Center for Technology Enhanced Learning

Technology can be found all around us!
Technology can be found during faculty & student instruction
Technology can be found during faculty and adult learner interaction
Technology can be found in group study situations
Technology can even be used from the comfort of your home!
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USM Online's Center for Technology Enhanced Learning (CTEL) supports the efforts of faculty, departments, and programs who want to develop online and blended programs and courses. Faculty can get initial consultation, course development assistance, instructional design, technical help, and support for course delivery at CTEL.

Teaching online can be challenging. You need to find new ways to help your students learn, create community, and to provide a sense of immediacy with students who may never see you in person. 

How can we help?

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News & Events

Open Badges: Re-imagining Credentials for the Digital Age

Open Badges: Re-imagining Credentials for the Digital Age

Event Date and Time: 
Wednesday, April 30, 2014, 1:00 PM to 2:30 PM
Location: 
215 Abromson Center, USM Portland Campus

CTEL Speaker Series

Guest Speaker: Erin Knight, Executive Director, Badge Alliance

Open Badges are a new way to think about recognizing and connecting learning and skill development. Digital, information-based, and stackable badges are becoming a new currency for skills, identity, and jobs. In this presentation, Erin Knight, Executive Director of Badge Alliance, will explore the state of the work so far, with examples of where badging is being successfully used across the ecosystem, as well as opportunities for higher education institutions to leverage badging within their own systems for their own benefit.

 

Open Badges: Re-imagining Credentials for the Digital Age

Wednesday, April 30th

1:00pm to 2:30pm

215 Abromson Center

 

Event Resources

 

Presenter:

Erin Knight

Erin currently runs the Badge Alliance, a network of organizations collaborating on building and growing an open badging ecosystem. One of the progenitors of the Open Badges movement, a new system for credentialing and accreditation and for supporting broader learning across the Web and lifetimes, she spearheaded the badges work at Mozilla for three years before transitioning to the Alliance. Previously, Erin served as the Research Director at the Center for Next Generation Teaching and Learning, a non-profit at UC Berkeley committed to researching and promoting technology and practices for student-centered learning. Before that, she worked for Blackboard, the leading learning management system provider. Her career to date has been balanced between the education technology industry, giving her an inside view into the inner workings of education technology development, adoption and limitations, and academia where she studied information systems, lectured and ran research studies on participatory learning environments. She now brings these experiences, perspectives and passion to the open education and ed tech world. Erin lives in Portland, ME with her husband, son and two chocolate labs.

 

Keep the Conversation Going

Reach out to Erin Knight.
April 30, 2014
1:00 PM to 2:30 PM
215 Abromson Center, USM Portland Campus

Mobility, Nudges and Greater Academic Success

Mobility, Nudges and Greater Academic Success

Event Date and Time: 
Wednesday, May 7, 2014, 1:00 PM to 2:30 PM
Location: 
423/424 Glickman, USM Portland Campus

Support in Hand: Mobility, Nudges and Greater Academic Success

As learners enter and return to school in greater numbers, higher education struggles with defining and providing support and services that fit the "new traditional" and often-struggling digital age learner. At the same time, insert a changing population of time-stressed adult students, first-generation students, part-time students, and a growing population of underprepared students. All this together produces a perfect storm of unrecognized support and service needs to ensure that struggling students reach graduation.

In her talk, Jill Frankfort, co-founder of Persistence Plus (http://persistenceplusnetwork.com/) will describe their innovation which involves providing time sensitive, interactive, and automated academic support ("nudges") to students via their mobile devices. Persistence Plus is developing algorithms that generate support triggers grounded in behavioral science. Jill will share lessons learned from their work with students in introductory courses at University of Washington-Tacoma (UWT), a campus of 4,300 students, that has wrestled with issues of retention since it opened in 1990.  Preliminary results from the UWT study indicate that students respond and value such support and that students receiving such support have higher passing rates and GPAs than other students. The team has shared results from this study in an EDUCAUSE Review Online brief: http://www.educause.edu/ero/article/analytics-nudges-and-learner-persistence

Wednesday, May 7th

1pm to 2:30pm

423/424 Glickman, USM Portland Campus


This event will not be recorded


Event Resources:

 

Presenter:

Jill Frankfort
Co-founder, Persistence Plus

Jill Frankfort is focused on helping colleges transform how
they support, engage, and motivate students to completion. Ms.
Frankfort was previously a director at Jobs for the Future where she
worked with colleges and districts to improve the educational outcomes
of low-income students. She is deeply knowledgeable about college
retention issues and success strategies, and has more than ten years
of experience as a strategy consultant and education professional. Ms.
Frankfort is the author of 100 Paid Summer Adventures for Teachers and
was selected as a Kauffman Foundation Education Venture fellow.  She
received her bachelor's with honors from Brown University and a
master's in education from Wake Forest University.

 

Keep the Conversation Going:

Reach out to Jill.
May 7, 2014
1:00 PM to 2:30 PM
423/424 Glickman, USM Portland Campus

A Review of MOOC Research - CTEL Speaker Series Event

A Review of MOOC Research - CTEL Speaker Series Event

Event Date and Time: 
Monday, May 19, 2014, 1:00 PM to 2:30 PM
Location: 
109/110 Abromson Center, USM Portland Campus

A Review of MOOC Research: What Questions Are Scholars Asking?

With faculty members Maureen Ebben, USM Communication and Media Studies, and Julien Murphy, USM Philosophy.

In this May CTEL Speaker Series discussion, faculty members Maureen Ebben and Julien Murphy will talk about their recent publication that surveys the first decade of scholarly research about Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs).  While popular accounts, editorials, and commentary about MOOCS abound, the purpose of this discussion is to cut through the noise to analyze empirical research published in scholarly journals about MOOCs. 

Maureen Ebben and Julien Murphy identify learning theories, assumptions, research directions, and themes across MOOC literature and establish a conceptual framework for understanding the present landscape of MOOC scholarship.  They suggest that MOOC research can be understood as occurring in two chronological phases: (1) Connectivist cMOOCs, Engagement and Creativity, and (2) xMOOCs, Learning Analytics, Assessment, and Critical Discourse.  The analysis locates the MOOC phenomenon within a larger social and pedagogical context, and thereby offers a deeper understanding of the trajectory of MOOCs use in higher education.

 

Event Resources:

 

Presenters:

Maureen Ebben

USM Communications & Media

Maureen Ebben is an Associate Professor, Adjunct and Lecturer in the Department of Communication and Media Studies at the University of Southern Maine. Her teaching includes courses on interpersonal communication, gender and language, research methods, and communication technology and social media.  She teaches in both online and face-to-face environments.  Maureen has been the recipient of grants to study students’ perceptions of technology in teaching and learning and has published works that explore the nexus of information technology, pedagogy, and human communication.

 

Julien Murphy

USM Philosophy

 

 

Keep the Conversation Going

Reach out to Maureen & Julien.
May 19, 2014
1:00 PM to 2:30 PM
109/110 Abromson Center, USM Portland Campus
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