We are celebrating the best of what the Academy has to offer today in the inaugural Faculty Learning Communities Showcase. Everything kicks off at 2:30 PM in the Setzer Student Center Ballroom. The formal presentations by each FLC begin at 3:00 PM. Everyone in the LU community is welcome to join us for this exciting event. Are you thinking of using lecture capture as part of your learning experiences next semester? If so, you might want to participate in an upcoming webinar. The University of Texas-Austin will be sharing best practices from their experiences with lecture capture, blended learning and active and collaborative engagement. The webinar takes place this Wednesday, May 16 at 11:00 AM and is free but you must register to participate. When you begin to talk about who is offering educational opportunities, the shorter list may be who is not. With recent announcements by Harvard, MIT, NBC, WalMart and now National Geographic the possibilities seem endless. The questions about quality and content are certainly weighing heavily on this topic. Online learning is part of the options currently available to students who are pursuing a college education. LU has been at the forefront of this option for a number of years and the options continue to emerge for our students with the addition of College of Business. The CT+LE will be offering a series of workshops in the Fall semester to provide faculty development opportunities for all who are interested in creating a blended class, online course or those just looking to upgrade their technology skills. Watch this blog for more information. Collaborative learning is an umbrella term for a variety of educational approaches involving joint intellectual effort by students, or students and teachers together. It has long been recognized as an effective approach to the learning process. It has been reported that a collaborative learning community plays a significant role in promoting learning, sharing knowledge, and social and intellectual involvement. Nicole Anderson and Chi-Cheng Lin, in their article Exploring Technologies for Building Collaborative Learning Communities among Diverse Student Populations, write that "Formats for collaborative learning include in-class activities such as peer teaching, writing groups, and seminars, as well as outside classroom cooperative activities such as team projects and study groups." Anderson and Lin discovered in their research that students responded most positively to the use of blogs as a learning experience.