Online Cheating

This week, for your consideration, we’d like to post another piece from the Chronicle:

Online Classes See Cheating Go High-Tech

 

It discusses technology-based cheating and some technology-based ways to detect academic dishonesty. 

What are your thoughts? Feel free to exchange ideas with colleagues in the CCCOnline Community.

Policies for Late Assignments

CCCOnline instructors, we’d like to hear your thoughts on late assignment policies.  Here is a relevant piece from the Chronicle’s ProfHacker blog (“Developing Policies for Late Assignments”); note its thought questions at the end:

·          How do you handle late assignments in your courses?

·          If you have a late policy, how does this support your teaching goals?

Feel free to discuss with colleagues in the CCCOnline Community!

Let the Games Begin!

This week, we’re pleased to post news from Chris Luchs, Associate Dean of Career & Technical Education:

While the world gets ready for the XXX Olympics Games in London, CCCS is also embarking on its own challenge with games. On May 9th, Dr. McCallin announced the funding of fifteen Immersive and Game-Based Learning Faculty Challenge grants. So fifteen teams of dedicated educators will begin the development of games based learning projects on July 1, 2012.

So, what is games based learning? It is simply the application of gaming principles and practices to education to increase student engagement, retention and performance.
Many games require players to improve their literacy skills to complete assignments and questions as well as to utilize math skills to optimize player performance in game. Games also introduce players to probability and critical thinking as they select what attributes will improve their character and identify and plan strategies for overcoming obstacles and in certain cases defeating the villain.

One of the most powerful attribute of games is the idea of die and do over. This concept refers to the fact that failure is a common experience in most games. However, these failures allow the player to learn and experiment. Players are allowed repeated low cost attempts at defeating the monster. Many popular games foster a fail fast environment that allows players to engage in rapid prototyping and implementation of strategies and tactics until they are successful.

Would you like to learn more about this type of learning environment? It is expected that there will be another round of Immersive and Games-based Learning Faculty Challenge grants announced in the fall semester. You could start by adding some interesting books to your summer reading list. Some of the popular authors of games based learning are Clark Aldrich (Learning by Doing), Jane McGonigal (Reality is Broken), Henry Jenkins (Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture), James Gee (What Video Games have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy) and Lee Sheldon (The Multiplayer Classroom).

Or if you prefer to learn more about game based learning as part of a course, please sign up for the Games-based Learning MOOC, which was funded as part of the Faculty Challenge Grant. This massively open online course (MOOC) is open to all CCCS faculty, instructors and staff and is free of charge. To find out more, please go here. http://gamesmooc.wordpress.com/

CCCOnline Joins Quality Matters

Good news: CCCOnline is now an official subscriber to Quality Matters! Quality Matters is a nationally recognized leader in quality assurance for online education with over 550 subscribers, including universities, community and technical colleges, and K-12 schools. We’re excited about the partnership and the opportunities it will bring for ongoing CCCOnline improvement.  

We’ll be sharing more as we roll out the program; in the meantime, please feel free to comment in the CCCOnline Community.

CCCOnline Tutoring (Reminder & Invitation for Feedback)

As summer courses draw near, we’d like to remind our instructors about online tutoring:

*CCCOnline students have access to NetTutor (in each course, students will find the NetTutor link in the Helpful Links widget on the left side of their course homepage).

*CCCOnline students enrolled in developmental courses also have access to the Online Tutoring Lab (OTL); the OTL appears as a separate class when these students log in to D2L.

We also invite your feedback. Have your students been using these tutoring services?  Please feel free to share your experiences with the services (or tips on encouraging your students to use them) in the Cultivating Excellence discussion within the CCCOnline Community.

The Great Extra Credit Debate

CCCOnline instructors: do you offer extra credit in your class? What’s your justification for including, or not including, the opportunity for bonus points?

We’d love to hear your thoughts in the CCCOnline Community!

[This article, published last November in Faculty Focus, lists some pros and cons in the great extra credit debate.]