Techno-News Blog

by Peta Lee, University World News

Developing countries worldwide are to benefit from an agreement signed last Tuesday by the World Bank Group and Coursera, a leading provider of MOOCs – massive open online courses. The collaboration aims to help meet the demand for solutions-oriented learning on pressing issues in targeted countries. The courses will be offered as part of a new Open Learning Campus being built by the World Bank, “where practitioners, development partners and the general public can more systematically access real-time, relevant and world-class learning”, according to a press release.

http://www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=20131017131951244

By Steffani Nolte, WXOW

Students needing some help preparing for college math classes can take advantage of UW-La Crosse’s Massive Open Online Course, or MOOC for short. It’s a free course open to anyone in the world. “You can take it for a variety of reasons,” Bob Hoar, Associate Vice Chancellor of Academic Affairs said.  “Some are high school students preparing for college. Some are in college but haven’t taken a math class yet, others are home school kids.” You can work on the class whenever you feel like it. “There are really two paths through the course,” Hoar said. “They can stay with the instructor and move at the pace the instructor is moving or they can drop back and move at their own pace.”

http://www.wxow.com/story/23723066/2013/10/17/mooc-helps-uw-students-skip-remedial-courses

by Carl Straumsheim, Inside Higher Ed

Despite the buzz about cloud computing and massive open online courses in the last year, colleges and universities are either slow to adopt these technologies or skeptical of their potential to provide a sustainable future for higher education, according to the findings in the 2013 Campus Computing Survey. Four of the top five issues chosen by the CIOs, CTOs and other high-ranking IT officials surveyed all relate to IT as a service, from helping faculty use technology in the classroom to leveraging resources to help students succeed. Those findings may indicate that colleges and universities are moving away from focusing on specific products and vendors and toward a more holistic view of technology. Institutions across the spectrum rate faculty training as the most pressing issue, with the lone exception of community colleges, which singled out student success.

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/10/17/survey-shows-it-service-dominates-top-priorities-among-university-it-officials

By KRISTINA D. LORCH, Harvard Crimson

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s MOOC Research Initiative has granted HarvardX $21,450 to study how massive open online courses might be made more personalized for individuals in online courses everywhere, HarvardX announced Tuesday. Led by Sergiy Nesterko, a HarvardX research fellow, and Svetlana I. Dotsenko ’10, founder of startup Project Lever, the study will take self-reported data from those enrolled in HarvardX classes, including country of origin, education level, gender, age, and usage of the course materials. The study will also look at individuals’ learning outcomes and goals.

http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2013/10/17/edx-to-examine-personalized-mooc-experience/

by Jeff Dunn, Edudemic

When you start bringing iPads, iPhones, and iPod Touches into your classroom, you’re opening up a Pandora’s Box of potential problems. For starters, you might not be totally sure which apps are the best ones to install at the start. You may not be sure which games are useful or which productivity apps are worth their salt. I’ve recently stumbled across an effective chart that actually ranks education apps according to a few critical criteria. The visual from Grasping For Objectivity details 29 different ‘edutainment’ apps that are both free and paid. I like how each one is laid out and ranked accordingly. The apps are each given an overall score and it’s based on a plethora of criteria:

http://www.edudemic.com/effective-education-apps/

By Miguel Guhlin, CIO Advisor

Last December, Jean Tower (director of technology for Northborough-Southborough Public Schools in MA) shared a description of what would be discussed at CoSN’s CTO Forum, naming it “The Undiscussables of Technology Leadership”: If your people are too afraid to talk to you about what’s happening, challenge your thinking, then the group is broken. When I tweeted a question about this and posted it in the Google+ Community Scott McLeod started on School Leadership, Scott asked, What do you mean by undiscussables? To this question, Jean replied: The undiscussables are the conversations that take real courage to initiate. When we want to really challenge the status quo. We sometimes need to go after the sacred cow practices and those are tough discussions – almost, undiscussable.

http://www.schoolcio.com/Default.aspx?tabid=136&entryid=6523

by James G. Mazoue, Educause

Among the widely debated list of transgressions, MOOCs:

• Fail to engage students in effective pedagogical practices
• Deny students mentoring experiences with scholars passionate about their research
• Lack the rigor of an on-campus curriculum
• Provide, at best, superficial and narrowly defined training rather than deep understanding
• Are an attempt to replace faculty

http://www.educause.edu/ero/article/five-myths-about-moocs

By Lawrence Biemiller, Chronicle of Higher Ed

MOOCs may also cost colleges money, the paper says, citing an agreement between Udacity and the Georgia Institute of Technology to offer an online master’s degree in computer science. “Udacity gets the intellectual content for a master’s program of 20 courses at an upfront cost of $400,000,” the paper says. “It borrows Georgia Tech’s reputation as its own, at a huge discount (no training of graduate students, no support for labs, no decades of accumulated know-how through which Georgia Tech earned its reputation).  It acquires these courses for a proprietary platform: Georgia Tech cannot offer these OMS CS courses, created by its own faculty, to a competing distributor.”

http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/report-by-faculty-organization-questions-savings-from-moocs/47399

By Hannah Winston, Chronicle of Higher Ed

As professors step out from behind lecterns to stand beside laptops or in front of cameras—or both—the top concern for campus information-technology departments across the country is how they can help faculty members move smoothly into the digital age of learning. That’s one finding of the Campus Computing Project’s annual survey of senior technology administrators, released on Thursday. The survey found that as technology continues to grow on campuses—through both online classes and the increasing ubiquity of mobile devices—the ability of faculty members to use and integrate technology is a big concern. Another worry is the effectiveness of information-technology spending.

http://chronicle.com/article/Helping-Faculty-Members-Use/142377/

by Technology Review

The length of the messages we send on Twitter is getting shorter, raising important questions about how the social messaging service is changing the way we communicate, say researchers. Back in the old days, say in 2009, Twitter was a relatively unknown social network that was beginnign to spread like wildfire. In 2007, Twitter users posted some 400,000 tweets per quarter, by June 2010, they were posting 65 million each day. Today, there are 200 million registered users who send around 400 million tweets every day.

http://www.technologyreview.com/view/520311/tweets-have-become-shorter-since-2009-say-computer-scientists/

By Rachel Metz, Technology Review

In theory, smart watches offer a smoother, more natural way of checking information than pulling out a smartphone. The act of glancing at your watch is a commonly accepted social custom, and it’s intriguing that an old form factor could come back to prominence. It’s just that now we want to see more at a glance than simply the time.

http://www.technologyreview.com/review/520236/so-far-smart-watches-are-pretty-dumb/

By Samit Sarkar, Polygon

The Penn State University professors behind a massive open online course (MOOC) on infectious-disease epidemics are running an online game, Moocdemic, that will allow players to see how a disease spreads across the globe. Moocdemic is tied to “Epidemics – the dynamics of infectious diseases,” a free, eight-week online course offered by Penn State. More than 27,000 students have registered for the sessions, according to Marcel Salathé, an infectious disease biologist at the university’s Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics and one of the instructors of the course. “We’re going to run a massive online epidemic here in parallel to this course with you, the participants — virtually, of course,” said Salathé.

http://www.polygon.com/2013/10/14/4837524/moocdemic-virtual-disease-epidemic-online-mobile-game

by Christina Quattrocchi, EdSurge

Pair MOOC provider, Coursera, with teacher training experts at the New Teacher Center, and you get a different breed of professional development–one where teachers choose and there are options for everyone. This is in stark contrast to the one-size-fits-all trainings typically mandated by districts. Coursera began its foray into the teacher professional development world last May when it launched new partnerships with the likes of John Hopkins University School of Education, Relay Graduate School, and the New Teacher Center. Now after the first three teacher PD courses have wrapped up, EdSurge takes a look at what happened, who showed up, and what teacher PD really looks like when it gets MOOC’ed.

https://www.edsurge.com/n/2013-10-14-coursera-teaches-teachers-anywhere-anytime

By IVAN B. K. LEVINGSTON, Harvard Crimson

Representatives of the Chinese Ministry of Education and more than 10 of China’s top universities met Oct. 10 at Tsinghua University in Beijing to announce XuetangX, China’s newest online education portal. XuetangX is powered by Harvard’s edX’s open-source platform, but the initiative is a distinct, independent organization and China’s largest online collaboration of leading universities. It will begin to launch courses on Oct. 17. Chinese government and university representatives revealed the initiative just two days after another provider of massive open online courses, Coursera, announced the launch of its own Chinese-language portal.

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/10/15/american-adults-see-online-courses-least-equivalent-most-ways

By Katie Lepi, Edudemic

Every teacher has a technology wishlist. Whether you have one computer in your classroom or thirty iPads, there’s always a little something that we wish we had to make something a little more fun or a little easier. Sometimes, our really slow computers or lack of resources really make us wish for a technology makeover. This fun infographic from We Are Teachers showcases seven tongue-in-cheek signs that your school might need a technology makeover. They created this awhile back when they were running a contest for a technology makeover, but the humor in them still rings true today. For those of you dealing with eight year old computers and chalk boards that use real chalk in your classrooms, you’ll surely get a laugh.

http://www.edudemic.com/7-signs-school-needs-technology-makeover/

by Dror Ben-Naim, Financial Review

Just as Google and Facebook let advertisers tailor their messages based on our online behaviour, the same type of technology is now promising to radically restructure education by making learning personal. In the future, every student will have their own digitised, lifelong learning profile that will record their skills, knowledge and credentials. It will travel with them through school, university, and onto their professional development during their career. Such profiles will be continuously constructed from early childhood as students go through online learning experiences at school or at home – while learning, doing assignments or taking exams. These profiles will make it possible for education providers to deliver personalised and adaptive instruction to each learner, throughout their lifetime – a bit like having your own digital private tutor. On the flip side, they will also help employers align with job-seekers as digital profiles of skills, certifications and qualifications are easy to aggregate, search, and match.

http://www.afr.com/p/national/education/tailored_online_learning_is_the_GV1xd9haoYVacpWNsMyHvN

by ERIC SPIEGEL, Wall Street Journal

There are two major advantages to the online education business model. The first is access. Online education allows students around the world to learn from recognized leaders in higher education, regardless of where they live. Online courses, like MOOCs, are challenging the foundations of traditional education institutions. The second advantage is adaptability. The very nature of online education allows it to quickly adjust to the ever changing needs of industry.

http://blogs.wsj.com/experts/2013/10/12/moocs-will-change-the-university-business-model/

Gina Sipley, PolicyMic

Queens Borough Public Library, alongside the Chicago Public Library and the Scottsdale Public Library, are reimagining the library as a digital space; one where books will no longer be the focal point. The libraries of tomorrow might be digital, but too often going digital, like going green, simply means reducing costs and cutting public services. With more and more millennials enrolled in on-line courses, MOOCS, distance degree programs, and other higher education opportunities not tied to a university campus, the public library is a central site of learning and innovation. As the books slowly disappear, and the university campus becomes virtual, it is essential that digital libraries maintain a prominent public space for local collaboration.

http://www.policymic.com/articles/67457/surprise-it-s-the-golden-age-of-libraries

By Aviva Hope Rutkin, Technology Review

Scot Osterweil is the creative director of the Education Arcade and a professor at the MIT Media Lab. He spoke at MIT Technology Review’s EmTech conference about why educators need to encourage more creativity—and how that could help us build a better, more leisurely future. What we need to do, to some degree, is sort of return to an era of free-range children, where there’s more play, more discovery. The problem in America right now is that kids are having less time to explore and invent and discover. The one space where I think kids are still being as adventuresome as they ever were is in the space of games. I don’t mean to say that all education could be done through games, but I think we can look at what happens in game play and we should try to model that and make more of our education system like that, where we present kids with authentic challenges, give them freedom to really explore those challenges and invent solutions.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/520216/three-questions-for-tech-education-pioneer-scot-osterweil/

by Virtual College

The Virtual College team keep a close eye on the latest trends in e-learning, so we can advise our clients on any interesting developments. One trend we have been examining recently is ‘Open Badges’. We have noted a growing interest in Open Badges and thought it would be useful to offer a simple comparison between e-portfolios and Open Badges and take a look at how they will interact.

http://www.virtual-college.co.uk/news/EPortfolios-and-Open-Badges-newsitems-118.aspx

by the Economist

A recent study of faculty attitudes to technology by the online publication Inside Higher Ed found much skepticism about MOOCs, but also that staff who have actually taught on them are far more positive about their quality. Nishikant Sonwalkar, the editor of MOOCs Forum, says professors do not want to teach on courses they did not create. At the same time they are concerned about “academic marginalisation”. Popular MOOCs are creating star professors, such as Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller at Stanford University. Mr Sonwalkar observes that many of the academics he has approached to appear in MOOCs decline because they feel uncomfortable on camera. Academics are over-reacting, argues Jack Wilson, the president emeritus of the University of Massachusetts. Professors will eventually get used to them. But first, says Mr Wilson, they must “get over the fear factor”.

http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21587820-many-professors-are-hostile-online-education-learned-luddites