Coursera debuts its iPhone app to bring you online education on the go | VentureBeat | Education | by Christina Farr. Coursera appears to be racing ahead of its competition in its quest to bring online education to your smartphone. The Mountain View-based online education provider released its new iPhone app this morning. Coursera is the best known of the massive open online education course providers, often referred to by insiders as “MOOCs,” with its registered 5.5 million students.
Above: A screenshot from Coursera’s mobile app I’ve been playing with the app throughout the day, perusing video courses in computer programming (in honor of this month’s coding education push), bioinformatics, and finance. These courses are taught by professors at some of the top universities in the world, including Stanford University and Johns Hopkins. The app doesn’t differ all that much from the web experience that you may be used to.
However, much of the content is still under development, which is frustrating. Chief rival Udacity has yet to release its mobile app. Powered by VBProfiles. How To Raise The Next Zuckerberg: 6 Coding Apps For Kids. If you want to give your kid every opportunity to succeed, it’s hard to argue with teaching them to code. Some of the wealthiest and most influential people of our time began programming young, and who wouldn’t want that kind of future for our kids? Yesterday, we reviewed Hopscotch, an iPad app that teaches children the basics of any modern programming language. However, that’s just one of the many options out there. Here are six free tools to get kids excited about code. Whether she’s 5 or 15, and whether she wants to learn Ruby or Java, there’s something here just for her: Scratch Age range: 8 and up Language: Original visual programming languagePlatform: Browser-based With over 3 million uploaded user projects, Scratch is undeniably popular.
Since Scratch is a Turing-complete computer language, anything that kids can imagine, they can build. Alice Age range: 8 and up Language: Original object-oriented 3D programming language Platform: Windows, Mac, or Linux download Daisy the Dinosaur 5 to 8. Content hackathons: the future of textbooks? Plenty of startup communities and companies host hackathons to generate new web tools and apps. But as the amount and awareness of free or low-cost open educational resources increases, more open-content publishers and educators are experimenting with a similar approach to hack textbooks. For the past couple of years, Siyavula, a Cape Town, South Africa-based company, has been organizing content hackathons, collaboratively creating math and science textbooks in about three weekends.
Earlier this year, open content textbook publisher Flat World Knowledge hosted a hackathon to crowdsource a computer science textbook. Last month, a group of Finnish math teachers spent the weekend creating a high school math book. Content hackathons are a way to bring educators and subject-matter experts together to curate and organize the content into a structure that helps students learn as effectively as possible, said Boundless co-founder and CEO Ariel Diaz. Image by Spectral-Design via Shutterstock. Www.stopstealingdreams.com is ready to read and share. "What do you think we ought to do about education? " My readers ask me that question more than just about any other.
So here's my question back: What is school for? (Click the link to get to the free download). I've just published a 30,000 word manifesto, totally free to read, share, translate, print and, most of all, use to start an essential conversation. This is an experiment in firestarting--I'm hoping that removing friction from the sharing of this idea will help it spread. If you get a chance, visit the page and give a shoutout to a teacher that's made a difference to you or your kids.
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