Formation Continue du Supérieur

By Inge Ignatia de Waard. Just got a boost from Slideshare! As I was sleepingly looking at my slideshare account (I go there sometimes, procrastination, I admit), I found that the content I uploaded was within the top 1% of most viewed content. That was quite a surprise. Fun.
Intro to durable and scalable mobile learning - 11.900 views, 73 downloads
MOOC benefits for international learners - 6700 views, 110 downloads
The future (of learning) will be telepathic and telekinetic - 3800 views, 57 downloads
Planning an mobile learning project - 4400 views, 46 downloads
Plan your own MOOC from OEB2013 - 4200 views, 29 downloads (this one is my latest slide deck). More...

By Inge Ignatia de Waard. Starting from previous qualitative experiences of all the participants, Anne gets an idea of her audience. Anne who is very energetic and clearly so knowledgeable that she is open to questions from the floor at any moment. Anne’s approach is starting from the data. 
Premise: it can start from mixed methods, as well as purely qualitative 
Important for PhD justifying the methodology used. More...

By Inge Ignatia de Waard. The wonderful Terry Anderson of Athabasca University in Canada has gathered international partners for the first international 3 minute online thesis contest. And I am quite excited to be one of the PhD student teams (the team of the Open University of the UK).
All contestants and their thesis topics are listed here, so feel free to have a look. For those interested, the contest can be followed by the public and you can even vote for the people's choice of best speaker. More...

By Inge Ignatia de Waard. My PhD journey is well on its way and nearing the end of year one (started in February 2013). One of my reoccurring challenges is using distinct academic vocabulary that gives stamina and rigor to my reports and papers. In all honesty as a Dutch speaking person I learned English by looking at Children BBC, documentaries and ... American action movies. Not surprisingly my PhD notes sometimes reflect these linguistic prior experiences. I write phrases like "I reshuffled my data until it triggered my curiosity and opened my eyes with a blast! In order to get the right answers, more action is necessary.", where my supervisors relentlessly tell me I could (read should) be using more scientifically accepted jargon. So giving it  try here and transforming the above sentence into: "While closely examining the data, new evidence emerged. However, additional research is necessary in order to examine these findings before a conclusion can be reached." ... well not sure if this is getting at the ultimate academic phrasing, but it simply sounds more like what one would expect in an academic paper (or so I am told, it would be nice to write a paper using action hero lingo though). More...

By Phil Hill. Recently I pointed out that the widely-quoted Babson survey on online learning estimates 7.1 million US higher ed students taking at least one online course while the new IPEDS data indicates the number as 5.5 million. After looking deeper at the data, it appears that the difference in institutions (whether or not an institution offers any online courses) is even greater than the difference in students. This institutional profile is important, as the Babson report (p. 13) noted that institutions offering no online courses had very different answers than others, a theme that ran through much of the report. More...

By Phil Hill. Reader Mike Himmelstein has rightly pointed out that our analysis of the new IPEDS data would benefit from using visualization tools instead of just tables. This comment led me to a multi-day investigation of which data visualization tool would best integrate into a WordPress blog while maintaining interactive data exploration. I tried MicroStrategy (great tool but cannot share without login), IBM Many Eyes (good public tool but limited in formatting), and several variations of Google Charts (not as rich in features as MicroStrategy, but close, and supports public sharing). In the end I’ve ended up using the Visualizer plugin to display Google Charts. All data below is for degree-granting institutions. More...

By Michael Feldstein. Inside Higher Ed has a write-up today on an effort by the Association of American Colleges & Universities (AAC&U) to develop a competency-based framework for general education called General Education Maps and Markers (GEMs), funded by a multi-million-dollar Gates Foundation grant. I am honored to report that I have been invited to participate on one of the GEMs committees. More...