English Pronunciation Skills and Intelligibility of Native Russian Speakers

The rapid growth of the native Russian-speaking population in the United States created an urgent need to improve their pronunciation skills and increase their second language speech intelligibility. The purpose of this field project was to present a research-based curriculum, with the use of embedded technology, that can be utilized to improve the American English pronunciation skills and intelligibility of native Russian speakers. The body of analyzed scholarship demonstrated that speech intelligibility is the primary goal of second language pronunciation teaching, justified the importance of research-based pronunciation teaching, emphasized the significant role of technology in pronunciation research and teaching, and revealed the lack and need for resources teaching American English pronunciation to native Russian speakers. The Affective Filter Hypothesis, one of five hypotheses that form Krashen’s Theory of Second Language Acquisition, is used as the theoretical framework for this field project. The designed field project English Pronunciation with ZOYA is an eLearning Platform grounded on a research-based curriculum tailored according to the related in-depth literature review and personal teaching experience to improve American English pronunciation skills and intelligibility of adult native Russian-speaking learners. The eLearning Platform is available at englishpronunciationwithzoya.tilda.ws. The Platform is designed as a user-friendly website with an easy-to-navigate module structure course curriculum creating a safe self-paced learning environment for pronunciation teaching and learning. The developed curriculum is recommended for adult intermediate to advanced proficiency level (B1 - C2, CEFR) native Russian-speaking learners, their instructors, and curriculum developers interested in improving pronunciation skills and intelligibility of native Russian-speaking learners

Cloud composition technologies in multimodal composition program documents

Writing programs at numerous universities—including the Georgia Institute of Technology, Iowa State University, Miami University of Ohio, Virginia Tech, and Purdue University—are incorporating more learning about multimodal communication into their curricula, including written, oral, visual, and electronic communication (WOVE). Within WOVE, electronic technologies enable students to produce, distribute, and consume written, visual, oral, and electronic communication (Ong 1982; Bush 1945; Eisenstein 1979, Lauer 2009, 2014). Integrating cloud technologies into writing programs may be difficult because it requires ongoing training, support, and maintenance, but it may be worthwhile because it helps produce a writing culture mediated by these technologies. I use activity theory (Kaptelinin & Nardi 2006, Russell 1997) to argue that participant techne—as the knowledge of an art with a focus on the method of production—is an influential component of cloud-supported composition culture. And I demonstrate how cloud technologies may be written into course overview documents with modularity and social information

Digital learning objects: a local response to the California State University system initiative

The purpose of this paper is to present a virtual library plan created by library directors of the 23 California State University (CSU) system campuses. The information literacy portion of the project offers a repository of high quality interactive digital learning objects (DLOs) in the MERLOT repository. Therefore, DLOs created locally at the Dr Martin Luther King, Jr Library at San José State University (SJSU) focus on topics that supplement the “core” DLO collection

Student, Interrupted: Can Digital Badging Improve Programmatic Agility and Help IS Students During Crises?

We propose that a stackable badged micro-credential system could increase academic programmatic agility, in turn helping university students cope with personal crises (illness, accidents, family emergencies), and societal-level crises (pandemics, natural disasters, geopolitical events). We demonstrate how our proposed system would certify students’ mastery of several modules comprising a required graduate-level Strategic IS Management course. This proposed system will provide helpful structure (through a modular design and reliance on well-accepted faculty governance, including the traditional college registrar role), and temporal flexibility (enabling students to receive credit for course modules taken in different terms/semesters, and taught by the same or different instructors) and portability (given that micro-credentials provide valid evidence of specific skills or knowledge a student has acquired, regardless of learning modality or instructor). This stackable badged micro-credential system would help students during crises, by making it easy for them to temporarily drop out of a course when circumstances impede effective learning and making it easy for them to resume studies when they are ready and able to do so. We discuss technical challenges that university administrators may face in implementing micro-credentialing in IS classes, offer suggestions for pilot-testing the proposed system, and suggest possible future extensions of this idea

Skills and Knowledge for Data-Intensive Environmental Research.

The scale and magnitude of complex and pressing environmental issues lend urgency to the need for integrative and reproducible analysis and synthesis, facilitated by data-intensive research approaches. However, the recent pace of technological change has been such that appropriate skills to accomplish data-intensive research are lacking among environmental scientists, who more than ever need greater access to training and mentorship in computational skills. Here, we provide a roadmap for raising data competencies of current and next-generation environmental researchers by describing the concepts and skills needed for effectively engaging with the heterogeneous, distributed, and rapidly growing volumes of available data. We articulate five key skills: (1) data management and processing, (2) analysis, (3) software skills for science, (4) visualization, and (5) communication methods for collaboration and dissemination. We provide an overview of the current suite of training initiatives available to environmental scientists and models for closing the skill-transfer gap

Shared Modular Course Development: A Feasibility Study

This project evaluated the viability of shared course development (SCD) and identified the necessary baseline mechanisms, principles, policies, and procedures for future joint course development collaborations. Although collaborative course design is still relatively new in Ontario, our institutionally-based project teams identified and researched a number of successful examples from Australia, Canada, Europe, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. These successful models demonstrated the transformative possibilities of blended learning, expanded course variety, maintained or enhanced the breadth of course offerings, and reduced institution-specific development costs while maintaining delivery autonomy. They also focused on enhancing student learning and produced momentum for instructional improvement and course re-design among collaborating institutions. This report concludes that there is considerable value to the development of collaborative institutional cultures in and of itself, and that collaborative capacity will become an increasingly important core competency in the more differentiated and change-oriented university sector that is emerginghttps://scholar.uwindsor.ca/ctlreports/1000/thumbnail.jp

Mobile Learning: The Teacher In Your Pocket

Mobile computing has exploded around the world over the past several years. Morgan Stanley suggests that mobile Internet use will exceed the use from fixed devices, and Ericsson projects that 80 percent of people will access the web from a mobile device by 2015 (Ingram 2010; Ericsson Corporate Public & Media Relations 2010). Mobile devices are being used for content creation, communication, information seeking, and so much more. The notion that mobile devices would be used only for quick and simple tasks has been challenged by research showing that a growing portion of the population—especially low-income and minority mobile users—use their phones as the primary means of accessing the web (Smith 2010). This growth in the usage of mobile devices in all aspects of people’s lives has led educators to look to it as an ideal mechanism for delivering content and improving interactivity in learning. In 2011, mobile learning was named a top trend with an adoption horizon of less than a year in K–12 and in higher education in the NMC Horizon Reports (Johnson et al. 2011; Johnson, Adams, and Haywood 2011). Mobile phones and other handheld devices have become valuable learning tools that can be capitalized on inside and outside of the classroom. This chapter focuses on how libraries can take advantage of mobile learning in the classroom

Technology Solutions for Developmental Math: An Overview of Current and Emerging Practices

Reviews current practices in and strategies for incorporating innovative technology into the teaching of remedial math at the college level. Outlines challenges, emerging trends, and ways to combine technology with new concepts of instructional strategy