Accurately grading open-ended assignments in large or massive open online courses is nontrivial. Peer review is a promising solution but can be unreliable due to few reviewers and an unevaluated review form. To date, no work has leveraged sentiment analysis in the peer-review process to inform or validate grades or utilized aspect extraction to…

Fast-growing and evolving online content has enabled responsive curriculum updates to support students' learning of how to apply concepts to understand and solve real world problems. Written case studies have long served this purpose in a wide variety of disciplines, and many educators have seen value in presenting cases through the use of online…

Promoting blog content is a social activity--a means of communicating one student's appreciation of another student's work. This article explores the feasibility of using student promotions of content, in a blogosphere, to identify quality content, and implications for students and instructors. We show that students actively and voluntarily…

This article makes a case for the inclusion of creative writing in Library & Information Science (LIS) courses. Using an example of the course on reading practices and audiences, it shows how creative writing can contribute to the development of creativity, critical thinking, ability for self-direction and independent learning--all the…

Designed as a hybrid undergraduate class that includes online exercises and in-class discussion, Places in the Media helps students better understand the spatial politics of media that help structure our everyday lives. The article is meant as a do-it-yourself guide for instructors interested in building a course like Places in the Media. As such,…

The characteristics of written comments on assignments as well as the process of writing them were studied. Interviews to three case-study middle school students, observation of lessons and content analysis of their assignments show that features that promote learning are: comments located next to what needs revision must be reviewed; use of…

Educational Policy Improvement Center (EPIC) researchers visited 38 public high schools around the United States in 2007 and 2008 with the goal of validating and operationalizing a definition of college readiness. Schools in the sample were selected because they were demonstrating success at enabling more students from underrepresented groups to…

This article describes a writing-across-the-curriculum project that was born of one university's commitment to writing and ubiquitous computing. Faculty members across the disciplines, seeing an opportunity to re-introduce WAC on its campus through a curriculum development initiative funded out of an internal teaching, learning, and technology…

Writing, an essential part of every young child's school life, is a complex affair involving cognitive, affective, and psychomotor elements. Most children learn to write, with varying degrees of success, and every school has children who can be classified as nonwriters. Some children are inhibited and frustrated by writing and are put off by the…

While the library is at the center of many campuses physically, it is often an overlooked and underused resource in improving the learning and success of first-year college students. Librarians, classroom faculty, administrators, and higher education researchers come together to explore the potential of the library in shaping the student…