Friday, March 30, 2007

EDUCAUSE Quarterly | Volume 30 Number 1 2007

Here is an excellent article detailing tips for online learning:
How Students Develop Online Learning Skills by Alan Roper, Educause Quarterly, vol. 30, no. 1, 2007.

After a survey of successful online students, Roper (of CyberCampus at Golden Gate University) distilled the responses down to 7 tips:
  1. Develop a time-management strategy
  2. Make the most of online discussions
  3. Use it or lose it
  4. Make questions useful to your learning
  5. Stay motivated
  6. Communicate the instruction techniques that work
  7. Make connections with fellow students
These are also good tips for faculty--you need to structure your courses to encourage these behaviors. For instance, provide a forum/discussion where students can ask each other questions about what works and what doesn't, or specifically ask for examples from students' own work and lives. Faculty could also provide links to this and other e-learning articles.

Friday, March 09, 2007

ScienceDirect down this weekend

ScienceDirect will be down for a few hours this Sunday morning. The updates (having to do with the big updates they did last week and the change in Daylight Savings Time) should be finished by 8 am.

ScienceDirect is the online arm of Elsevier, one of the premier science and technology publishers in the world. We get a great range of full text journals from them, including titles in the sciences, technology, library and information science, medicine, social sciences, and even a few in the humanities. A helpsheet is available.