73 percent of students prefer some courses be fully online post-pandemic — from campustechnology.comby Rhea Kelly
“When three-fourths of students and more than half of faculty want to experience at least some courses fully online, the key takeaway is that the pandemic did not threaten but in fact accelerated the long-term growth, acceptance, and desirability of online learning, and those numbers will only improve, as emergency remote offerings are rebuilt as modern online courses and programs.”
What is Book Creator and How Can Educators Use It? — from techlearning.com by Erik Ofgang
Excerpt:
Book Creator is a free tool that allows educators and their students to create multimedia ebooks based off of class assignments and topics.
Available on Apple and Android tablets and phones, and on Google Chrome for desktop use, Book Creator is a digital resource that helps students explore their creative sides while learning.
The tool lends itself well to active learning and collaborative projects of all kinds, and is appropriate for various subjects and age groups.
Book Creator gives students the ability to upload images, vidoes, audio, and more within the ebooks they create. It also empowers them to draw, take notes, and collaborate in real-time with their classmates and instructor.
Read on to find out everything you need to know about Book Creator.
Also see the Book Creator’s website:
Addendum on 5/21/21:
Addendums on 5/24/21:
As with all of Book Creator we have made the image search fully accessible to screen readers and keyboard navigation. But we thought we could go a bit further with the image search and make it accessible to younger kids or ELL students who aren’t super confident with their spelling by introducing a voice search.
Addendum on 6/7/21:
Coursera Conference 2021: Highlights and Takeaways — from blog.coursera.org by Betty Vandenbosch
Excerpt:
The Coursera Product Innovation session was another conference favorite, as we shared learner stories and offered a glimpse into some of the key innovations we worked on over the past year to support learners, educators, and institutions:
Also see:
Reimagining Online Culture: Project-Based Learning, Inclusion, and Reach in Online Education — from er.educause.edu by Christian Schneider
The pandemic created a unique opportunity for educators to rethink their approach to online learning and explore how this educational environment can expand access while increasing and building on diversity.
Excerpt:
The move to online education during the pandemic has been one of the greatest experiments ever conducted. It was initially met with reluctance and fatigue, but once we moved beyond the attempts to replicate what we do in real life, it brought to light important innovations.
We cut out constraints, categorizations, and biases while concentrating on our faces, voices, and work, and we extended the reach of geographical, cultural, and social access.
During the pandemic, however, when most students were in their home countries, they seemed to be more comfortable as their authentic selves, working on projects that related to their local environments.
…
Teaching online can not only make education available to more people around the globe but also open a space where students can share “a piece of themselves,” where different perspectives can interact, where we can learn from each other and our local environments and opportunities. This creates an enormous opportunity for equity and inclusion.
Elevating Your Streaming Production Quality — from avnetwork.com by Cindy Davis
Excerpt:
The instructional studios started with a mobile standing desk, which serves as the command center for instruction. The desk has a room controller, document camera, and an interactive display with an adapter for laptop content sharing. Behind the desk is a whiteboard with a whiteboard camera. In front of the desk, we designed an AV cart that includes a shotgun mic pair, LED light panels, two large displays, one off-lens teleprompter, and PTZ camera.
The studios put the instructor in control of the meeting using a Zoom Rooms controller— allowing them to easily switch between and share multiple types of content simultaneously: main camera, document camera, laptop content, digital annotations, and whiteboard writing.
2021 EDUCAUSE Horizon Report® | Teaching and Learning Edition
This report profiles key trends and emerging technologies and practices shaping the future of teaching and learning and envisions a number of scenarios and implications for that future. It is based on the perspectives and expertise of a global panel of leaders from across the higher education landscape.
3 Tech Trends Shaping the Future of Post-Pandemic Teaching and Learning — from campustechnology.com by Rhea Kelly
The landscape of higher education has been transformed by COVID-19, and that impact is a major factor in the 2021 Educause Horizon Report. Here are three key technology trends to watch as the lasting effects of the pandemic play out.
Excerpt:
What’s in store for higher education’s post-pandemic future? The latest Educause Horizon Report has identified the trends, technologies and practices shaping teaching and learning in the wake of COVID-19. The potential lasting effects of the pandemic “loomed large” in the trend selection this year, the report stated, emphasizing that although it remains to be seen whether the transformations of the past year will persist into the future, “it isn’t hard to imagine that higher education may never be the same in some important ways (good or bad).”
In the realm of technology in particular, it’s clear that the pandemic-induced shift to remote learning has dominated the trend landscape. The top three technological trends identified by the report are…
From 2021 EDUCAUSE Horizon Report® | Teaching and Learning Edition
Also see:
Jessica Rowland Williams, director of Every Learner Everywhere, agreed. “The pandemic has given us the unique opportunity to pause and listen to each other, and we are beginning to discover all the ways our experiences overlap,” she said.
How to Design a Hybrid Workplace — from nytimes.com
Excerpt:
But many companies have hatched a postpandemic plan in which employees return to the office for some of the time while mixing in more work from home than before. The appeal of this compromise is clear: Employers hope to give employees the flexibility and focus that come from working at home without sacrificing the in-person connections of the office.
From DSC:
There has been — and likely will continue to be — huge pressure and incentives put on companies like Cisco, Zoom, Microsoft, and others that develop the products and platforms to help people collaborate and communicate over a distance. It will be very interesting to see where these (and other) vendors, products, and platforms are 2-3 years from now! How far will we be down the XR-related routes?
How will those new ways of doing things impact telehealth? Telelegal? Virtual courts? Other?
