This Free Font May Actually Help Dyslexic Students Read Better This is one of those developments that make you love technology and how it can truly benefit education. There’s a free open font now available that may actually help dyslexic people read better. Whether it’s true or not, this idea is incredible. The font, available for download here , was made by Aberlardo Gonzalez and has a license that lets you use it for free without any restriction. In other words, it might be time to start trying this out with any of your students (or you, perhaps) who have dyslexia. 1 in 10 people have dyslexia so this font may make a big difference in comprehension. How To Use The OpenDyslexic Font From The Font Creator Your brain can sometimes do funny things to letters. Get The Font The font is available for download here on GitHub
The Dunbar Number, From the Guru of Social Networks A little more than 10 years ago, the evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar began a study of the Christmas-card-sending habits of the English. This was in the days before online social networks made friends and “likes” as countable as miles on an odometer, and Dunbar wanted a proxy for meaningful social connection. He was curious to see not only how many people a person knew, but also how many people he or she cared about. The best way to find those connections, he decided, was to follow holiday cards. After all, sending them is an investment: You either have to know the address or get it; you have to buy the card or have it made from exactly the right collage of adorable family photos; you have to write something, buy a stamp, and put the envelope in the mail. Working with the anthropologist Russell Hill, Dunbar pieced together the average English household’s network of yuletide cheer. This was exactly the number that Dunbar expected. In 1992, Dunbar published his answer: brain size.
Researchers explore who is taking MOOCs and why so many drop out Researchers are trying to understand why the vast majority of students fail to finish free online classes and who is signing up for the classes to begin with. One widely quoted dropout figure for students in massive open online courses is 90 percent. The number would be staggeringly high for a traditional class and has been used to cast doubt on the promise of MOOCs. The number is simple to come up with: take the number of users who register for a course and compare it to the number still participating at the end. Some researchers say MOOC dropout figures being bandied about do little to describe why hundreds of thousands of people across the world are signing up for MOOCs in the first place. That’s why it may not make sense to compare the number who register to the number who finish. "What we're trying to do is distinguish between them in a meaningful way," Ho said. “They have nothing more than, ‘This is a good way to spend my free time – it’s better than television,' ” she said.
Coursera Jumps the Shark Remember when Coursera – the world’s largest purveyor of Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs) – was going to disrupt higher education, and put hundreds if not thousands of public institutions out of business ? I know it’s hard to cast your mind back all of eighteen months, but try. Actually don’t. Because it’s all over. Yesterday, Coursera did a weird strategy about-face by announcing that, rather than competing with public colleges, it’s going to start competing with Blackboard instead. We’ve been heading this way for awhile. Coursera has simply never had a coherent plan to generate revenue. And so the revolution ends with a whimper, not with a roar.
Why we want MOOCs (even though they might work best in theory) › Hybrid Publishing Lab Notepad Reading about the “revolution of college education” or the “year of the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC)”, you might think that the MOOC concept has been invented just recently. But as often noticed: concepts evolve from previous concepts. The original idea of MOOCs came up in the 1960s and there were run some successful MOOCs as early as 2008. Moreover, there are two different schools of thought behind the MOOC idea, they are currently referred to as „xMOOCs“ and „cMOOCs“: Those initiatives by Stanford and Harvard and their partners (platforms such as Coursera and edX) represent the xMOOC-model whereas the cMOOC-model goes back to the connectivism theory by George Siemens, a professor at Athabasca University in Canada, and has been in practice since 2008. While in the US the buzz has focused on the top tear universities, in Germany, the latter model seems to obtain a lot of attention and I think there are good reasons for this. The “xMOOC”-model
5 Things Google Wants You To Know About World Teachers' Day It’s World Teachers’ Day tomorrow and that means teachers around the globe should be honored and shown the respect they truly deserve. But in this truly connected age, there should also be a big emphasis on the world part of World Teachers’ Day. Take the day as an opportunity to grow your PLN, share your insight on Twitter, or simply connect with a teacher anywhere you are. In honor of World Teachers’ Day, Google has assembled a few key statistics that I wanted to pass along. They touted the many education products they’ve developed over the past few years ( YouTube Edu , Google Apps for Education , and cost-effective Google Chromebooks … but the meat of a recent blog post by Google is in the stats. As of today, more than 20 million students, faculty and staff worldwide use Google Apps for Education. We at Edudemic wanted to join Google (and everyone else) to congratulate all the teachers around the world for doing what they’re doing.
"MOOCs" for Credit Come to California Take note, folks. It’s here: “MOOCs” for credit. California Governor Jerry Brown, San Jose State University President Mo Qayoumi, and Udacity co-founder and CEO Sebastian Thrun held a press conference this morning to announce a pilot program that marks a first for the state: San Jose State will award college credits for special versions of select Udacity classes. The pilot program will be available to a group of 300 students from San Jose State, community colleges and high schools, but it’s really aimed at the latter two groups — in the hopes of boosting students’ “college readiness” and with the recognition that the wait lists for California’s community colleges make it incredibly challenging for these students to get into introductory classes. But as Thrun stressed at last week’s Reboot CA Higher Education event, the emphasis must be on making education better not just cheaper. The Year of the “MOOC”? As for me, I’ve put “MOOCs” in scare quotes throughout this piece.
taxonomy of 8 types of MOOC We're not payin' because this guy... ...this guy's a fuckin' mooc. But I didn't say nothin'. And we don't pay moocs. A mook? Yeah. What's a mooc? I don't know. You can't call me a mooc. I can't? No! Scorcese's Mean Streets (1973) What are MOOCs? “The future is already here, it’s just not very evenly distributed” said William Gibson, that is certainly true of MOOCs. Taxonomy based on pedagogy To this end, it is important to define a taxonomy of MOOCs not from the institutional but the pedagogic perspective, by their learning functionality, not by their origins. transferMOOCs madeMOOCs synchMOOCs asynchMOOCs adaptiveMOOCs groupMOOCs connectivistMOOCS miniMOOCSs 1. transferMOOCs Transfer MOOCs literally take existing courses and decant them into a MOOC platform, on the pedagogic assumption that they are teacher-led and many rely on a ‘name’ of the institution or academic to attract learners. 2. madeMOOCs 3. synchMOOCs 4. asynchMOOCs 5. adaptiveMOOCs 6. groupMOOCs 7. connectivistMOOCS 8. miniMOOCSs Conclusion
Day 1: Your First Web Page Reactive programming is a way of coding with asynchronous data streams that makes a lot of problems easier to solve. RxJS is a popular library for reactive...Once in a while, it's important for us as developers to go back to what made us excited about computers in the first place. For Derek Jensen, that is gaming....React is a flexible framework that makes it easy to build single-page web applications.
Inequality in American Education Will Not Be Solved Online - Ian Bogost With funding tight, the state of California has turned to Udacity to provide MOOCs for students enrolled in remedial courses. But what is lost when public education is privatized? Unlit road at night (MRBECK/Flickr) One night recently, it was raining hard as I drove to pick my son up from an evening class at the Atlanta Ballet. There are ways to fix such dangers. Such is essentially the logic the state of California has adopted in its plan to offer online classes in the California State University System, a deal the state has struck with "massively open online course" (MOOC) provider Udacity. The startup, which has received more than $15 million in funding from Silicon Valley venture capitalists, will provide online classes in remedial and introductory subjects for students at San Jose State University (SJSU), in exchange for an undisclosed sum from the state. In response, California could reinvest in public schools and the profession of secondary teaching. That's the political situation.
35 Ways To Build Your Personal Learning Network Online Personal learning networks are a great way for educators to get connected with learning opportunities, access professional development resources, and to build camaraderie with other education professionals. Although PLNs have been around for years, in recent years social media has made it possible for these networks to grow exponentially. Now, it’s possible to expand and connect your network around the world anytime, anywhere. But how exactly do you go about doing that? Check out our guide to growing your personal learning network with social media, full of more than 30 different tips, ideas, useful resources, and social media tools that can make it all possible. Tips & Ideas Get started developing your social media PLN with these tips and ideas for great ways to make use of social tools. Actively make ties : It’s not enough to just follow and read, you need to connect. Guides Tools & Resources Want to really make the most of your PLN?
Why MOOCs are like Farmville Another day, another report from one of the thought leaders on higher education. This time it is from Moody’s, which proclaims the death of the traditional model of higher education. While the concerns raised by Moody’s are real – diminished resources due to state budget cuts, declining family incomes, and less willingness by students to take on debt – we should hesitate before leaping to the conclusion that these challenges necessitate a radical change, through massive adoption of online learning technologies such as MOOCs. Over the past few weeks, for every piece of commentary extolling the virtue of MOOCs, I have found another that calls into question whether this particular type of online learning is sustainable over the long term. As MOOCs have now reached the peak of inflated expectations, I expect that skepticism of their potential will become more widespread and accepted. De-emphasis of the traditional classroom lecture.