d42fd4473841ddab8567343dbcb7aa41. OECD_8_12. Система образования Финляндии. Viewpoints. Are MOOCs the Future of Online Learning? Teaching Strategies Arienne McCracken In education, we often hear arguments in favor of smaller class sizes.
These arguments contend that students learn better when there are fewer of them in a class, because each one gets more individualized attention from the instructor. So it may seem counter-intuitive to support classes that can swell to several thousand participants. How can students learn in these sorts of settings? The answers to these questions aren’t found in traditional classrooms — no surprise. Stanford University does a MOOC. 6.2 Million Americans Go Online for their Education. Tampa, FL (PRWEB) August 26, 2011 Marketdata Enterprises, a 32-year old market research firm that has tracked a wide variety of service sectors since 1979, has released a groundbreaking new 115-page report entitled: Online Education: An Industry & Competitor Analysis.
The study traces the “distance learning” business from 2002-2015 forecasts. Critics of e-learning say that learning alone via a computer does not provide the enriching intellectual exchange that in-person classes offer. Because the industry is so new, naïve consumers may not know the difference between accredited institutions and the estimated 700 fly-by-night operations that imply accreditation and charge steep prices, or sell fake degrees. What’s the quality of online education degrees? According to Research Director, John LaRosa: “Online education is a fairly new and high growth industry, with its share of growing pains.
Report’s major findings: Why Are Finland's Schools Successful? It was the end of term at Kirkkojarvi Comprehensive School in Espoo, a sprawling suburb west of Helsinki, when Kari Louhivuori, a veteran teacher and the school’s principal, decided to try something extreme—by Finnish standards.
One of his sixth-grade students, a Kosovo-Albanian boy, had drifted far off the learning grid, resisting his teacher’s best efforts. The school’s team of special educators—including a social worker, a nurse and a psychologist—convinced Louhivuori that laziness was not to blame. So he decided to hold the boy back a year, a measure so rare in Finland it’s practically obsolete. Finland has vastly improved in reading, math and science literacy over the past decade in large part because its teachers are trusted to do whatever it takes to turn young lives around. This 13-year-old, Besart Kabashi, received something akin to royal tutoring. Дистанционное обучение в США в 2009 году. UK online learning is ‘most popular in Europe’ By Virtual College.
American Public University enlists faculty to write e-textbooks. The American Public University System wants to get more bang for its buck with e-textbooks, so the for-profit college system is enlisting its professors to write and edit digital course materials.
Faculty members are submitting proposals for e-textbooks to be used in about half of the institution’s general education courses by the end of 2012. And university leaders hope the recently launched APUS ePress will produce many more in-house e-textbooks in the future. The plan has led to grumbling among faculty members, some of whom worry about quality control for the new digital texts and about whether they will be paid enough for the new work.
Internally published texts also raise challenging questions about professors’ intellectual property rights. University officials, however, promise that faculty will be fairly compensated, and that each e-textbook will be vetted for proper copyright protection for its contributors. Fred Stielow, the dean of libraries, oversees APUS ePress. CDIO. The CDIO Initiative (CDIO is a trademarked initialism for Conceive — Design — Implement — Operate) is an innovative educational framework for producing the next generation of engineers.
The framework provides students with an education stressing engineering fundamentals set in the context of Conceiving — Designing — Implementing — Operating real-world systems and products. Worldwide CDIO Initiative: A Framework for the Education of Engineers. What has Finland *not* done? In his book Finnish Lesson, Pasi Sahlberg writes: The dominance of cognitive psychology, along with the emergence of constructivist theories of learning and the advances in neurosciences on the horizon, attracted Finland educational researchers to analyze existing conceptions of knowledge and learning in schools.
Several influential and teacher-friendly readers were published and sent to schools. UNESCO and COL release open education policy document for higher education. Timothy Vollmer, November 1st, 2011 Today UNESCO and the Commonwealth of Learning jointly released the policy document Guidelines for Open Educational Resources (OER) in Higher Education.
The purpose of the guidelines is “to encourage decision makers in governments and institutions to invest in the systematic production, adaptation, and use of OER and to bring them in to the mainstream of higher education in order to improve the quality of curricula and teaching and to reduce costs.” UNESCO and COL note, “Open Educational Resources are teaching, learning or research materials that are in the public domain and released with an open license (such as Creative Commons). What Can We Learn From Stanford University’s Free Online Computer Science Courses? At the end of July 2011, Stanford University announced that three introductory one-term undergraduate courses would be available free as online distance learning courses during the October to December 2011 term.
Each course is taught be people who are leading figures in their fields, and in some case more-or-less the leading figures. Here are links to the descriptions of each of the courses: Machine Learning, taught by Professor Andrew Ng, Director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab, which is the main AI research organisation at Stanford University;Database Design, taught by Jennifer Widom, Professor and Chair of the Computer Science Department at Stanford University;Artificial Intelligence (AI), taught by Sebastian Thrun, Research Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, and Peter Norvig, Director of Research at Google (who was a keynote speaker at the 2007 ALT Conference). 1. 2. 3. 4. 5-minute 2011 TED talk by Sebastian Thrun: