MIT launches online learning initiative | eLearning. MIT Expands ‘Open’ Courses, Adds Completion Certificates. By Inside Higher Ed The Massachusetts Institute of Technology — which pioneered the idea of making course materials free online — today announced a major expansion of the idea, with the creation of MITx, which will provide for interaction among students, assessment and the awarding of certificates of completion to students who have no connection to MIT.MIT is also starting a major initiative — led by Provost L. Rafael Reif — to study online teaching and learning. The first course through MITx is expected this spring. While the institute will not charge for the courses, it will charge what it calls “a modest fee” for the assessment that would lead to a credential.
The credential will be awarded by MITx and will not constitute MIT credit. The university also plans to continue MIT OpenCourseWare, the program through which it makes course materials available online. Online learning a godsend. By Lindy Cansler, Augusta Chronicle As a grandparent guardian, this holiday season I am thankful for virtual learning and how it has helped my child succeed. Our grandson is an active 10-year-old Boy Scout who participates in a bowling league and, as he says, “has one true friend.” That’s because he has Asperger syndrome, or high-functioning autism. He is extremely bright, has a 95 percent average overall in all his classes and loves school. He attends South Carolina Connections Academy, a virtual public charter school that was recommended by his therapist, and it has been perfect for him.
The Jig is Up. A brief history of the impending transformation of post-secondary education, just to clarify where we are, followed by some commentary. Dates are approximate as I’m working from memory on an airplane. Perhaps later I’ll turn this into a proper piece of writing with supporting links, etc., if folks find it interesting. 7x – The internet. Data can be routed from computer to computer. 8x – Free software. 9x – The web. 9x – Courses go online. 98 – Open source. 98 – Open content. 0x – Blogs and wikis. 01 – Creative Commons – The rickety open content licenses are replaced by solid legal documents with better branding and a more capable, charismatic leader. 02 – MIT OCW – MIT commits to publish much of the materials used in its classroom instruction as open content using a Creative Commons license. 04 – Open teaching (aka Wiley wiki model). 07 – Unofficial Certificates. 08 – MOOC – Open teaching scaled to thousands of students, with much greater flexibility given to learners.
Life in a 21st-Century English Class. Teaching Strategies Creating a Common Craft-style video is part of the classroom assignment. By Shelley Wright I teach in an inquiry, project-based, technology embedded classroom. A mouthful, I know. So what does that mean? It means my classroom is a place where my students spend time piecing together what they have learned, critically evaluating its larger purpose, and reflecting on their own learning.
Finally, technology is embedded into the structure of all we do. In my English classroom, this looks a lot different than in my biology and chemistry classrooms (which you can read about here). My curriculum states that I need to develop skills in 5 areas: reading, writing, viewing and representing, listening and speaking. Whenever we begin a new inquiry unit, research is always involved. After researching, we come back together to discuss what needs to happen next. This semester, we’ve chosen to create a social media campaign to raise awareness around modern slavery. Here’s one example: Vancouver showcase of online learning innovations available on video. Quick Look: Why Scientists Need An Image Makeover. MIT up the stakes in open education.
Open online courses at university level are gaining momentum. There are the MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) run by George Siemens, Stephen Downes, Dave Cormier and colleagues, a wide range of open courses facilitated by Peer 2 Peer University and now Stanford University's headline grabbing Artificial Intelligence course with over 50,000 students. They all offer exciting new arenas for collaborative learning and offer people a chance to participate in a stimulating and challenging learning environment. However none of them offer full university credentials - yet.
The free students on the Stanford course took the full course but were not eligible for university credits. Instead they received a certificate from the teachers but without the Stanford stamp of approval. Enter MIT. It's part of a clear strategy to extend the global reach of MIT. The learning software will be open and other educational institutions are free to develop their own versions. Polishing the Student’s Image on Facebook Timeline.
Culture. A Tool Chain for Plotting Twitter Archive Retweet Graphs – Py, R, Gephi. From Hero to Host: Giving Up on Being "The Expert" Several weeks ago, I wrote a post on social artistry, on how I am shifting my understanding of what I do and how I do it, seeing myself more and more as a "social artist. " Since then, I've been doing a lot of reading, thinking and exploring on the concept, particularly on how we can better use conversations for learning and to dig into the meaningful issues that we aren't addressing right now. This has opened up a whole new world for me and how I think about the work that I do. If I go back to what I loved initially about blogging, it was the opportunity to engage in meaningful discussions with other people through the comments and back and forth blog posts. If I look at my face-to-face work, it has always been about finding ways to facilitate and engage in meaningful conversations because in my experience, that's where learning and change take place.
I'm currently reading Meg Wheatley's Walk Out Walk On: A Learning Journey into Communities Daring to Live the Future Now. Warming up for the Citizens' Initiative. Editing Images with PowerPoint. By Joseph Suarez Sometimes an eLearning course needs to be enhanced with an image, but finding the right one can be a chore in itself. It’s frustrating to locate an image only to find it just isn’t quite right.
In these cases, it’s possible to tweak the image with a graphics editor. Many people don’t consider PowerPoint as a capable graphics editor since its main function is to create presentation aids. Some also assume that in order to make basic changes to an image, they need to buy expensive software with a long learning curve such as Photoshop. However, newer versions add more abilities and previously hard-to-find options are more prominent. Of course, high end graphic editing requires a high end program, but PowerPoint is certainly capable of commonly made basic edits such as: All this editing power would be useless if you couldn’t export your changes out of PowerPoint.
Meritocracy, Family and Education. In "The rise of meritocracy", Young explains how 'the cult of the child' took over from social class as being the most significant driving force behind educational and professional success. The triumph of the socialist movement gradually led parents to go to increasing lengths to get the best for their children: ballet classes, music lessons, reading groups... "The cult of the child became the drug of the people; inspired by hope, vitalized by ambition, the whole nation began to advance as never before from the moment that the Labour Party came to a standstill" (The rise of meritocracy, pp111-112) Not surprisingly, Young explains, this led to some distortion of the meritocratic organisation of society, where it was those who had access to the best opportunities - who increasingly tended to be the children of the rising working classes who did best, at the expense of those whose IQ scores were kept low through the lack of access to educational opportunity.
His reason is that Be warned! Musability. This morning I read a short item from Mashable describing some predictions being made for the next five year by IBM. Among more workaday predictions we've heard elsewhere - that biometrics will become mainstream, for example, or that mobile computing will end the digital divide - is a prediction that demands more attention: that mind reading will become a practical technology. This seems more the stuff of science fiction than it does a practical reflection on the future of work. However, the technology itself is not science fiction. The technology already exists to allow a person to control the movement of a cube on the screen through the exercise of thought alone. As we design input devices of greater and greater sensitivity, phenomena that once appeared to us to be only mental - our thoughts and dreams, for example - will begin to appear as physical manifestations.
Musing ('mental using') will become commonplace. Most likely we will first experience these interfaces as games. Learning Problems and Consultation Based Curricula. (This is a jumble of snippets in no particular order for a post that I’m not going to get round to writing…) Ewan McIntosh’s presentation at TEDxLondon: The Problem Finders [VIDEO] All our students, their parents and the people teaching them, have been indoctrinated that is teachers who sift through all the things we can learn, find the areas worth exploring, and make up theoretical problems for students to solve.
On top of this, most educators believe that it is their job to invent problems at just the right level of difficulty to appeal to every one of the 30 children in front of them. A couple of days after I saw this, John Naughton raised a similar issue at the Arcadia project review workshop – that experts and professionals are good at creating (or identifying) problems out of mess or muddle, the trick being that the problems are cast into a standard form to which known solutions/problem solving strategies can then be applied.
Is this related? PS maybe related? Like this: EIT ICT Labs Master School: apply online! In the fall of 2012 EIT ICT Labs Master School will be able to welcome its first students (approximately 200). Visit the website to also find out more about how it combines a technical major and a minor in Innovation and Entrepreneurship, providing graduates with double degrees and a special EIT and EIT ICT Labs certificate. Students who will take the chance and fullfill the programme will gain a fantastic network of exclusive contacts with leading research and business organisations and fellow students all over Europe.
Tuition fee waivers and scholarships For the most highly ranked admitted students (as a minimum 30%), we will provide fee waivers. EIT ICT Labs has also reserved funding for scholarships covering personal expenses on the level of 9000 Euro per year and student, however a formal decision by the European Commission is pending in this matter. The application period opens on January 1 and closes on February 15. EIT ICT Labs Master School's website. A Refreshing Take on User Experience Design. Study finds Spanish gender gap in Internet use and frequency. Compared with the average of all 31 nations, Spanish men rank 17th and Spanish women rank 19th. This puts Spain under the average in Europe for information and communication technologies (ICT) use.
With respect to the level of gender equality in the digital world, Spain fares even worse by ranking 20th. 'Spanish men and women score lower than the European average on ICT use,' explains Juan Martín Fernandez from the Complutense University of Madrid in Spain and one of the authors of the study. 'For women, internet use frequency is lower than that of men and the gender gap is wider than the European average.' The countries that report the highest levels of ICT use along with the smallest gender gap are Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden, followed by France and Slovenia, with the Netherlands just behind.
Hungary, Malta, Portugal and Slovakia rank somewhere in the middle of the road, with Bulgaria, the Czech Republic and Romania just behind. For more information, please visit: Reis: Clive on Learning. New ways to distribute content: part 3. Whichever format you choose for your content, you need a way to make this accessible to learners. As ever, there are plenty of options: Use your intranet or internet web site: A relatively simple option is to make your content available directly on your web site. It’s probable that your organisation uses a content management system (CMS) of some sort (such as Microsoft SharePoint) as a platform for your website, in which case you can work directly within this. As well as inputting the HTML content, you’ll need to upload any additional files such as Flash movies, audio, video, PDFs and native documents and either embed these in the HTML or link to them for download.
This may sound complex, but it won’t take long before you know your way around the CMS. Use a content sharing site: Another way to make your content available is by using site specially designed to allow users to share content. Part 1 Part 2 Coming in part 4: Establishing copyright About Clive Shepherd. IRRODL call for papers: Technology Enhanced Information Retrieval for Online Learning.
Online learning classrooms: More teachers ride virtual circuit. By Kay Luna, Quad Cities Times English teacher Sean Chapman is coaching his high school students, helping them narrow down their research paper topics. “I picked Ansel Adams,” one student offers. “OK,” 47-year-old Chapman replies, pausing for a beat. “Let’s talk about that.”
But their discussion isn’t a typical one. Online Classes Accelerate Math for Middle Schoolers, Research Finds. Advancing the Open Online Learning Front. Conference: Closing the generation gap, EDEN, Portugal, 2012. Francophone colloque/conference in Montreal, 3-4 May, 2011. Building a knowledge economy through Telecentres in Africa. 5 E-Learning Forecasts for 2012. Freakonomics: What Went Wrong? Warming up for the Citizens' Initiative. Books and Band Saws: the Future of Libraries. Warming up for the Citizens' Initiative. Adobe Captivate: Nudge the Screen Area. Catholic School Clamps Down on Kids Using Facebook. Building the future. Authentic & situated learning with mobile computing devices.
Knowing What to Do vs. Having the Will To Do It. The learning cycle and the power of asynchronous learning activities. The 80/20 Rule for Learning Transfer | Learning Management Systems | Digital Learning, Education, eLearning, Improve Learning, Mobile Learning. Winning Student Presentation at CAC | Kapp Notes. Is Design Thinking Missing From ADDIE? UNESCO Launches Global Portal to Track Open Access. Curating Information & Making Sense of Data Is a Key Skill for the Future [Research] | Content Curation, Social Media and Beyond. Clive on Learning. LMS – Before the Launch – 2. Gesture control. CNIE conference, Canmore, Alberta, 2012. MITx – Continuing Education online? Quick Look: The Top 10 tech trends for 2012. Online Learning Algebra Course Leads to Higher Achievement. M.I.T. Expands Its Free Online Courses to Online Learning Certificates.
Tools and technologies ’spur on the success of online learning’ Quick Look: Online Interactions Between Teachers and Students. Writing and Grammar: More on Lists, Bullets, and Tufte. Clive Thompson on the Future of Printed Books. Big developments in e-books. Tune Your Feeds… MIT Now Granting Official Certificates For Their Free Online Courses. How to undermine Facebook. The Trouble with Gifting an E-Book. Galactic Zappers. Fachforum "Free Your Lecture! Mit digitalen Medien Freiräume in der Lehre schaffen." Three Ways to Create Your Own Job. Fachforum "Free Your Lecture! Mit digitalen Medien Freiräume in der Lehre schaffen."
The E-learning Conceptual Framework. Crowdsourced Predictions for Your 2012 Education Strategy. Head of gold, feet of clay: The online learning paradox | eLearning. € 5.7 billion for Marie Curie Actions under Horizon 2020. € 5.7 billion for Marie Curie Actions under Horizon 2020. Merry Textmas, Everyone – a seasonal pastiche. Future skills. Play the ball, not the man. Open Online Learning CourseWare 2.0. Top seven black swans for education in 2012. Giving College-Bound Students More Tools. The Future of Education: Online and Blended Learning. Entrevista – Práticas Pedagógicas em eLearning.