Hurdles Remain Before College Classrooms Go Completely Digital. OnlineUniversities.com came out with an optimistic infographic last week about how college classrooms are going digital. But as someone who makes as much as a quarter of his income from teaching college classes in any given year, and who also spends a good amount of time speaking at conferences trying to help professors incorporate technology and social media into their curriculum, the view from the trenches is very different than the iPad-in-every-backpack proponents would have you believe. This is not to say that tech isn't changing the way we teach and the way students learn: it most certainly is.
But probably not as fast as some people outside of higher ed think it is. People who say we're at the dawn of a new way of learning at the college level are overlooking some rather significant economic and cultural hurdles. We (Don't) Have The Technology But here's the reality: laptops break, and students can't afford replacements. Tenure Doesn't Equal Tech Savvy High School's Chilling Effects. 5 Places to Get Digital Textbooks Mashable 5 Places to Get Digital Textbooks | The top source for social and digital news.
The 'Undue Weight' of Truth on Wikipedia - The Chronicle Review. By Timothy Messer-Kruse For the past 10 years I've immersed myself in the details of one of the most famous events in American labor history, the Haymarket riot and trial of 1886. Along the way I've written two books and a couple of articles about the episode. In some circles that affords me a presumption of expertise on the subject. Not, however, on Wikipedia. The bomb thrown during an anarchist rally in Chicago sparked America's first Red Scare, a high-profile show trial, and a worldwide clemency movement for the seven condemned men. Today the martyrs' graves are a national historic site, the location of the bombing is marked by a public sculpture, and the event is recounted in most American history textbooks. A couple of years ago, on a slow day at the office, I decided to experiment with editing one particularly misleading assertion chiseled into the Wikipedia article.
Coincidentally, that is the claim that initially hooked me on the topic. The "undue weight" policy posed a problem. MIT launches free online 'fully automated' course. 13 February 2012Last updated at 11:37 ET By Sean Coughlan BBC News education correspondent MIT is creating an online "MITx", offering courses to students anywhere in the world. Pic: Jon Fildes Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), one of the world's top-rated universities, has announced its first free course which can be studied and assessed completely online. An electronics course, beginning in March, will be the first prototype of an online project, known as MITx. The interactive course is designed to be fully automated, with successful students receiving a certificate.
The US university says it wants MITx to "shatter barriers to education". This ground-breaking scheme represents a significant step forward in the use of technology to deliver higher education. Automated university MIT wants to experiment with how much can be taught through online courses Pic: Jon Fildes Study materials and the awarding of grades are all provided online. 'Honour code' Udemy Puts Ivy-League Profs on Your Desktop for Free. Want to learn about the history of modern China from a professor who has taught at Dartmouth since 1985? Until Thursday, your best bet was probably to cough up some serious SAT scores and even more serious tuition. Now Udemy is giving you access to an online courses by professors with such qualifications — for free.
The startup online learning platform launched a new site called "The Faculty Project" Thursday that offers free course content from professors. The site's first 15 courses include teachers from Stanford, Yale, Northwestern and Dartmouth. When users enroll for a course on Thursday, they'll be emailed when the professor adds new lessons to it. After the course is finished, all lessons will remain on the site for anyone to complete at his or her own pace. Professors use the same course creation tool Udemy offers on its main site to create the courses. "We want people to know that this is the one-stop shop for OpenCourseWare," Tim Parks, the director of the Faculty Project, says.
Pearson and Knewton Team Up to Make Learning Personal. One of the largest textbook publishers in the world is making its digital course offerings more data-driven and individualized. Pearson announced Tuesday an extensive partnership with Knewton, a startup that specializes in adaptive learning technology. The technology personalizes the presentation of educational material based on students' strengths and weaknesses. Pearson, McGraw-Hill and other publishers have developed products that incorporate this kind of technology. Knewton plans to power Pearson's product MyLabs, which has more than 750 titles. In addition, Knewton and Pearson will work together to develop full course solutions that facilitate blended learning in classrooms.
Knewton COO David Liu says those courses won't be released until at least 2013 and will likely look much like math remediation classes that Knewton has already launched at six universities. Students in these courses use the computer during class time to work through material at their own speed. Pearson-backed Startup Aims to Be the Zynga for Learning. What if the 232 million people who log into Zynga's Facebook games each month instead spent hours working through online learning resources?
At least where teens are concerned, a new Pearson-backed startup Alleyoop is betting the result would be more college graduates. “Fundamentally, we’re focused on big problem of how you help a teen take control of their future," Alleyoop President Patrick Supanc tells Mashable. He's approaching the problem not by creating new content, as many startups in Pearson's cornucopia of tech investments have, but by structuring existing content like a Facebook game. Here's how it works: Students who are searching for homework help find guidance and practice problems on the site.
It uses this information to pull learning morsels it thinks would be appropriate for each learner — whether videos, activities or one-on-one tutoring — from partner websites and assembles them to make a relevant learning path. Connections Education: The rise of an education tech startup. The Baltimore-Washington corridor is an economic powerhouse in many areas -- federal contracting, anyone? -- but it may soon become known as the nexus of another, growing industry: online education. The $400 million purchase of a local education technology startup by a British company this fall is the latest sign that the region is successfully producing firms that develop cutting-edge technologies for schools or seek to transform them entirely.
The purchase of Connections Education Inc. by Pearson PLC, a London-based education publishing conglomerate and owner of the Financial Times newspaper, was also among the biggest acquisitions of a Baltimore company in years. Private investors did not disclose returns but said they were pleased by the deal. "When we started Connections, it was an idea on the back of a napkin," said Chris Hoehn-Saric, who was involved in the original brainstorming sessions a decade ago that led to the formation of the company. Online Degrees From MIT. Khan Academy Integrates With Digital Textbooks. The 12-minute video lectures that Bill Gates has called "the start of a revolution" will now be linked with the material in some digital textbooks. Etextbook maker Kno announced Monday that it will integrate thousands of tutorial videos from Khan Academy into its books. Khan Academy has been praised and funded by both Gates and Google.
At its core, it's a database of instructional YouTube videos that its founder, Salman Khan, started creating in order to help his cousins with their math homework. Video production quality does not extend beyond the capabilities of Microsoft Paint, but Khan has a knack for making calculus seem like gradeschool math (the archive contains videos on both topics) that has made his tutorials a popular resource for independent learning. Kno will be linking them to its books through a new "smart links" feature. “We’re excited that Kno sees the value in our mission and has integrated our videos and study tools directly into their books," Khan said in a statement.
Khan Academy Blends Its YouTube Approach With Classrooms. Virtual schools are multiplying, but some question their educational value. Conceived as a way to teach a small segment of the home-schooled and others who need flexible schooling, virtual education has evolved into an alternative to traditional public schools for an increasingly wide range of students — high achievers, strugglers, dropouts, teenage parents and victims of bullying among them. “For many kids, the local school doesn’t work,” said Ronald J.
Packard, chief executive and founder of K12. “And now, technology allows us to give that child a choice. It’s about educational liberty.” Packard and other education entrepreneurs say they are harnessing technology to deliver quality education to any child, regardless of Zip code. It’s an appealing proposition, and one that has attracted support in state legislatures, including Virginia’s. People on both sides agree that the structure providing public education is not designed to handle virtual schools. “There’s a total mismatch,” said Chester E. Despite questions, full-time virtual schools are proliferating. Exclusive: What Electronic Textbook Provider Has The Biggest Library? [STUDY]
Just about every electronic textbook company declares that it has the most books available for download. Coursesmart calls itself “the world’s largest digital course materials provider.” Sellers like Barnes & Noble and Amazon return absurdly high numbers for searches in their etextbooks sections that include novels and other general books used in classes. Textbooks.com boasts the “biggest selection of used & new college textbooks.” And a Kno executive recently told that Kno has the biggest etextbook offering on the Internet. Up until this point, there’s really been no good way to objectively compare each company’s offerings. Campusbooks , a 12-year-old textbook price comparison site, recently gained this ability when it expanded its database of texts across seven different etextbook makers — thus receiving access to their catalogs.
The site worked with partner booksellers to come up with a list of the 1,000 most popular textbooks for fall 2011 to use as its metric. CourseSmart: 82% JSTOR opens limited free access option for non-subscribing scholars. For a subscription-based content vault like JSTOR, the economy of the modern Web is a double-edged sword. On one side, you have open-culture hacktivists like Aaron Swartz trying to spring your paywalled content by allegedly sneaking into a wiring closet at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and downloading 4.8 million documents from your online archive.
This edge can cut against you — as it did in July, when Swartz’s caper framed the open-access debate (fairly or not) in terms of Swartz, the geek-hero, versus JSTOR, the Scrooge. On the other side, you have universal Web search engines sending droves of unlikely visitors to your content. They might not be paying the toll to get in, but the fact that they found their way to the door means your potential clientele is larger, and closer at hand, than you had imagined.
And if your mission is the dissemination of knowledge, that's a good thing. That is where the registration part comes in. Making You More Awesome: The Red-Hot World of Online Learning Services. The joy of learning is among the most valuable ways to find meaning in life. Combine that with the substantial imbalance between supply and demand of skilled labor in the United States, and a period of economic upheaval, and you've got a recipe for for something magical to happen. While traditional schools struggle to fit the bill, the internet is finally rising the the occasion. Startups like Treehouse, CodeAcademy, Lynda.com and of course Khan Academy are capturing the imagination of learners around the world, of all ages. Can these sites give traditional education the "Wikipedia vs. the encyclopedia" treatment? Why are these new websites aimed at teaching new skills so hot right now? A discussion of those questions leaves me feeling very optimistic, for the future of humanity even.
Human Capital Management is Hot I remember first reading about Human Capital Management years ago when people were writing about the huge waves of baby boomers about to retire. Enter the DIY Web Apps.