Techno-News Blog

BY ZACH LOZANO, Daily Texan

For engineering majors, the workload and level of difficulty in classes can make it a challenge to graduate in four years. A new app developed by the Cockrell School of Engineering called G4, in reference to the goal to graduate in four years, is available to engineering students and gives them a visual representation of a student’s degree plan to better assist course planning. Roughly 31 percent of entering freshman engineers will graduate with an engineering degree in four years, said Gregory Fenves, Dean of the Cockrell School of Engineering. He said 54 percent end up graduating in five years.

http://www.dailytexanonline.com/news/2013/04/05/engineering-students-have-new-online-tool-g4-to-improve-grad-rates

By Francesca Di Meglio, Business Weekly

Stanford University’s Center for Professional Development will expand its Online Innovation and Entrepreneurship Certificate Program, which was launched in September 2012, by rolling out new courses throughout the year. It unveiled its latest, Building Business Models, on April 2. The brainchild of School of Engineering Professor Robert Sutton and Graduate School of Business Professor Hayagreeva Rao, the certificate program is unique because it tackles a subject rarely covered by online courses and is more interactive than most, says Kristin Brennan, program manager of professional education at the center.

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-04-04/stanfords-online-innovation-program-expands

by Chris Parr, Times of Higher Education

Massive open online courses could be hindering the development of open educational resources because they do not allow everyone to contribute to the innovation of content, a conference has heard. Patrick McAndrew, professor of open education at The Open University, said that although some online resources were genuinely open in this way, the best known Mooc platforms – such as Coursera and edX – were not.  Speaking at Open Educational Resources 2013, held at the University of Nottingham on 26 and 27 March, he praised the work of platforms such as Peer to Peer University and the OpenCourseWare Consortium for “really being careful to do everything in a way that truly meets criteria of ‘open’”.

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/news/us-mooc-platforms-openness-questioned/2002938.article

by Vivek Wadhwa, Washington Post

Social networking is allowing for some of the more profound changes in modern education, offering a viable many-to-many model. MOOC platforms such as Udacity, Udemy, and Open Study are beginning to use Facebook-like applications to enable students to share ideas and coach one another. These applications allow students to rank online content and discuss what they learned. Gooru provides a search engine to help find pieces of knowledge and then assemble them into comprehensive lessons. Think of it as crowdsourcing the course-creation process. The collective knowledge of millions could lead to dramatic improvements in the quality of online education while growing the volume of courses exponentially.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/on-innovations/in-education-innovation-moocs-are-only-the-beginning/2013/03/29/88d77ae6-97ef-11e2-814b-063623d80a60_story.html

by Rip Empson, Tech Crunch

Udemy launched in 2010 to help students of all ages continue their education through video-based, online courses — and in turn, give teachers (and experts) a way to make a buck by sharing their knowledge with the masses. Capitalizing on the growing interest and buzz around online learning and MOOC platforms pioneered by sites like Khan Academy, Udemy has been on a mission to create the largest online destination for on-demand, online courses. The popular MOOC platforms like Coursera, Udacity, edX and Khan Academy are all, in one way or another, on a similar mission; so, to differentiate itself, rather than offer classes for free, Udemy offers both free and paid courses, putting it more in the vein of platforms like Skillshare and Lynda.com.

http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/02/with-over-6000-courses-now-live-udemy-brings-its-learning-marketplace-to-ios-to-let-you-study-on-the-go/

By Jenny Hill, Learning Solutions

“It is most important that learners can access the material, so understanding the learners and thinking about potential barriers is key. Making this your focus will change your thought processes and allow you to avoid potential accessibility issues from the start, saving time and improving the quality of your work.”  How can you create online course content that is more accessible to students, even (or especially) to those with permanent or temporary physical or sensory challenges? This article offers five techniques that will start you down the path toward creating more accessible online course content and help you create content that is more accessible to learners.

http://www.learningsolutionsmag.com/articles/1145/accessible-online-courses-techniques-and-tips

By Cathie Norris, Elliot Soloway, THE Journal

Both Higher Ed and Lower Ed are pursuing personalized learning. But they are going in opposite directions. Higher Ed says… learner, here are opportunities for learning, you choose. Lower Ed says… learner, an algorithm knows best what opportunities you need for learning; it chooses. After keynoting the Institute of Applied Technology’s Technological Education Conference 2012 in Abu Dhabi on April 1, we served on a panel of faculty and high school students discussing the use of mobile devices in high school education. In response to a question about personalized learning, a high school student on the panel said, in effect, that it was important to him to be able to choose what he wanted to learn and when he wanted to learn and that mobile devices helped in that endeavor.

http://thejournal.com/articles/2013/04/01/higher-ed-vs-lower-ed.aspx

by Eric Rabkin, Cisco

We live in an increasingly mobile world and Americans are particularly mobile, changing “permanent” residence about 14 times in their lifetime. Instead of putting together a string of courses from a single university, like UMUC, modern transplants can now present a portfolio of courses from many schools, and even life experiences, to institutions the like fully accredited Thomas Edison University in New Jersey to undergo centralized review and the receipt of degrees. Given the growth of comparatively traditional class-size pedagogy in online environments, like the public Western Governors University and the private Kaplan University, people can change schools without ever changing residences, becoming mobile learners intellectually as well as geographically, to seek the educational experiences that suit them best.

http://newsroom.cisco.com/feature-content?type=webcontent&articleId=1166026

By Education Portal

Education Portal, a Silicon Valley start-up that develops free online courses that lead to real college credit, today added 13 Advanced Placement (AP) courses to its roster of over 40 college courses. The AP courses are designed to help high school students pass the upcoming AP exams in May. Students can save thousands of dollars on the cost of their education and reduce student loan debt by taking AP courses. Research shows that students who perform well in AP courses are more likely to graduate from college in four years. AP courses allow students to acquire the skills and habits to be successful in college as well as earn college credit that is accepted by more than 90 percent of U.S. colleges and universities. With AP exams fast approaching, students are forced to cram an entire school years’ worth of information to prepare for the exam. Education Portal’s courses offer an easy way for students to review important information.

http://www.sacbee.com/2013/04/02/5309657/education-portal-offers-13-free.html

by Ki Mae Heussner, GigaOM

Since launching in 2010, online learning startup Udemy has offered learners the opportunity to take online classes from home. On Tuesday, the company upped the convenience factor with an iOS app that lets students take classes directly from their smartphones. With 600,000 users enrolled in the company’s paid and free classes, Udemy is attracting a strong following. But given competition from longtime online learning company lynda.com, as well as startups Skillshare and Codecademy, Udemy clearly wants another way to hook and keep students. While lynda.com does have a mobile app for users, several other Udemy rivals do not.

http://gigaom.com/2013/04/02/udemy-lands-on-mobile-so-students-can-learn-on-the-go/

by the Live Mint (India)

Two recent reports in the Financial Times and Nature say that India is emerging as one of the biggest markets for what have come to be known as massive open online courses, or MOOCs. Indian students are the second biggest group in two MOOCs initiatives, edX and Coursera.
Online education is the wave of the future. It may not necessarily replace classroom teaching in all cases, but it does offer a wider range of education options for students. One possible reason Indian students have taken to online courses with such enthusiasm is that the Indian university education system is, with some exceptions, broken.

http://www.livemint.com/Opinion/TUo5fB2q7LRMzmXHwhiYJJ/Click-to-learn.html

By Ollivier Dyens, Montreal Gazette

Educational technology encompasses a whole range of possibilities, everything from PowerPoint to immersive virtual reality. Is online instruction any good? An analysis of 50 studies performed in 2010 by the U.S. Department of Education found that university students and adult learners taking online courses “performed modestly better, on average, than those learning the same material through traditional face-to-face instruction.” Do online courses foster isolation? Apparently not. The most common complaint from our professors involved in online education is the amount of work involved in answering and managing the endless stream of emails, comments, debates and questions from and among students.

http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/Opinion+have+much+learn+about+educational+technology/8178732/story.html

By ANNE EISENBERG, NY Times

The key to these new robots is the ability to respond more flexibly, anticipating and adjusting to what humans want. That is in contrast to earlier generations of robots that often required extensive programming to change the smallest details of their routine, said Henrik Christensen, director of the robotics program at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “Researchers in labs worldwide are building robots that can predict what you’ll do next and be ready to give you the best possible assistance,” he said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/31/business/robots-and-humans-learning-to-work-together.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&_r=0

by Bart Copeland, GigaOM

Today’s IT departments face an identity crisis. Technology is an integral part of every single business process, and has come to dominate the lives of consumers who are routinely shopping online, downloading information, and browsing the Internet. Yet ironically, in an era when technology rules, IT departments are losing ground fast: The forces of cloud computing, social media, and information management are evolving rapidly, and business managers are discovering and adopting new technology before IT departments even have a chance to master it. Gartner Research predicts that by 2015, 35 percent of most companies’ technology-related expenditures will be managed outside the IT department’s budget.

http://gigaom.com/2013/03/31/technology-is-king-so-why-are-so-many-it-departments-playing-backseat-roles/

By JOSHUA BERLINGER, Associated Press

Some educators and politicians, including Gov. Sean Parnell, want to even the playing field for students in Takotna and every other of the state’s approximate 500 schools by giving each student a tablet computer and establishing a unique digital learning infrastructure. It’s part of a push for digital learning initiatives as a way to improve the classroom experience, better engage students, and help teachers become better instructors. Takotna is one of the smallest communities in the Iditarod Area School District, which covers nine schools situated along the famed Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race in Interior Alaska about 225 miles northwest of Anchorage. There are no roads leading in or out of the village; planes come in twice a week to deliver mail or groceries. McGrath is the closest community to go grocery shopping. It’s only 18 miles away, but a round-trip flight costs upward of $200. Takotna’s school is very much like those throughout rural Alaska.

http://www.therepublic.com/view/story/24f0e8d615094b24b9c22908c7ac7d08/AK-XGR–Digital-Learning-Initiative

by Cathy Davidson, Hastac

For my proposed Coursera course on the History and Future of Higher Education–intended for high school and college teachers, students, parents, and students themselves–I am designing every segment not only to give history and analysis of the forms of education we have inherited from the Industrial Age that invented so many of them, I also plan to pass on concrete advice I’ve gleaned from the thousands of teachers I’ve met of how to learn with, through, around, and often despite the clunky apparatus of contemporary education. I’ll be giving advice on ways to be creative within structures that seemed designed to squelch creativity and how to workaround some of those structures. And I’ll be giving totally non-cynical advice about how to use the testing that is required in so many schools around the world to actually help learning, critical thinking, and creative thinking. Thousands of teachers do it. I want to pass that on to those taking my course.

http://hastac.org/blogs/cathy-davidson/2013/03/30/how-use-multiple-choice-testing-learning-not-assessment-tool

by Andrew Wind, WCF Courier

After a week of practice, Bunger Middle School eighth-grader Blake Thompson has become adept at designing small objects with the help of a computer program. He quickly created plans for two doughnut-like interlocking rings during an industrial technology class earlier this week. Thompson started with a circle from the menu of geometric shapes included in the Autodesk Inventor Pro software used by Bunger students. Designing on three planes, he input measurements and soon displayed the three-dimensional object on the computer screen. The 3-D printer industrial tech teacher Wayne Lidtke purchased after receiving a grant from the Waterloo Schools Foundation last spring is allowing his eighth-grade students to create the object they’ve designed. Yellow thermal plastic filament is fed into the printer from a spool, melts and is extruded through a nozzle. The liquid plastic is layered on a Plexiglas surface until the design is complete.

http://wcfcourier.com/news/local/d-printer-turns-designs-into-reality/article_b1b7c216-724c-5255-8a2a-893cc46eb643.html

By John Eger, UT San Diego

The California Senate introduced legislation last month that could reshape higher education by requiring the state’s public colleges and universities to give credit for online courses. The Senate’s concerns surely include some basic facts: The cost of getting a college degree is no longer affordable to most young people, and even if they can afford college, they cannot get the general education courses they need to progress in their academic career. Major problems to be sure. Allowing students to learn when and where it is most convenient for them is extremely attractive. Given the widespread availability of technology, it is not surprising that the “cyberschool” approach is fast becoming ordinary and acceptable at high schools and colleges in America, Europe and in other developed nations.

http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2013/mar/30/college-online-costs/

by Katherine Bourzac, Technology Review

Genetic logic gates will enable biologists to program cells for chemical production and disease detection. By Katherine Bourzac on March 28, 2013 If biologists could put computational controls inside living cells, they could program them to sense and report on the presence of cancer, create drugs on site as they’re needed, or dynamically adjust their activities in fermentation tanks used to make drugs and other chemicals. Now researchers at Stanford University have developed a way to make genetic parts that can perform the logic calculations that might someday control such activities. The Stanford researchers’ genetic logic gate can be used to perform the full complement of digital logic tasks, and it can store information, too.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/512901/how-to-make-a-computer-from-a-living-cell/

by Hal Hodson, new Scientist

It was the largest online attack ever reported. Over the course of the past week, servers belonging to an international non-profit company called The Spamhaus Project, which fights email spammers, were inundated with up to 38 gigabytes of traffic each second. That’s about 10 DVDs’ worth of data. The company ground to a halt, and another firm that tried to come to Spamhaus’s online aid was also drawn into the battle. News reports suggested the onslaught was so big that the internet itself slowed down during the worst of it. Such accounts may have been overblown, but in the aftermath it has become clear that the attackers can exploit vulnerabilities in just about anything – from software to the infrastructure of the internet itself – to devastating effect.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23334-huge-online-attack-exposes-internets-vulnerability.html

by Mike Lenox, Forbes

I predict that we will see a bifurcation in the higher education market. A cost leader (or leaders) will emerge catering to the mass market. They will leverage technology to provide an effective and efficient education. They will cater to the population who may not have had access to higher education thirty years ago. The emergence of the cost leader position will be bad news for the many for-profit online universities that have arisen in recent years and for numerous non-selective residential universities. This is where the shakeout will be most disruptive. The entry of high reputation universities into the MOOC space where they (currently) provide courses for free could be a game changer for this tier of players if someone figures out accreditation and degree granting. This disruption will play out over years, if not decades, as struggling colleges fight to stay alive and student attitudes towards online education evolve.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/darden/2013/03/29/the-imminent-shakeout-disruptive-innovation-and-higher-education/