Plan Your Free Online Education at Lifehacker U: Summer Semester 2012. Move Over Harvard And MIT, Stanford Has The Real “Revolution In Education” Lectures are often the least educational aspect of college; I know, I’ve taught college seniors and witnessed how little students learn during their four years in higher education. So, while it’s noble that MIT and Harvard are opening their otherwise exclusive lecture content to the public with EdX, hanging a webcam inside of a classroom is a not a “revolution in education”. A revolution in education would be replacing lectures with the Khan Academy and dedicating class time to hands-on learning, which is exactly what Stanford’s medical school proposed last week.
Stanford realizes that great education comes from being surrounded by inspiring peers, being coached by world-class thinkers, and spending time solving actual problems. So, last week, two Stanford professors made a courageous proposal to ditch lectures in the medical school. Skeptical readers may argue that Khan Academy can’t compete with lectures from the world’s great thinkers. [Image via the University of Waterloo.] 50 resources for iPad use in the classroom. The transition to the more extensive use of technology in classrooms across the West has resulted in the integration of bring your own device (BYOD) schemes, equipping students with netbooks and tablet computers, and lessons that use social media & online services. Gesture-based technology is on the rise; according to the latest NMC Horizon Report, gesture-based technological models will become more readily integrated as a method of learning within the next few years.
The iPhone, iPad, Nintendo Wii and Microsoft Xbox 360 Kinect technology are examples of these kinds of developments, and in particular, resources for Apple products in education are becoming widely available online. For teachers, some of which are just beginning to use tablets and mobile devices in class, these resources can be invaluable in promoting more interactive classrooms and understanding how best to use and control such products. Tutorials: 1.) iPads for learning: Getting started 2.) 3.) 50 iPad2 tips and tricks 6.) Will Free Benefit the Rich? How Free and Open Education Might Widen Digital Divides. Tuesday, Janary 17, 12:30 pmBerkman Center, 23 Everett Street, second floorThe event is at capacity; this event will be webcast live at 12:30 pm ET and archived on our site shortly after. The explosion of open education content resources and freely available collaboration and media production platforms represents one of the most exciting emerging trends in education.
These tools create unprecedented opportunities for teachers to design and personalize curriculum and to give students opportunities to collaborate, publish, and take responsibility for their own learning. Many education technology and open education advocates hope that the widespread availability of free resources and platforms will disproportionately benefit disadvantaged students, by making technology resources broadly available that were once only available to affluent students. About Justin I’m a doctoral student at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a Fellow at the Berkman Center for the Internet and Society. Publishing with iBooks Author. Change.mooc.ca. Text Message (SMS) Polls and Voting, Audience Response System. Case Studies on Connected Learning. Connected Learning: Reimagining the Experience of Education in the Information Age.
Boundless Learning Raises $8 Million to Make Expensive College Textbooks Free. Let me get this out of the way: Boundless Learning, a Boston-based startup, just raised $8 million from Venrock, bringing the company's total funding to just under $10 million. Okay, onto the juicy stuff. In our earliest days, Pando went a little crazy covering books.
Amid the flurry of posts, I noticed a long-overdue disruption finally creeping its way into the textbook market. Companies like Inkling and Chegg were working to digitize the existing market in ways that seem commercially viable. The company's website declared "100% Free Textbook Replacement," claiming its beta product, essentially a free textbook hacking tool, had helped students at 1000+ universities save almost half a million dollars and perform better in their classes. Boundless Learning's algorithm recreates the content of thousands of textbooks culled from free sources of information like Wikipedia, government sources and creative commons-licensed material. Connexions - About Us. Connexions is a dynamic digital educational ecosystem consisting of an educational content repository and a content management system optimized for the delivery of educational content.
Connexions is one of the most popular open education sites in the world. Its more than 17,000 learning objects or modules in its repository and over 1000 collections (textbooks, journal articles, etc.) are used by over 2 million people per month. Its content services the educational needs of learners of all ages, in nearly every discipline, from math and science to history and English to psychology and sociology. Connexions delivers content for free over the Internet for schools, educators, students, and parents to access 24/7/365. Modularity Information is often presented to us linearly, but the way we learn is most often by making connections between new concepts and things we already know. Frictionless Remixing all modules are save in a simple and standardized XML format.
Distribution Quality Control. Open Learning Network | Activities. Europe > Neelie Kroes. European Institute of Innovation and Technology: Overview. Udacity - Educating the 21st Century. Technology Cannot Disrupt Education From The Top Down. Editor’s note: Guest contributor Patrick Gibbons is a Las Vegas-based writer and researcher focusing on education policy and reform. Computer technology has penetrated the classroom for thirty years with little impact. After hundreds of “disruptive” education startups, the best innovation in education is still the chalkboard. This isn’t the fault of the entrepreneurs, but the fault of an education system which resists innovation at every turn.
Many K-12 education technology startups target teachers and administrators by offering tools to become more productive: Lesson plan sharing, gradebooks, training tools, whiteboards and more. Devin Coldewey called them “practical” in his TechCrunch post “If I Were A Poor Black Kid” Inadvertently Touches On Sad Education And Tech Truths.” Unfortunately, the top down “practical” approach won’t work for some very good reasons. To innovate in education, entrepreneurs need to understand some key education statistics. Blinklearning secures €350k of R&D funding to personalise education. Blinklearning, the e-tutoring platform, has raised €350k of public money from the Spanish CDTI NEOTEC program for further R&D into how Artificial Intelligence can be leveraged to offer a more personalised education for learners.
Based on the premise that education must be adapted to the needs of each individual student who may learn at a different pace to their peers, the Spain and UK-based startup currently gives teachers better tools to create learning content along with technology to “track the individual performance of every student and subsequently provide those students with tailor-made content and exercises.”
The new funding will enable Blinklearning to conduct R&D into new product developments with the goal to help teachers to reduce underachievement and the failure of school for many students. The company is also in the process signing agreements with additional publishers and international expansion in markets like Colombia, Peru and Chile.
(via Loogic) Now On iOS And Android, 2tor Brings Higher Education To Mobile Students. There’s a growing focus on the intersection of education and technology, from Apple’s initiatives to reinvent the textbook and Inkling’s efforts to take virtualized textbooks to professional publishers to Bertelsmann and others backing a $100 million fund for innovative education. All of these projects, in one way or another, focus on higher education. Peter Thiel declared that higher education is in a bubble, and John Katzman, the founder and Executive Chairman of 2tor, wrote that your alma mater may very well be in jeopardy. Among other things, this is due to the fact that the cost of higher education is soaring, and as a result, there’s more attention being given to distance learning — or, in other words — ways that the Web and digital technology can transcend borders to bring a quality education to people, regardless of proximity to a campus, at a far lower price.
The reason for raising so much? For more, check them out at home here. A Step Forward? Bertelsmann & Others Back $100 Million Venture Fund For Innovative Education. Just as (mobile) technology is bringing some exciting changes to the health industry, it’s simultaneously over in the classroom trying to save education before it’s too late. I’m not sure we’re even close to “too late”, but it’s hard to ignore the fact that, like the health industry, the educational system (and I don’t limit that to the U.S.) is broken. Millions of young people are entering a system that just isn’t built to handle the diversity of learning styles — or the speed of innovation.
Peter Thiel is right: Higher education is in a bubble. I’m not sure dropping/stopping out is the always the best answer, but the point remains. The truth is that, while higher education may be in a bubble, most institutions are starved for cash. Whether they’re subject to the consequences of their own poor decisions or victims of an unkind global economy, (generally speaking) institutions are strapped for cash.
What do you think? MITx ou les premiers pas de la vraie révolution éducative en ligne ? Perspectives on Contemporary American Democracy by Jeb Barnes. After receiving his law degree from the University of Chicago Law School, Jeb clerked for a federal bankruptcy judge and then practiced as a commercial litigator in Boston and San Francisco. In 1994, he left the practice of law to pursue a doctorate at the University of California, Berkeley. His research centers on the intersection between law and politics and how policy emanates from interactions among the various levels and branches of government.
His research has been published peer-reviewed articles in a variety of journals, including Political Research Quarterly, Law & Society Review, Law & Social Inquiry, and Annual Review of Political Science, and three books: Dust-Up: Asbestos Litigation and the Failure of Commonsense Policy Reform (2011), Overruled? Legislative Overrides, Pluralism, and Contemporary Court-Congress Relations (2004), and a co-edited volume, Making Policy, Making Law: An Interbranch Perspective (2004). Create a Course on Udemy. Dramatically Bringing Down the Cost of Education with OER. SOURCE: AP/ Jim Mone A Blaine (MN) High School student is shown with a printed online textbook.
Instead of mass-produced textbooks, the more than 3,100 sophomores in the state's largest district are learning from an online curriculum developed by their teachers over the summer with free software distributed over the web. By David Wiley, Cable Green, and Louis Soares | February 7, 2012 Open Educational Resources Download this issue brief (pdf) Read this issue brief on your browser (Scribd) We are in the midst of a revolution in education. The key to this sea change in learning is open education resources, or OER.
OER are starting to hit the public consciousness in the form of initiatives like the Khan Academy , MIT OpenCourseware , and Washington’s Open Course Library . OER are already being used by learners for self study, by teachers to enhance classroom learning, and by education providers to bring down the cost of instruction. OER and you Education at its core is sharing The BOGO conundrum. Class Central - Google+ - Stanford professors +Daphne Koller and +Andrew Ng are… Peter Thiel: We're in a Bubble and It's Not the Internet. It's Higher Education. Fair warning: This article will piss off a lot of you. I can say that with confidence because it’s about Peter Thiel. And Thiel – the PayPal co-founder, hedge fund manager and venture capitalist – not only has a special talent for making money, he has a special talent for making people furious.
Some people are contrarian for the sake of getting headlines or outsmarting the markets. For Thiel, it’s simply how he views the world. Of course a side benefit for the natural contrarian is it frequently leads to things like headlines and money. Consider the 2000 Nasdaq crash. Thiel was one of the few who saw in coming. And after the crash, Thiel insisted there hadn’t really been a crash: He argued the equity bubble had simply shifted onto the housing market. So Friday, as I sat with Thiel in his San Francisco home that he finally owns, I was curious what he thinks of the current Web frenzy. Instead, for Thiel, the bubble that has taken the place of housing is the higher education bubble. Will We Need Teachers Or Algorithms? Editor’s note: This is Part III of a guest post written by legendary Silicon Valley investor Vinod Khosla, the founder of Khosla Ventures. In Part I, he laid the groundwork by describing how artificial intelligence is a combination of human and computer capabilities In Part II, he discussed how software and mobile technologies can augment and even replace doctors.
Now, in Part III, he talks about how technology will sweep through education. In my last post, I argued that software will take over many of the tasks doctors do today. And what of education? We find a very similar story of what the popular – and incredibly funny! – TED speaker Sir Ken Robinson calls “a crisis of human resources” (Click here for the RSA talk from the same speaker which has been animated in a highly educational fashion).
At the TED 2010 conference, he stated that “we make poor use of our talents.” Identifying Emerging Trends In Education This decentralization does not have to benefit only the students, though. Ken Robinson: Changing education paradigms. Sir Ken Robinson: Bring on the learning revolution!