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A recent project has involved the concept of “negative learning”. Negative learning refers to unintended takeaways from a learning experience that are inaccurate, misleading, or even harmful. These may not be discovered by the educators or facilitators until well into a learning experience or afterwards. The usual strategy in instructional design is to anticipate these through solid design methodologies, learner (novice) empathy, testing with live learners, and open feedback loops with learners.
Subject matter experts ...
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Some online learners give indications of great frustrations with the learning / course management technologies, but they’ll do it without direct communications. They’ll send endless emails and treat those like TMs. They’ll send spam emails to the entire class with personal queries. They’ll post unopenable files, and when the first one doesn’t work, they’ll keep doing the same thing a half dozen times instead of just pasting their text into the HTML window.
They’ll ...
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For many freshman-level courses, it may be fair to assume that learners will be coming in cold to the learning domain. Coming in “cold” means that they lack basic background in the field. It also means that their skillsets may be scatter-shot in terms of the subject materials, and the learners may well be acquiring their learning skills as they go.
Strategies for supporting novice learners to a learning domain are manifold. First, one strategy involves building ...
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The opening of the article was riveting. An instructor of an introductory course in computer programming was noticing his student demographics, and the high probability that they…
“Are from some minority group Did some portion of their k-12 in a compromised educational system Are students not just out of high school and may be working Are not born in the United States Speak English as there (sic) second language Have very little (sic) computer skills May be dismayed by the ...
Continue reading The Challenges of the "Highly Anxious" Student Profile
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Design questions that other people wrangle with regarding socio-technical systems often reveal a lot about people. With the emphasis on self-help and self-management as a money-savings endeavor for education, healthcare, and other aspects of modern life, people have been looking at how to offer sufficient feedback and encouragement to help people self-assess, and further, to help them know when to seek help (and from where).
Help-seeking is not as simple of a phenomena as one might ...
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Artificial intelligence has been used to code “agents” in the ways of conviviality and social norms. What does this mean? This means that in some immersive spaces, there are AI agents that simulate social niceties and behaviors that are appropriate for that particular cultural milieu. When people enter those spaces, they may learn about other ways of being. They may interact with these robots, and they may start forming awareness and habits that fit that particular social setting.
These technologies ...
Continue reading The Transfer of Sociability to a Curriculum
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At the recent SIDLIT conference in Overland Park, KS, Tim Murphy presented on “Meeting the Challenges of International Online Teaching.” His task was to take part in online course redesigns for better acceptance by international audiences. He began with a Venn diagram of overlapping circles representing place, language and culture, for a global classroom.
At one point in the presentation, he asked rhetorically whether synchronous communications were ever advisable for international online classrooms. One ...
Continue reading Adjustments for International Online Teaching
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
30 July 2009
A recent article referred to how some companies design technological tools for amateurs vs. novices. In a sense, instructional design may also differentiate between learners based on amateurs vs. novices—as a construct.
Okay, so definitions, first. A “novice” is a person who eventually aims to be an expert. This person is at the beginning stages of learning about a particular area of expertise. This person will be initiated into a field from elementary understandings to ...
Continue reading Designing Technological Tools (and Instruction) for Amateurs vs. Novices
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Faculty members do accrue a collection of student excuses for late or poor work. Many of the excuses are dire in terms of health or housing or relationship issues. Students often know the policy parameters sufficiently to where they offer insights that are excusable. And I’ve been around long enough to know that life doesn’t necessarily fit set parameters. There are valid reasons for late work.
I will request evidentiary proof at times. At times, I will even ...
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One of my recent projects has involved the use of peer education, or the use of students to serve as supporters and peer advisors for fellow students on issues of acclimating to campus and maintaining a healthy lifestyle. These programs involve some vetting and training of students to support these services. This endeavor is a way to save on funds, but it’s also about packaging important information in a way that may be more effectively delivered to people—through ...
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The use of e-learning to back up universities during times of crisis or emergencies has long been in discussions on various campuses. With the WHO declaration of H1N1 at the pandemic flu level on June 11, some are re-looking at virtual learning as a way to support social distancing—or strategies for self-isolating as a protective measure to keep the flu from being passed from person-to-person and possibly recombining in other more dangerous ways.
It’s interesting, but faculty uses ...
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Professional writers often forget what it’s like to be a starting writer. They forget how sensitive writers may be about their work and how hard it is to share. They forget how stinging simple critiques may be. They forget that writers often conflate themselves with their work.
As an instructor who regularly “workshops” student writing online, I am continually re-learning how to adjust to the changing young writers who take the courses.
In a workshop ...
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I’d always thought that it was a pretty big disadvantage to come into a field with only very generalized knowledge (or occasionally, no knowledge). That’s just part of the work life of an instructional designer, I thought.
A recent project has helped me revise my opinion. There’s something to be said for empathizing with the total outsider student. Knowing where questions may arise may help in the curricular design. It may help in identifying what learning experiences ...
Continue reading Student Buy-in of the Instructor Framework for a Course
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A recent project has involved the use of the Quality Matters Rubric to ensure the quality of the e-learning through the curricular design. A trained QM-certified faculty member is spear-heading the critique. That said, the others of us without that training are still finding this rubric very helpful for aligning the elements of the course and ensuring that the basic elements are in place.
This rubric was funded through a FIPSE grant (from the US Department ...
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Dr. Marilla D. Svinicki, a professor in Educational Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, spoke Mar. 30 at K-State in a presentation titled “Changing student (and faculty) attitudes about who’s responsible for learning”. This was presented as part of the provost’s lecture series.
She described a mis-match between learner and instructor expectations of each other, particularly over issues of who is responsible for what in a course. She led the audience through activities in which the ...
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For years now, I’ve been watching freshman and sophomore students interact with each other in a variety of online courses. Even though most of the learning in my courses are asynchronous, the general co-learning in time among college students really enhances the learning experience.
For one, online learners seem very supportive of each other. They pass along kudos and encouragements. They share personal life stories. They share photos—of desserts, of artwork, of ducks from a duck hunt, of ...
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There’s little doubt that these are stressful times for many. Posted student messages show a heightened concern for their studies. And behind that concern seems to be a range of personal challenges that only occasionally make it to the surface of the conversation.
Maybe the higher levels of student stress come from a new L/CMS and the higher learning curve in knowing how to use that. Maybe the higher stress comes from pretty ...
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A month or so ago, I went ahead and zipped up course materials on Blackboard and downloaded that onto my desktop. Then I uploaded the zipped contents into a course shell in ANGEL Learning. And that was as far as I got in terms of transferring curricular contents en masse. I will admit to a great deal of skepticism that this particular organization should just ask faculty to move their own work even though I have instance manager privileges on ...
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For many, deadlines just sort of blow right past them, and changes don’t get made. One of the more seductive aspects of digital content is that it feels sort of permanent even though it can so easily be updated. So much digital content in courses need updating because of changes in research, in available digital resources, in pedagogical methods, and in technologies.
Some make changes on the fly. As they realize there are issues to fix, they go ahead ...
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Addressing Learners’ Online Test Anxieties
“And one of the things about testing is that it’s harder to do better than you can do, but it’s easy to do worse than you can do.”
– Dr. Ann Johnson, in “A Map of the Stars: Using Test Data to Create Useful Academic Interventions”
Test anxieties have a way of manifesting in various ways. I’ve seen doctoral students, who were college administrators in their “real lives,” fall apart and walk out ...
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There are ways to totally disassociate calls for responses for doctoral surveys. These are posted on listservs. There are the broadcast emails. And I’d noticed and sort of passed by one calling for feedback on how online courses and instructional strategies are designed to be culturally sensitive.
Then, finally, after a few months of this, I got a personalized email…with pretty much the same information but also the “I’ve already read your article…” That’s a little ...
Continue reading A Phone Interview about Culturally Sensitive E-Learning
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Two faculty from unrelated fields (audiology and interior design) recently presented on how their respective programs use assessment plans. Both concur that assessment is generally just “good practice.” Within the general push to encourage assessments, programs have flexibility and may focus on different aspects to build in different years.
Both faculty are from fields with external accrediting agencies, which focus on the building of knowledge and skills in learners, and their feedback has enhanced the functioning of both programs. Audiology ...
Continue reading Completing an Assessment Plan: Two Programs (Part II)
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It usually takes several elements to go wrong in an online situation for things to get really nutty. And reversing this little catastrophe early in an online course is not difficult to see at all. First, I trusted in a pre-made class. While I had gone in and rearranged files, I hadn’t looked to check if the calendar was set up. I didn’t check to make sure that a learner walk-through was working. Mistake 1.
Next, I did ...
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One risk to having taught on a subject for a long time is to disconnect from the experiences of new learners. Long immersion in a topic also leads an instructor to having assumptions about how information may be approached, and hard as a person may try to fight this, it may lead to an intellectual stasis, a comfort.
This seems to be a pretty dangerous place to be as an instructor. And that danger is compounded by teaching online where ...
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Every quarter or two or three, I get into an online scape. Most scrapes can be seen forming like a storm cloud from a long way away. Usually, a student takes offense at a perceived slight because they’ve received a particular comment about their writing. They’ve conflated their idea of self with their work. Or their grades aren’t what they feel they deserve: they assume that they have earned full points before they’ve done any work ...
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There’s nothing better on a crisp and sunny fall afternoon than to be traipsing across campus with a sheaf of flyers and plenty of tape and pins. That’s at least so for the first hour. The second and the third ones are not as delightful. How I came to be distributing materials around campus is that I offered to publicize a website that is being built to support the protective elements of students’ lives to combat suicide, which ...
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Usually, by the 2nd, 3rd or 4th weeks of a 10-week term, students will start emailing me with a dilemma, which goes something like this: “I ordered my book as soon as I had the money to pay for it, but it hasn’t arrived yet, so may I get a deadline extension to turn in late work?” They then sometimes include the clause that the book may take up to 3-4 weeks to arrive from the day of ordering ...
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Clients know what they want, but they have a hard time explaining what they want in a way that is specific and usable enough for developers and site designers.
I’ve come to this conclusion after seeing projects languish, without any traction or support (and then the predictable finger-pointing). I’ve seen this with websites where faculty clients may not know what is available or possible technologically, and they have one image or groove in their minds. There’s no ...
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With online synchronicity, most presenters do wrap up the interactions with some flourish. There are some closing comments, a thanks to all who participated, URLs of where the digital resources will be posted, and promises for future events. That sense of wrap-up is fairly critical in giving participants a sense of event completion.
In e-learning, though, I see much less design of closure. Too often, there’s a flurry of activity to hit the deadlines. There are cumulative assignments. There ...
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At a national conference a year ago, in Chicago, one of the presenters spoke about using learning management system (LMS) information about student performance to raise red flags about their learning and to provide the faculty with some sort of early warning. The idea then was to have academic interventions come into play.
At that time, I wondered how oblivious an online faculty member would have to be not to have some red flags raised with certain student behaviors: absenteeism ...
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Various research writings have originated creative ways to capture information as a byproduct of work. For some, creating help texts and directions can be unwieldy and time-consuming. An article by Paris, Colineau, Lu and Linden summarized an endeavor that captured a procedural help based on how people used a computerized system. This automation was to help replace the “labor-intensive and tedious” writing and maintenance of procedural help texts. Their system apparently captures use information from various data streams: textual, graphical ...
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In student journalism, faculty and advisors work hard to shepherd student work forward towards publication—often locally and then in larger and larger venues. Students had a chance to evolve their work. They made mistakes in small venues before risking mistakes in the larger ones. Some of you already know where I’m going with this.
Students today often publish to the world early on. Various classes may require blogging or wiki postings. While these may ...
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It doesn’t take long for the doctoral students to find their way to those involved in instructional design. There’s research on quality matrices, hybrid learning strategies, interactive television, strategic deployment of e-learning, and any number of other issues and combinations of issues.
The outreaches come through on listservs, broadcast or micro-cast emails, telephone calls, online surveys, shoutouts at conferences, face-to-face queries, and conferences.
Students want advice. They want readers for their draft chapters. They want access and connections ...
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Back in the day, there were some of my freshman classes that had some 700 – 800 or more students per auditorium. Our learning was facilitated by TAs, and there were notes that we could buy in case we missed a lecture date or two. That’s how I recall it. I never actually bought lecture notes as study aids although I probably could have earned some extra points with that. I remember seeing some, and they were full of typos ...
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It was a friendly invitation between two Kansas universities to chat about ITV via Polycom. We were meeting from two universities and one branch campus. The dry run had gone well. The automated dialing system didn’t quite work, but we all did finally get online live to discuss the issues at hand.
One of the universities in the state was seeing ITV (interactive television) as the way to do distance learning. While they ...
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This clipart shows a gymnast standing on a balance beam in a balanced but difficult pose.
This stock image shows a man wearing a business suit and tie presenting to a group while standing in front of a whiteboard with writing on it.
This clipart image shows a man and a woman holding up an award in the form of a large trophy cup.
This image shows a bright pink "bot" that looks like a head floating in the screen ...
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Online learners have become much more diverse now over time, as e-learning has become more mainstreamed and accessible. And in writing classes, people bring much more about the inner texture of their lives. They joyfully share about being rednecks, vegans, Buddhists, and vintners.
In my F2F classes, students would bring in photos of the aftermath of an accident after a jump on the snowboarding slopes with plenty of stained snow. They would bring in slides of their ...
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It is a simple truism that most people would not want to be replaced out of their jobs. Suggesting that might make a person downright uncomfortable. So it was with amusement that I came across a phrase in my readings on automated learning: “offloading the instructor.”
That very blunt phrase highlights a very real factor in the support for automation of learning. Less offensive phrasing is usually used, more like “cost-savings.”
I recently co-presented on automated learning at this campus ...
Continue reading "Offloading the Instructor" and Automated Learning
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With work that may be a little boring, it helps to spice it up by thinking of ways to add value. That especially applies to transcripting. Of course, it is a slippery slope to integrate transcription into instructional design, and I most certainly don’t mean to integrate this. That said, I am assuming that most IDs will occasionally get dragged into some transcripting by the needs of a particular project every now and again.
Either that, or I’m ...
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For many quarters and semesters now, I’ve included a learner lounge space where learners can collaborate, share information, and socialize without any instructor presence. The only caveat is that an instructor will enter the space if something goes awry, and that presence is requested.
This space allows learners to have their own privacy, and it stands in the place of four-walls hallway conversations and chitter-chatter that doesn’t include the instructor.
I’ve ...
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A colleague generously set up a campus tour for me, and during this tour, we visited a state-of-the-art e-learning lab.
The lab itself looked like any other set of academic offices, with a mixture of computers, papers and books….and students…and comfortable furniture. We all crowded into a small meeting room to see some of the work of this office (which has a strong track record of federal educational grant funding as well ...
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In the quest for high learner retention and high participation, one strategy in the building of CSCL spaces (computer supported collaborative learning) has been to encourage the building of so-called “back channels.”
In all sorts of communication environments, having such informal back channels is useful. It allows for richer interchanges without people having to necessarily go on the formal record. And if vetted, such information can be highly useful and pro-social and pro-learning.
One example of such ...
Continue reading Developing Back Channels for Online Learners
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Some public debate has surrounded the issue of public universities and colleges displaying greater responsibility for their troubled students, in order to head off potential on-campus violence.
There have been government studies on students who engage in violence on campus. There have been various universities that have shared publicly some of their endeavors, usually through their counseling support programs for students.
Recent articles have suggested that such institutions of higher education need to be more interventionist. They need to take ...
Continue reading A Watch List of Troubled Students...and Virtuality
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Student retention has always been a bit of a challenge in many academic programs. Doctoral programs seem to feature about a 50% dropout rate. High schools have a 30% dropout rate. For e-learning ones, there are additional challenges, many of which have been mitigated with more student screening, student support, learner outreach, and faculty and staff training. That said, the challenge of retention does crop up in different ways.
Recently, a program that has high student entry traffic but low ...
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When we buy a piece of software, we pretty much assume that it'll be plug-and-play. Few of us read the manual first, and most just follow the directions for the upload and then noodle around until the pieces start coalescing into sense. The immense amounts of support that go into a software product's launch and the continuing help provided for its users often seem invisible to most users. Lately, I've been noticing this "digital bubble wrap" that ...
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People in customer service have to get tough. When they're faced with irate and frustrated customers, they can handle the issue by troubleshooting it and getting out of the way. Others will "get back" at the complainer with further delaying tactics, ignoring strategies, baleful looks or filing the complaint in the circular bin.
For the past several hours, I've been reading digitally archived complaints. These are textual ones submitted by email and web forms. I'm not ...
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After all the sweltering heat yesterday, I am glad it's raining today. I have a million small tasks to complete before getting away from the office for two days to attend the 7th Annual SIDLIT (Summer Institute of Distance Learning and Instructional Technology) conference in Kansas City on Aug 3-4. I am excited and eager to present with my colleagues on the launching of the IDOS blog. I also plan to attend several sessions and have marked those sessions ...
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E-Learning Companion: A Student's Guide to Online Success by Ryan Watkins and Michael Corry The George Washington University Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company 2005 188 pp. wirebound softcover
Dr. Ryan Watkins and Michael Corry's E-learning companion helps a modern young college learner segue into online learning. This text serves as a college study skills handbook with college tutorials and foundational insights on online learning. Taking a practical approach, these authors advise online learners to annotate readings to strengthen their ...
Continue reading E-Learning Companion (Brief Resource Review)
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In my years in the classroom, I've always thought it was one of the highest compliments to dream big for my students. (My students didn't always think so.) I think it's important to expect much for them to live up and aspire to. This thought came up again recently as I was reading program literature for the Evergreen State College's (TESC) Reservation-Based program. Their brochure reads in part:
"Program faculty believe that we best meet students ...
Continue reading Dreaming Big, Planning for the Real and Seeing Truth
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There's little doubt that alpha and beta testing are important parts to the design process. There must be a procedure to evaluate whether a multimedia design is working or not.
For years, my former students in "Writing for New Media" had set up alpha and beta tests. They had test-run their sites. Some of them went live and built up a following. Others never went live, just sort of existed in electronic portfolios and student sample work DVDs. I ...
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Last week, I talked about the presentation from FETE on arousing curiosity in students, in class. Today, I will share some tips I got from the discussion. Before I talk about it, I would like to say these are by no means my ideas, but ideas/comments from everyone in the presentation.
Here is a summary of the tips that was voiced in the presentation ( in no particular order):
Blog Entry
I was reading a book on technology in education recently, and the authors observe that "work and university study have always been closely related" (A.W. Bates and G. Poole, 2003, p. 17). That got me to thinking about how we actually design for student employability. (Research says that employers tend to be more leery of degrees earned totally online vs. those that involve some face-to-face time.)
To be employable, people need a sense of self-discipline and polish. They need ...
Continue reading Instructional Design for Student Employability
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Much of first (early)-generation online learning is highly text-based. This means that learners have to engage their reading minds to understand the concepts, facts and practices.
Reading, a common staple of adult education, is more complex than many realize. Tony Buzan in Use Both Sides of Your Brain identifies seven steps in the process of learning (Boyles and Contadino 102). Being aware of the complexity of reading will help instructors provide the necessary support for adult learners in their ...
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Let me open with a sincere doubt (scary way to start a virtual conversation). I sincerely doubt that cultural neutrality is an actual possibility in digital course design.
The reasons are several-fold. For one, information is rarely culturally neutral. Virtually all information used in education has a human source and springs from a culture and a time. Information has assumptions about world-view and truth. There's a degree of plausible deniability about virtually everything.
Yet, I would say that the ...
Continue reading "Cultural Neutrality" in Digital Course Design
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There are a number of federal laws that deal with the issue of accessibility and websites. When I used to teach "Writing for New Media" at a college in the Pacific Northwest, my students would come in well-armed with firsthand observations about the challenges of disabilities and any number of strategies on how to design sites (often from scratch) that were accessible and welcoming to those with various combinations of disabilities. Various software makers have built accessible templates. Technologists have ...
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So our campus is discussing the use of mobile student response systems for use in classrooms. Apparently, some early adopters have been using such systems for years, including some with custom-made software on HP devices. There's a push now to establish some campus-wide standards, so all the units on campus that need to support this technology can be on board.
We brainstormed a massive list of desirables in whatever technology would be chosen. These included things like cost, technological ...