Open Education Research

How to make the ideal conference badge

Turadg — Wed, 26 May 2010 21:46:35 +0000

Here is the main principle to bear in mind when designing a badge: The purpose of the badge is to help people connect. Participant's names should be biggest thing on the badge and then affiliation. First names bigger than last names. Duplicate front on back for when it flips. (Can print one-sided and fold.) Continue reading →

Qrumbs proposal to Digital Media and Learning Competition

Turadg — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 22:05:54 +0000

The MacArthur Foundation is sponsoring a competition for innovative Digital Media and Learning applications. I had learned of it through my colleague Derek Lomas who won last year for his Playpower project. This year the applications are posted online with open commenting. The … Continue reading →

Preparing more people for a diverse future

Turadg — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 17:48:48 +0000

The TED Talks lecture series is a wonderful intellectual and cultural resource. I’ve been a fan for years and on this long weekend relished the opportunity to catch up on some I’ve had in my queue. One of my favorites … Continue reading →

QCommons opens to all content areas

Turadg — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 03:12:57 +0000

Today I rolled out a big update to QCommons, implementing support for many more content areas than Chemistry. The key new feature is groups. Each group has its own set of content, its own forums, and its own classification terms. … Continue reading →

Introducing QCommons: Chemistry

Turadg — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 18:08:44 +0000

After a long summer of programming and design, the first output of the QCommons research project is ready for the world. I will blog more about QCommons in general, but today I’d like to tell you about QCommons: Chemistry, made … Continue reading →

OER Copyright Survey

Turadg — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 02:06:18 +0000

Educators enjoy certain greater freedoms under copyright law’s Fair Use Doctrine, and such the culture of exchange in education is pretty lax. In a workshop recently in which I discussed Qcommons (more on that later this week), the teachers said … Continue reading →

Usability testing gets easier and easier

Turadg — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 23:50:00 +0000

Your product is useless if no one can use it. But how do you know how usable it is? You can try it yourself, but you are not the user. (“You are not the user” is practically a mantra here … Continue reading →

Conference deadline extension statistics

Turadg — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 18:36:06 +0000

Anyone who publishes in conferences knows the pain of making sacrifices to meet a deadline, only to find at the last moment that it has been extended. Year after year of these extensions and people come to expect them, making … Continue reading →

Plone, Drupal, Moodle and ATutor

Turadg — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 20:34:33 +0000

I'm overdue for an update here on what I've been working on. My current project is a web application for collaboratively sharing, critiquing and improving question items for homeworks and quizzes. Basically a wiki question bank, but more socially-oriented. In my last post, I was... Continue reading →

Plone tips

Turadg — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 22:40:40 +0000

I’ve chosen Plone for a web application I’m working to develop, a collaborative site for educational assessment materials. I have years of experience with PHP/LAMP and Java, but am pretty new to Python and very new to Plone. As such, … Continue reading →