Denver, CO – November 6, 2012 – ExamSoft Worldwide, Inc., a technology leader that helps schools more efficiently create and administer direct assessments, and generate actionable data to measure and improve individual student learning outcomes, today announced the launch of its Exam Intelligence (E.I.) solutions at the EDUCAUSE Annual Conference in Denver.

There’s no hidden agenda here: Asking the question of what makes learning difficult doesn’t imply that the objective is to make the content easy. Material can be so watered down that its basic integrity is compromised. In the same vein, there’s no justification for making material harder than it needs to be, but the right balance between difficult and easy is not the subject of this post.

DENVER, Colo., EDUCAUSE Booth #1433 — November 06, 2012 — Sonic Foundry, Inc. (NASDAQ: SOFO), the trusted market leader for video management and academic, enterprise and event webcasting, today announced the company’s Mediasite platform will be used to webcast the EDUCAUSE 2012 Annual Conference this week at the Colorado Convention Center in Denver, Colo.

The Writing Across the Curriculum movement has successfully introduced faculty across disciplines to a variety of writing, including very informal writing that faculty do not necessarily read or grade. The advocacy for this kind of informal writing rests on the old premise that practice makes perfect—that as long as students are writing something, their writing will likely improve.

Washington, Nov. 5, 2012 – Blackboard Inc. today unveiled a major new release for its flagship LMS Blackboard Learn™, marking a significant milestone in the company's effort to bring new innovation to its core teaching and learning products. The release brings a fresh approach to the user interface, an emphasis on social learning and significantly improved value for institutions and educators working to improve student retention.

Boston – November 05, 2012 – Pearson today announced Project Blue Sky, a cloud-based, content service that provides instructors with easy access to Open Educational Resources (OER). Pearson is partnering with Silicon Valley non-profit Gooru, a search engine for learning materials, and will leverage Gooru’s powerful search capabilities to build applications that seamlessly integrate high-quality learning resources on the web, including OER, with instructor-created and Pearson content. Faculty will also have the ability to publish their customized digital course content within multiple types of learning management systems, including Pearson’s OpenClass and LearningStudio.

Integrating technology with appropriate teaching strategies can help stimulate participation and create a student-centered atmosphere conducive to learning. One technology shown particularly successful in boosting student engagement is clickers (Martyn, 2007). In fact, a research study found that student test scores were significantly higher when clickers were used as part of an in-class lecture as compared to a different section of the same class that didn’t use clickers (Mayer, Stull, DeLeeuw, Ameroth, Bimber, Chun, et al. 2009).

Which online instructor characteristics help students succeed? It’s a rather basic question that has not been adequately answered. We did a literature search to find if anybody had done any research from the students’ perspective on what constitutes a quality online instructor. There were perhaps 10 articles by professors speculating about what they thought defined quality online instruction, but nobody had asked students.

We’ve all had conversations with students who want effort counted in their grade: “But I tried so hard ... I studied for hours ... I am really working in this course.” The question is, should effort count? Less commonly asked, however, is whether it should count in both directions. Students want effort to count when they try hard but their performance doesn’t show it. But what about when an excellent performance results without much effort? Should this lack of effort lower the grade? Beyond these theoretical questions are the pragmatic ones: Can effort be measured fairly, objectively? If so, what criteria are used to assess it?