The Mobile Conundrum: Pros and Cons of Technology in the Classroom Smart devices and laptops are an essential part of our day-to-day lives, but should they be part of the classroom?   At iClicker, we are fully committed to providing state-of-the-art hardware and mobile student response solutions. But we believe the decision on whether or not to allow mobile devices and laptops in the classroom lies with you, the educator. To help you consider the pros and cons of going mobile, we invite you to join three longtime faculty users, each with a different perspective. Watch Recording ... View more

Get Students Engaged in Their Own Learning Summer is an ideal time for curriculum planning and development. In this 30-minute on-demand webinar, Dr. Kate Biberdorf discusses how she plans and executes simple, active learning strategies into her classroom.   This webinar is ideal for anyone interested in learning and sharing new ideas and techniques to get students engaged and active in their own learning.     Watch Recording ... View more

Make your Classroom Engaging Years of research tells us active learning is effective. But we know it isn’t always an easy transition. In this 30-minute on-demand webinar, Instructional Technologist Angela Nickoli will disucss how to make your classroom more engaging and effective.   Watch Recording ... View more

Make your Classroom Engaging Join University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire Physics professor, Matt Evans as he discusses how he uses iClicker to get students to class and then engage them once they are there. He’ll first discuss his experiences in using the geolocation-based Attendance feature in iClicker Cloud to measure student attendance and will then provide insight into best practices for using in-class polling to actively engage students in their own learning. Watch Recording ... View more

Make your Classroom Engaging In this presentation, Dr. Chaudhury, Executive Director of the Innovation in Learning Center at the University of South Alabama, will share his insights into how research in the learning sciences combined with advances in computer technologies gives educators the tools to create engaging, interactive experiences for students. The social interactions of peer instruction play a prominent role in an interactive classroom. Dr. Chaudhury will present a variety of different formative assessment strategies—researched, developed, and tested by himself and others—and will give attendees strategies for incorporating clicker technologies into their own teaching. Participants will gain additional tools from this session to help them reach their instructional goals related to effective student learning through building their metacognitive skills. Watch Recording ... View more

Get Students Engaged in Their Own Learning   We’re sharing the love of Active Learning! Join Dr. Kate Biberdorf for a 30-minute webinar on how she plans and executes simple, active learning strategies into her classroom. This webinar is ideal for anyone interested in learning and sharing new ideas and techniques to get students engaged and active in their own learning.     Watch Recording ... View more

Join Grace Tuttle for a 30-minute webinar on creating a faculty learning community (FLC) at your institution to support active learning. During the webinar she will discuss the purpose of creating an FLC and what you should hope to accomplish from it. Watch Recording ... View more

Studies show that engaging students through activities, discussion and collaboration is more effective than traditional lecturing. iClicker is pleased to invite you to a Psychology-specific webinar led by Edna Ross. Attend this webinar to learn key strategies, ideas and best practices as they relate to the Psychology classroom!     Watch Recording ... View more

Studies show that engaging students through activities, discussion and collaboration is more effective than traditional lecturing. iClicker is pleased to invite you to a Chemistry-specific webinar led by Brandon Tenn, PhD, Professor of Chemistry and Math at Merced College. Attend this webinar to learn key strategies, ideas and best practices as they relate to the Chemistry classroom! This webinar is ideal for anyone interested in learning and sharing new ideas and techniques to get students engaged and active in their own learning. Click here for a copy of the slides used in his presentation.   Watch Recording ... View more

Studies show that engaging students through activities, discussion and collaboration is more effective than traditional lecturing. iClicker is pleased to invite you to a Biology-specific webinar led by Deb Pires, Instructional Consultant and Academic Administrator at UCLA's Center for Education Innovation in Life Sciences. Attend this webinar to learn key strategies, ideas and best practices as they relate to the Biology classroom!     Watch Recording ... View more

Studies show that engaging students through activities, discussion and collaboration is more effective than traditional lecturing. iClicker is pleased to invite you to a Physics-specific webinar led by Matt Evans. Attend this webinar to learn key strategies, ideas and best practices as they relate to the Physics classroom!     Watch Recording ... View more

This webinar will address a variety of ways to incorporate active learning strategies both inside and outside of the classroom. From getting your students to attend class, to engaging them while they are there, on through to assessing student understanding, this webinar is sure to have something for anyone interested in strategies and tools to impact student success. Watch Recording         ... View more

The expansion of open educational resources (OER) in higher education has led to a rush of commercial companies looking to provide OER-related services. Many if not most of these companies have brought products to market based on loose assumptions about what OER actually are and few have taken the time to learn and apply principles of the open education community that underlie the increase in OER use. Our group at Macmillan Learning strives to be different. Like other commercial publishers new to open education, we first understood OER only in terms of open textbooks and other resources that were disrupting the business of our commercial titles. But unlike most companies, our desire to learn from the people advancing open education, through conference attendance, campus visits, countless phone calls, and some “constructive” criticism on Twitter, led us to realize that the mission of open education complemented Macmillan Learning’s own mission to improve lives through learning. This was evident to me at my first Open Education conference and has carried through as teams at Macmillan and Intellus Learning focus on bringing OER-awareness to our company and incorporate principles of open education into our activities and services. We listened - and still are. Engaging with people and learning from them often results in correcting course, and correcting course is easier when there are guide posts to follow. It should start by taking a “do no harm approach” to avoid openwashing; it is carried forward with the 5Rs of open licensing (retain, reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute) that provide a structure to the promise of openly licensed content; and last fall, the offering of the CARE Framework provided an outline on not only how we can provide material and support services but how we orient ourselves to the open education community. The introduction of the CARE Framework has proven valuable context to mature our organization’s understanding of open education. You can find the many ways we align with the CARE Framework on our website. We support open licensing to improve student learning - not just lower costs. We understand the CARE Framework is not a set of criteria to check-off, but the beginning of a conversation. The conversation starts with access, but how we improve learning through the use of OER immediately follows. Pre-packaged free alternatives to commercial products will not suffice. Agency, empowerment, and validation are needed, too. To that end, the value of the Intellus Learning platform exists in the insights it provides on licensing and accessibility, its value in reducing information gaps and increasing efficiency in the discovery and usage of OER. A Curriculum and Campus Approach to Supporting OER Most OER-related services provided by commercial companies follow the money, and those companies believe the money lies solely in supplying services for general education courses. There is no shortage of companies claiming that they have the out-of-the-box solution to OER usage in introductory psychology, college physics, or U.S. history. Few companies, however, are developing resources that support the use of OER throughout the curriculum. The Intellus Learning platform enables instructors and course designers to discover and select resources from a database of more than 6 million OER assets structured in a taxonomy built around the undergraduate curriculum. In addition, Intellus Learning can provide insight into use of popular library databases like EBSCO, ProQuest, Springer and Films on Demand (just to name a few), and as a result it can be used to effectively identify, aggregate and deliver OER and freely available resources up and down the curriculum - not just in general education courses. Since Intellus-identified OER is delivered through the campus LMS, full-scale campus implementations can be more easily managed by campus technology. Curated Courses Serve as a Foundation for an Individualized Experience To make finding and delivering open educational resources even easier, we created Intellus Open Courses, using carefully curated, quality OER delivered via a customizable, affordable course to students. Each Intellus Open Course contains content from openly licensed eBooks and instructor resources such as presentation slides and test bank questions that have been created by Macmillan Learning and shared under Creative Commons licenses. Each course includes additional open and freely available resources including YouTube videos, optional institutional library content, primary source documents, and more. In our effort to ensure we are not charging for open content that can be freely-accessed elsewhere, all content that is included in an Intellus Open Course is linked to on our public website, no passwords, no paywall. Also unlike other offerings, central to our mission is to enable instructors to make each course their own by taking advantage of the powerful search and discovery tools within Intellus Learning to add or remove content and design their course to fit their individual course needs. Adopters of Intellus Open Courses receive support services, including on-demand training and implementation support. Continuing the Conversation The CARE Framework as well as so much of the work by the open education community has helped us become better participants in the conversation around open education. We welcome more feedback on how we are doing and look forward to many future conversations about how Macmillan Learning can be a participant in the broader mission of open education. Tell us your thoughts below, tweet us or email us at intelluslearning@macmillan.com. ------- Charles Linsmeier is senior vice president, content strategy, at Macmillan Learning, where he manages the social science, curriculum solutions, and high school programs. A graduate of the University of New Mexico, he began his career at Macmillan Learning in 2000. ... View more

At Intellus Learning, we are so excited and proud to be working with the American Public University System. Let's continue to reduce the cost of higher education through affordable course materials.  Read the full article! ... View more

It’s an exciting time to be exploring Open Educational Resources (OER), and we wanted to share some great articles that recently caught our eye: The Impact of Open Educational Resources on Various Student Success Metrics (New OER study put out by researchers Nicholas Colvard of the University of Georgia and Eddie Watson of the Association of American Colleges and Universities in the International Journal of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education) OER is at a tipping point. Here's how to keep it moving in the right direction. (A librarian’s commentary on what it will take to make OER work long-term) OER shown to improve grades, not just cut costs. (A University of Georgia study found that open educational resources improved end-of-course grades for undergraduates and lowered D, F, and withdrawal rates) Applications Open for Federal OER Grant (The Department of Education has formalized plans to award one to three OER grants totaling $5 million by late September) When it Comes to Free Textbooks, Who Pays? (Suggestions to make OER sustainable) ... View more