InterActive - Distance Learning Courses, UK - Business Studies Online. The Cassiopeia Project: Free Science Education Online. By Maria Popova What a mysterious retired physicist has to do with the future of learning. In 2008, The Cassiopeia Project began quietly publishing high-definition videos exploring in an intelligent yet digestible manner nearly every corner of the science spectrum, and releasing them online for free. With more than 100 videos to date available on iTunesU and YouTube, the project offers an invaluable resource on everything from quantum mechanics to evolution to the theory of relativity — another wonderful piece in the ever-expanding puzzle of free educational content online that is changing how we think about learning. We believe that if you can visualize it, then understanding it is not far behind.”
All the content is open-source and educators are encouraged to edit, remix and otherwise customize the footage. Sadly, the effort appears to be in stagnation since 2009, but we sincerely hope to see it resurface with more fantastic content. Via MeFi Share on Tumblr. Download & Streaming : Open Educational Resources : Internet Archive. 12 Dozen Places To Educate Yourself Online For Free.
Virtual and Artificial, but 58,000 Want Course. Khan Academy. 11 Tech Factors That Changed Education in 2011. Michael Staton is the founder of Inigral, which develops social software for student recruitment and higher education retention. Inigral recently brought on the first PRI as a venture investment from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and has been named one of the top 10 innovative companies in education by Fast Company. In 2011, entrepreneurs and startup activity sprouted up everywhere. Not coincidentally, the Bay Area, New York, Boston, Austin, Portland and every college town from Abilene to Gainesville is fostering young, eager minds. The millennial generation is proving it can create companies — and thus, jobs — that solve real problems. Trends like these are quickly impacting how young people relate to and absorb education. 1.
Former CEO of PayPal and venture capitalist Peter Thiel maintains that entrepreneurship is best learned outside of higher education, through real-world experience. 2. 3. 4. 5. Providence Equity acquired Blackboard for $1.6 billion. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. In 2011: How the Internet Revolutionized Education. As connection speeds increase and the ubiquity of the Web pervades, free education has never been so accessible. An Internet connection gives lifelong learners the tools to become autodidacts, eschewing exorbitant tuition and joining the ranks of other self-taught great thinkers in history such as Albert Einstein, Alexander Graham Bell, Paul Allen and Ernest Hemingway. We can be learning all the time now, whenever we want, and wherever we want. And because of that, we’re seeing explosive growth in online education. We’ve featured several companies and organizations in the past year that are disrupting the online education space including Open Yale, Open Culture, Khan Academy, Academic Earth, P2PU, Skillshare, Scitable and Skype in the Classroom.
Now that we’ve reached the end of 2011, it’s time to look back at our previous posts and remind ourselves how far we’ve come and catch up on all that’s happened. Insider How the Internet is Revolutionizing Education Stay in or drop out? News Apps. Coursera Raises $16 Million To Bring Free Online Education to Millions. The Internet is revolutionizing education, as several companies and organizations disrupt the online education space including Open Yale, Open Culture, Khan Academy, Academic Earth, P2PU, Skillshare, Scitable and Skype in the Classroom. The Internet has changed how we interact with time and each other. We can be learning all the time now, whenever we want, and wherever we want. And because of that, we’re seeing explosive growth and new models in online education.
For the past year, renowned Stanford University professors Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng have experimented with new online learning tools like videos, quizzes and peer-to-peer platforms to teach free classes to just under a million students. In the fall of 2011, the two developed Stanford University’s first online education platform, which served two courses and had a total enrollment of 200,000. Features on Coursera include: A set of reinforcing social features is what makes Coursera different from the rest. Olly via shutterstock. The future of teaching: Difference engine: Let the games begin. Why Get a Pricey Diploma When a Badge Will Do? Virtual Schools Booming As States Mull Warnings.
DENVER -- More schoolchildren than ever are taking their classes online, using technology to avoid long commutes to school, add courses they wouldn't otherwise be able to take – and save their school districts money. But as states pour money into virtual classrooms, with an estimated 200,000 virtual K-12 students in 40 states from Washington to Wisconsin, educators are raising questions about online learning. States are taking halting steps to increase oversight, but regulation isn't moving nearly as fast as the virtual school boom. The online school debate pits traditional education backers, often teachers' unions, against lawmakers tempted by the promise of cheaper online schools and school-choice advocates who believe private companies will apply cutting-edge technology to education.
Is online education as good as face-to-face teaching? Virtual education companies tout a 2009 research review conducted for the U.S. Still, virtual schooling at the K-12 level is booming. Online: 4 Reasons Your Brain Loves to Learn Online. Are we offloading our brains onto the web? Are programs better than teachers at knowing what we know? Do virtual badges motivate more than grades? What is it about cartoon foxes that helps us learn to code? As you can read in our piece “How the Internet Revolutionized Education”, we’ve been tracking on-line education closely for some time now– talking to experts and keeping tabs on an industry that’s exploding as predicted. Over here at the science desk, recent developments on the learning brain are meshing with what we already know of the web’s power to teach. We’ve analyzed here four different special powers of online teaching that make brains very happy. 1) Memory: This is your brain on-line.
According to Columbia neuroscientist Betsy Sparrow and her team, “We are becoming symbiotic with our computer tools”. Dr. So is offloading our brain making us dumber? Our dependence on the web for facts might even be making us smarter. He measured responses to curvey lines, like this one: Youtube EDU. Technophilia: Get a free college education online. The Stanford Education Experiment Could Change Higher Learning Forever | Wired Science.
Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig in the basement of Thrun's guesthouse, where they record class videos.Photo: Sam Comen Stanford doesn’t want me. I can say that because it’s a documented fact: I was once denied admission in writing. I took my last math class back in high school. Which probably explains why this quiz on how to get a computer to calculate an ideal itinerary is making my brain hurt. I’m staring at a crude map of Romania on my MacBook. Last fall, the university in the heart of Silicon Valley did something it had never done before: It opened up three classes, including CS221, to anyone with a web connection.
People around the world have gone crazy for this opportunity. Aside from computer-programming AI-heads, my classmates range from junior-high school students and humanities majors to middle-aged middle school science teachers and seventysomething retirees. Solid understanding? That stuff’s all easier said than done. Stanford Professors Launch Online University Coursera - Liz Gannes. There seems to be something in the water at Stanford University that’s making faculty members leave their more-than-perfectly-good jobs and go teach online. Coursera co-founders Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller Stanford computer science professors Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng are on leave to launch Coursera, which will offer university classes for free online, in partnership with top schools. Mountain View, Calif. -based Coursera is backed with $16 million in funding led by John Doerr at Kleiner Perkins and Scott Sandell at NEA.
It has no immediate plans to charge for courses or to make money in other ways. Compared to Udacity, a similar start-up from former Stanford professor Sebastian Thrun that’s creating its own classes, Coursera helps support its university partners in creating their own courses, which are listed under each school’s brand.
Koller and Ng are particularly committed to developing pedagogy for this new medium, and have built their own course software and student forums. Stanford Opens Seven New Online Courses for Enrollment (Free) Top Schools from Berkeley to Yale Now Offer Free Online Courses. On average, it will cost $55,600 to attend Princeton, Penn, Michigan or Stanford next year. But now you can enroll in online courses at all four universities online for free. The universities won't just be posting lectures online like MIT's OpenCourseWare project, Yale’s Open Yale Courses and the University of California at Berkeley’s Webcast.
Rather, courses will require deadlines, evaluations, discussions and, in some cases, a statement of achievement. "The technology as well as the sociology have finally matured to the point where we are ready for this," says Daphne Koller, a co-founder of Coursera, the for-profit platform classes will run on. "This is a group that didn't grow up at a time when there weren't browsers," Koller adds. Coursera grew out of an experiment in Stanford's computer science department that opened up a handful of classes to non-Stanford students via the Internet. Koller and Ng are the second pair of Stanford professors attempting to scale the idea past Stanford. YaleCourses.