructor interaction), meaningful engagement (student-to-content interaction), and ongoing checks of student understanding (student-to-instructor and student-to-content interactions). After using this approach to develop and then teach a …

Learning, Unlearning, And Relearning: Using Web 2.0 Technologies To Support The Development Of Lifelong Learning Skills [Book Chapter], Joanna Dunlap, Patrick Lowenthal

Joanna Dunlap

About the book: The emerging knowledge society places new requirements on the educational sector to support the needs of individuals and organizations. In the discipline of lifelong learning, which is one of the most important forces driving education in the 21st century, e-learning has become a collaborative and community-based process. This necessitates tools to support the autonomous and dynamic creation of lifelong learning communities and new distributed e-learning services. E-Infrastructures and Technologies for Lifelong Learning: Next Generation Environments provides a comprehensive review of state-of-the-art technologies for e-learning and lifelong learning, examining theoretical approaches, models, architectures, systems and applications. It addresses …

Software Engineers Helping Themselves: The Web Resource Collaboration Center, Joanna Dunlap

Joanna Dunlap

No abstract provided.

Preparing E-Learning Designers Using Kolb's Model Of Experiential Learning, Joanna Dunlap, J. Dobrovolny, David Young

Joanna Dunlap

In this article, Joanna Dunlap, Jackie Dobrovolny, and David Young describe their approach to the design of a real-world learning experience that prepares online graduate students to work as e-learning designers and specialists. Using Kolb's model of experiential learning to support their instructional design decisions, Dunlap, Dobrovolny, and Young have created a series of online instructional-design courses in which students use a variety of e-learning technologies and tools to discuss instructional strategies and to provide support and feedback to each other on the e-learning products they design individually. This approach allows school and the real world to be integrated in …

From Pixel On A Screen To Real Person In Your Students' Lives: Establishing Social Presence Using Digital Storytelling, Patrick Lowenthal, Joanna Dunlap

Joanna Dunlap

The Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework is a comprehensive guide to the research "and" practice of online learning. One of the most challenging aspects of establishing a CoI in online courses is finding the best way to attend to each element of the CoI framework in a primarily text-based environment. In our online courses, we have examined the use of digital storytelling as a way to break down the barriers that can get in the way of achieving a healthy and productive CoI. In this paper, we describe how we use digital storytelling to establish our social presence as instructors.