Cheating happens for a variety of reasons such as a need to maintain GPA, poor time management skills, assignments are not clear, task loading. Although cheating is still cheating, there are some instances that lead to learning opportunities for both students and faculty. For example, some students simply do not know how to cite sources properly. This happens quite a bit with adult learners who have been out of school for several years. A solution would be to recognize the error and provide citation examples or simply send them to the writing center for help. Another instance of unintentional academic dishonesty is group work when it is not allowed. This can be fixed by providing clear expectations to the students as to what is acceptable and what is not.

Regardless of class delivery mode (online or face to face), assignments and assessments should be modified regularly to avoid "repurposing" assignments from previous semesters. Some ideas are to pull exam questions from a class discussion board, have students to individualized research and submit the paper in parts, randomize and time exams in Blackboard while pulling the questions from a larger pool of questions. Engaging students and providing clear expectations and instructions for assignments and behavior will help students meet our expectations. No matter the situation, we must set examples and follow our own rules. Let's teach them how to use the technology we have in a constructive, not destructive way.

Once the process is complete on December 10, 2009, these courses will no longer be available on Blackboard. If any of these courses contain information you would like to safeguard for the future, you will need to export or archive your Blackboard course.

Click here for more instructions on how to archive your Blackboard courses or click here to register for training session.

Due to limitations of space, distance and complexity, it is not always possible to bring real-world experiences into the college classroom. Field trips and traditional student internships can offer students authentic learning contexts however these are often short in duration or occur late in a course of a student's educational career and the quality of these experiences tend to vary greatly. During these experiences, students often have little opportunity to develop team building skills and creative problem solving. Multi-user, persistent virtual environments (MUVE) have shown promise for fostering community and situated learning because they can support immersive, collaborative, extended experiences and simulations similar to those found in real world contexts.

This project focused on the creation of a virtual learning environment to support case-based learning using the online virtual world of Second Life, for use in undergraduate Ecology and Environmental Geology courses here at Seton Hall ...

Students meet various virtual residents that work in or visit Pirate Bay that provide different perspectives and opinions on recent marsh developments. By interacting with objects within the environment and observational data, student compare virtual results to historical data from Sandy Hook, N.J. and other relevant salt marshes, to determine their significance. Similar to gaming simulations, continual student assessment in the form of guided questions are built into the environment. Once students have formed a hypothesis to explain the mysterious observations presented in the case, they collect further data to test the validity of their hunches. They identify possible remediation strategies and propose a plan of action to restore the area's natural processes. Student groups present their proposed restoration plans and discuss among themselves the strengths and weaknesses of each plan to arrive at a best practice proposal together.

Inspiration for the design of the environment was drawn from the Sandy Hook salt water marsh area, an ecosystem that provides field experience in Marian Glenn's and Martha Schoene's courses. The Sandy Hook area is rich in ecological diversity and supports a large number of regionally rare and important flora and fauna species. The project pilot is currently being conducted in BIOL2341, a face-2-face undergraduate Ecology course taught by Marian Glenn.

This semester Dr. Chen has embarked on incorporating the virtual world Second Life into two sections of Introductory Chinese I (CHIN 1102). Dr. Chen is using the Second Life School on Chinese Island, created by the Confucius Institute at Michigan State University.

The following abstract describes Prof. Chen's virtual world project:

Along with face-to-face instruction, students will engage with their peers in the virtual world Second Life to learn about and practice the Chinese language and culture. 30 Students in this course have created virtual representations of themselves in the form of avatars and will navigate their way through the Second Life Chinese School, built by the Confucius Institute at Michigan State University. Using the resources provided by the Second Life Chinese School, 8 learning tasks were designed to accompany the teaching throughout the semester. Students are required to complete these 8 tasks individually and collectively. By exploring the learning activities, some of which are built into the school, students will acquire basic concepts and elements of Chinese cultures. They will also engage in conversation using the voice chat feature of Second Life through a number of assignments outlined in the course syllabus. The voice chat will be recorded and submitted to the professor for a grade. In this presentation we will discuss the Chinese virtual learning spaces within Second Life, the logistics of creating student accounts, the learning tasks, and students learning experience of Chinese within this virtual space.

Prof. Chen will be presenting this project at the end of this month at Yale University for the Northest Association for Language Learning Technology (NEALLT) and the New England Regional Association for Language Learning conference.

The tour began with an explanation of how the subjects of the experiment were trained in how to navigate through the Second Life environment. A maze was created that tested a user's ability to navigate through the space, once a user was able to successfully complete the maze three times they were thought to have mastered the necessary skills needed to continue with the study. The hosts of the tour then explained how objects were quickly rezzed so that rooms can be quickly changed into tech-geek or genre neutral. They made an important point of noting that Second Life is not a photo-realistic environment and that the goal of this project was to make the environment as realistic as possible in the placement of items that were identical to the real-life conditions but not to reach the same level of graphic realism.

When subjects enter the experiment rooms in Second Life using their avatars a sensor is used to detect what direction they were facing, this information is then emailed to a specific account for data collection.

Is Second Life even suitable for this kind of research? The research team found that results from the Second Life experiment were very similar to real-life results. What does this mean for researchers? Using a virtual world such as Second Life allows researchers to conserve resources in both finding and building out real-life spaces which costs money and time.

For more information visits the description of this build available on the NMC web site at: http://sl.nmc.org/2009/10/06/october-vwex/

An article on this study can be accessed at: http://scicom.ucsc.edu/SciNotes/0901/pages/geeks/geeks.html

To students of Latin, the availability of the language on Facebook may be just what's needed to narrow the distance between themselves and the venerable language. After all, the experience of studying Latin can frequently seem somewhat far and away. Even the readings prescribed by Latin teachers have an air of detachment about them: Cicero and Demosthenes, Caesar and Virgil. While students of "living languages" practice on subtitled films and in conversation groups, on vacations and with exchange students, Latin scholars soak in rare living breaths of their studied language, satisfying themselves with the occasional legal phrase, nursery plant, benediction or school motto. Recognizing verb stems and identifying vocabulary roots just somehow aren't quite the same as ordering off a menu or asking for directions.

Considering the amount of time people spend in facebook this could provide a rich practice environment for language learning.