Furthering My Knowledge
The following is an annotated resource list of supplemental articles I have used throughout the Teaching Adults Online course as well as links to useful tools for both online educators and students taking courses online.
Articles I have sourced
NPR:
NPR is the National Public Radio channel in the United States. They are broadcast as a part of the Public Broadcasting Service which is free for listeners as are their online articles and resources. They have a portion of their online programming which is specifically dedicated to news and journalism related to education. While this covers many aspects of education, not just adult education, it is easy to filter through the searches to look for those articles relating to just higher education. Their general website can be found here:
There are some specific articles of interest which I read and often referenced in various forum posts and other study materials for the Teaching Adults Online Course. A sample of those which I used are as follows:
Examining who is considered a “professor” when it comes to online universities. This article talks about the laws and regulations of who can call themselves a teacher or a professor and uses the case study of one online institution to examine if the laws and regulations are outdated and what that means for the future of online education:
Looking at making in-person higher education more accessible for all. One barrier towards higher education in the United States is cost. This can be a significant barrier for many potential students. Recently there has been a lot of work and activism centering around making higher education free or cheap for all students who would like to pursue it. In New York, they announced that all city and state colleges would offer free tuition- this article looks at the reality of the situation and where it stands now and what the implications are for the future of higher education in the United States.
This article discusses a change in the paradigm that many professors have towards in-person teaching. It is a shift away from lecture-based classes and focuses more on participatory methods and the implications for that in the future of higher education and productive student learning. This article interviews Cathy Davidson about her upcoming book on the topic and her point of view as a professor.
NASA and crowdsourcing
This is a website that delves into how the National Aeronautics and Space Administration uses crowdsourcing and collective knowledge for space exploration and furthering their mission of making discoveries in and about our universe. It is an interesting example of crowdsourcing and what collective knowledge can bring, although it is not without its own problems.
MOOC and Reddit at UVM
This is an article about one professor at the University of Vermont in the United States who has combined the social media platform of Reddit and the concept of crowdsourcing knowledge with his MOOC course much to the success of the students. It is done in an innovative and sustainable way that is explored and explained in this article.
Role of online teachers
This article explores 8 roles of an online educator. It differs from some of the roles we have explored and talked about in the Teaching Adults Online course, but in many ways they are also similar. The 8 roles explored in this article are: Tour guide, cheerleader, learning coach, individual and group mirror, social butterfly, big brother, valve-control, and co-learner. Particularly interesting is the promotion of the adult educator as a learner in this process.
Online Resources for Educators
Photovoice
This is a tool that educators can use to allow students to express themselves when writing may not come easily or naturally to them. Photovoice combines images and minimal words to get across ideas, express activism and learn more about the depths of the students and the teacher. This website explores the application and implications for this tool.
Pixton Comic Creator
This is a website that allows the students or the teacher to create comics in an easy and free manner. The online educator can use it as an aide to their teaching and to reach the students that learn best by having visual representation combined with words, dialogue and story. The students can use this tool to create their own comics to demonstrate understanding of concepts learned in the course.
Create a Podcast using Soundcloud
This is an article which explains how you can use a free service such as SoundCloud to create your own free podcast. While there are limitations to how much audio you can upload for free (the free user gets three hours of audio upload/month), you can chose to pay a fee to get a premium account that allows you more hours of podcast and a larger network of those able to access it. However, if you just want to make a few podcasts or are looking just to get started, this article gives you a good idea of how to get that done and the basic tools you will need to get your podcast started for free.
Doodle
Doodle is a great resource for finding a time when a group of people have common free time in order to schedule a class, a meeting or a trip or even deadlines for assignments. All participants can log in and indicate which option works best for them. It is an easy way to schedule things and have the most amount of people be able to attend or participate.
SurveyMonkey
SurveyMonkey is a free tool that can be used to create surveys and questionnaires that can then be distributed to anyone who has the link or anyone who is invited to participate in the survey. It can be useful to create evaluations, gather demographics or even to do short quizzes and interactions with the students. It will also give you the statistics for the questions answered and how many people answered which questions in which way- a tool that can be very useful for online educators to see what a lot of students may have missed or where they went wrong.
Kahoot
This website allows teachers to create educational games for free that can be played collectively by a group of participants. You can create games that are multiple choice questions or you can use one of their game templates and insert in your own questions to personalize it to your class. This has implications for being able to assess students’ learning in fun and creative ways and also makes learning more enjoyable for the students.
Online Resources for Students
MIT OpenCourseWare
The Michigan Institute of Technology, one of the most prominent schools in the United States, has created an online forum where their classroom course materials are published and put on the internet for free. This includes lectures, syllabi, notes, homework assignments and input from the students. Anyone can access these course materials and follow along with the course or read through the course themselves. This opens the knowledge and information to anyone interested to access it.
Ted Talks
Ted Talks are a great way to learn from experts in their fields. These talks ranging from 5 minutes to 30 minutes typically cover a wide variety of topics and tend to be interesting to listen to and to watch. The benefit of this is similar to accessing a free online lecture and allows the student to chose topics that are interesting to them and which they would like to learn more about. This is a good tool to supplement information and topics that the student is learning about in their courses.
This is an example of a Ted Talk where the lecturer is talking about the benefit of the free online university they started and why it is important in todays’ world. The lecturer explains the university, the requirements, how and why it is sustainable and what costs are included as a part of attending this online university.
Thomas Frank on YouTube
YouTube in general is a great source for collective knowledge as long as this source is backed by other academic sources. Because YouTube is available for anyone to publish videos about any topic they want, the accuracy of these videos must be verified through triangulation. However, there are also good YouTube videos such as the ones made by Thomas Frank which cover topics such as good study habits, how to learn effectively and the importance of sleep and health when participating in higher education. His videos can help prepare students for higher education learning.
Grammarly
Grammarly is a free online service that will not only proof-read essays and written materials, but will also run a plagiarism check on them to make sure that all sources and references have been cited properly and that there is no danger of the student submitting paper that includes plagiarism- a serious offense at most universities.
Google scholar
This is a search engine that is specific to academic resources. Often when using Google to search for a topic, the results that are generated may not come from verifiable or peer-reviewed sources. Google Scholar allows you to search only scholarly or academic articles relating to the topic you put into the search bar. If it is available as such, Google Scholar will provide the full text of the academic article for the student to reference. If the full text is not available, Google Scholar will provide the journal, book or publication along with the title and the authors’ names so that the student can search elsewhere for access to the full content of the publication.
Desmos
This is an incredible, free resource for those students studying math and sciences where they need to do advanced calculations and graphing. Typically, this would have been done on a graphing calculator or by some other manual means, but Desmos allows the student to insert the function or equation and will complete the graphing. This is a fun, interactive way for students to learn about math and study the beauty in the mathematical equations and graphing.
