Among the key issues of bringing students into a for them new learning environment is that they have to learn and understand the concepts and principles of the environment. Introducing students to these concepts has been popularized by Gilly Salmon as "Sparks". Sparks refer to short introductory learning activities that help learners to get used to the environment of the following learning activities as well as helping educators to understand the capabilities of their students in woring in the learning environment. Such activities can be fully automated and in online marketing these fully automated guides to learn about the environment are subsumised as "Onboaring". In this article I elaborate on one onboarding strategy for the Moodle platform and introduce a small moodle plugin to helps in this process.

Scaling educational innovation in higher education is difficult. Besides of managerial support and organizational commitment, developing a practice of learning design as process modelling is among its core success factors. With the increasing digitization and globalization of industrial societies, increasingly there is a demand to develop relevant skills. Among the many slogans related to these new basic skills is computational thinking. In this article, I focus on the question, why is computational thinking not just a learning objective for students but also a capacity of educators?

On 2 December 2016 I will speak at the Online Educa about getting around privacy, ownership of learning, and interoperability issues of learning analytics. It covers parts of the lessons learnt from my work on bringing XAPI into organisational operations.

A few weeks ago - in the middle of the summer break we saw very unusual activity at the HTW Chur campus. Suddenly, young people were showing up on campus, being suspiciously engaged in some kind of activity involving their smart phones. Some could be our students, while others were clearly too young - but again it was summer break and ordinary students avoid us during that time of the year. Quickly, it became clear that these people were Pokemon Go players.

In a way, we were exited that this was happening, because Pokemon Go unites several of the topics in our curriculum. So we thought: “if these people are already here, why not engage them in some science communication/study promotion”. We have plenty of printed and online material that present what we are doing. On the other hand, this material seemed awkward for giving out to players because it is entirely unrelated the reason why these players visited us. Also we did not want to disturb our core community if we start flooding our communication channels with something they are not interested in or possibly dislike (our traditional community responds very sensible in unpredictable ways). So we were looking for something that allows engaging players while leaving our existing community unaffected.

Read on to find out what we did and what we learned.

I am on a trip with swissuniversities to the USA and visit educational technology companies and institutions who use or innovate education technologies. This trip brought me to Boston and to San Francisco. This article is about the group's visit to Google and Coursera, where we discussed their global MOOC activities. The night before, Christian Simm and Benjamin Bellmann welcomed us at Swissnex San Francisco. Christian highlighted in his short reception speech that Big Data is the main trend at the US West Coast.

In case you found one of your research papers has been (partly or entirely) copied and republished under a different name and you are looking for advice on how to respond to this, then this post is for you!

This week I was searching the web for some new references on using the European Qualification Framework (EQF) as a tool for instructional design. With colleagues I published on the topic myself and I was interested whether there are new publications or if we have missed important research. Since it is not an overly hot topic, there is not much around and I was surprised to find a paper I didn't know yet. So I went and fetched it from the web. While flipping through the pages, I was surprised to find one of my grafics without reference and then saw another figure that has been used in the same article, so I went and actually read the paper finding that most of it sounds strangely familiar. After double checking with the original paper, I found that most of the paper including all figures and references were directly copied from the original article. I know that there are integrity guidelines but when I googled, I did find not a single reference on how to deal with plagiarism as the owner of the work. While there is a lot about how teachers should guide their students in case of plagiarism or what kinds of plagiarism exist, but nothing about how to get in touch with a journal that republished one's work under a different name.