Clifford Vaught

I'm not a fan of using social media/networking tools for online learning.  Seems to me to be the shiny new object that will be the focus, rather than the material for the course.

The 7 principles are interesting and I'll be checking that I'm in alignment.

I do not agree with the points on social networking.  There seems to continue to be an idea that individual instructors have creative rights to the LMS format where at my university, these are standardized.  The idea that I want students to exchange their work with each other makes it hard in my mind to assess whose work I'm scoring at the end. 

I find in my area that we have a lot of internationals who struggle with grammar.  I tell them to read - read newspapers, magazines - regardless of topic.  And watch American television.  Granted some of that will use slang and bad grammar as well but hearing often cements it in.

It is disappointing that a course such as this would suggest that multitasking is not only possible, but critical to online learning.  People cannot simultaneously perform multiple cognitive activities.  Our brains are not quad core processors.  Task switching is what we all do - and it is highly inefficient and prone to error.

Wow - this topic felt like theoretical academia.  In what world would you opt for Alternative Assessment over Authentic?  One of the bullets was to ensure you choose topics of interest to the student.  What about meeting course objectives?  I must be old-school because authentic made the most sense for me.

I don't see the application of norm referenced assessments in the classroom directly.

Interesting distinction between evaluations and assessments.

As in other courses in this series, it assumes the instructor has autonomy to choose tools for a class and experiement with the effectiveness.  I don't know about everyone else on this board, but that isn't an optioni at my university.  I will look into WebQuests and make suggestions to improve courses though.

I see areas I can implement from this section immediately around discussion forums and communications rubrics.