Colleges and Universities

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Education sector

The University of Pennsylvania implemented asocial strategy to enhance their online learning environment. On Tues., March 16, 2010, PADLA (ThePennsylvania/Delaware/New Jersey Distance Learning Association) sponsored a meeting where the following presentations took place.

Designing a New Online Learning Environment Centered on Social Interaction

Presenters described the development and implementation of the Penn LPS Commons, a custom-built online learning environment designed to center participants on the social interactions that drive learning communities. Built with Open Source products Drupal and Moodle, the LPS Commons includes social networking, learning management and collaborative web 2.0 tools as well as robust permissions models which allow select elements of online learning communities to be shared with public audiences as institutional Open Educational Resources (OERs).

Social eLearning @ the University of Pennsylvania by Staff

Integrating Social Strategy into Online Course Design

In this session, presenters turned their attention to the instructional design issues related to integrating social networking tools into effective online course design. The presentation described a non-credit course in Positive Psychology which drew a global audience of over 1000 participants from 62 countries. Designed to engage both self-access and social learners, the course centered on 36 hours of broadcast quality video and allowed participants to drive course conversations through a variety of activities using social tools (eg. blogs, discussion forums, user profiles).

THE PRESENTERS

Marni Baker Stein, PhD, Director of Program Development

Lisa Minetti, MA, Curriculum Design and Assessment Specialist: College of Liberal and Professional Studies, University of Pennsylvania

The Host

Recognized as America’s first university, The University of Pennsylvania, one of eight private universities in the Ivy League, is consistently ranked as one of the best national universities in the U.S.A. There are more than 23,000 students at Penn, including 4,500 international students, and more than 4,000 faculty members, including ten who have received Nobel Prizes in recent years. The College of Liberal and Professional Studies (LPS), a division of the School of Arts and Sciences, serves adult students working toward undergraduate degrees, post-Baccalaureate study, and professional master’s degrees in the humanities, social sciences and natural sciences. The Program Development Group at LPS develops new programs through strategic partnerships, assesses the viability and sustainability of new program ideas through market research, and oversees the design and assessment of innovative and cutting-edge programming.

About PADLA

Now in its 8th year, PADLA’s mission is to establish an open forum dedicated to the free exchange of ideas and information between corporate, non-profit, academic, and government professionals, concerning the issues and technological changes in the field of Distance/e-Learning and how it can be utilized to improve human performance. Bi-monthly face-to-face meetings and an annual conference are held covering the latest research, trends and best practices in Distance/e-Learning presented by recognized experts and practitioners.

Web2themag.com thanks PADLA for this education sector update.

http://www.padla.org/