Preliminary Results of the College’s Application of SmarterMeasure

As part of its Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP), J. Sargeant Reynolds Community College adopted SmarterMeasure, an assessment tool that assesses student readiness for learning within the online classroom.  SmarterMeasure evaluates students’ skills and attributes in seven distinct areas: Life Factors, Personal Attributes, Technical Competency, Technical Knowledge, Reading Rate and Recall, Learning Styles, and Typing Speed and Accuracy. After piloting SmarterMeasure in Spring 2010 through volunteer faculty in online courses, the College fully implemented the assessment in Summer 2010. At present SmarterMeasure is delivered to incoming students as a part of placement evaluations, and distance learning faculty are also asked to integrate the tool within their first-week assignments in order to reach returning students. Since its incorporation at the College, close to 4000 students have completed the SmarterMeasure assessment.

The QEP Team has begun its principal analyses of SmarterMeasure and what it reveals about JSRCC students. Information gleaned from these analyses will guide the team in its development of a comprehensive student orientation to learning online and in its development of remediation modules that will help students to bolster their areas of weakness. The first round of data focuses upon all of the distance learning students who both completed the SmarterMeasure assessment and enrolled in at least one online course.  In the next few weeks, the data will be investigated further as the team evaluates first-time distance learners, various demographic factors, and displaced workers (the specific focus of the College’s FIPSE grant).

Open Educational Resources: The Real Democratization of Education

In a recent post, English Professor Miles McCrimmon discussed the ways in which Open Educational Resources (OERs) are impacting the traditional approaches to and soaring costs of textbooks in education. Along those same lines, I've been thinking about how the technologies of the Internet and mobile global access are breaking down barriers to information, education, and learning.  I recently heard someone declare that in virtual reality, "everyone is free."  In the context of politics, sociology, and education, this statement is powerful indeed.

The digitization of knowledge, information, speech, communication, and social and cultural tools has eroded the political, geographical, and economic structures that once defined the concrete landscapes of our world. As our world(s) become increasingly multi-dimensional and as we move further into virtual landscapes limited only, it sometimes seems, by our own capacity to imagine them into being, new freedoms come into definition. We have witnessed such freedom most graphically in the recent weeks in the context of the dramatic political changes that have brought long-standing dictatorships to an end. These revolutions began within the virtual worlds created by the Internet and spilled over into the real spaces of city squares, neighborhoods, and entire nations.

The Impact of Digital Literacy in Education (Part 2)

One way that educational institutions are seeking to accommodate the needs of the Millennial learner is through the use of media literacy tools such as multimedia textbooks.   Media literacy means that educators look at the Millennials not just as consumers of knowledge, media, and technology but as creators.  According to Considine et al. (2009) “this is crucial when working with the Millennials who are accustomed to living in a multimedia landscape” (p. 475).  Allowing learners the ability to interact with multimedia texts and express themselves through activities that promote engagement and creation are options that some educational institutions are currently undertaking as there seems to be “a gap between what college teachers expect and what college students expect”  (Pratt & Pratt, 2009, p. 1). One such educational association is the National School Board Association.

           

The Impact of Digital Literacy in Education (Part 1)

With an understanding of who the Millennials are and the characteristics that differentiate them from previous generations of learners, it is important to also consider how these difference will impact education and the way teaching and learning is conducted.  Millennials are entering an educational environment that is not prepared for the way they learn and the way they communicate.  This places heavy demands on educators as they are in a constant struggle to combine the content of the old curriculum in a way that the Millennial learners can relate to and learn from (Prensky, 2001).  This is one of the main issues as the Millennial generation does not respond well to the traditional teaching methods, such as the lecture, that is so prevalent in today’s classroom (Pratt & Pratt, 2009).  According to Price (2010), most Millennials prefer to learn from a variety of teaching methods including multimedia tools such as podcasting, videos, and other online tools.  Price (2010) also noted that one of her learners even successfully navigated the first three weeks of her course and passed the first exam without even purchasing the required text. This demonstrates that faculty must seek other means to communicate lessons to the Millennials rather than relying heavily on texts, as they have done in the past.  Faculty can use activities such as wikis, blogs, games, and social networking tools as optional means to disseminate the lessons to these learners.