Techno-News Blog

By Josh Clement, Business2Community

Online learning is nothing new, but recent trends make it easier than ever for companies to boost employees’ productivity and ultimately company profits. For many businesses, the latest, greatest change has been the advent of MOOCs, or massive open online courses, which offer online classes to thousands of learners. All one needs is a computer, access to the Internet, the desire to learn and time to spare. While MOOCs became popular in university settings, businesses are now realizing the amazing potential of this new type of online learning. It’s not just about the free content; here are three exciting ways that today’s online training can enhance productivity.

http://www.business2community.com/human-resources/three-ways-online-learning-boosts-employee-productivity-company-profits-0855137

by Steven Mintz, Inside Higher Ed

Next-generation online learning differs from last generation e-learning in six distinct ways. First, it is scalable. New instructional support models—including coaches and peer mentors— allow online courses that are not MOOCs to effectively reach many more students in the past.

Second, it is personalized. It offers multiple learning pathways tailored to student learning styles, needs, and interests. Just-in-time remediation and enrichment are embedded and content reflects students’ learning goals.

Third, it is outcomes-oriented. Mastery of explicit learning objectives, including content and skills, represents its aim.

Fourth, it is data-driven. Learning analytics provide students, instructors, coaches, and advisers with dashboards that signal student progress and problems in real time.

http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/higher-ed-beta/expanding-your-online-pedagogy-toolkit#sthash.udVQjrfu.dpbs

By John K. Waters, Campus Technology

Higher education is in the midst of a kind of Renaissance. A flurry of activity and experimentation around adaptive learning is taking place on college and university campuses, thanks to a high-profile, targeted grant program from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; the relatively recent emergence of sophisticated adaptive learning software and platforms; and nascent partnerships among schools and learning content publishers. Institutions around the world are engaged in serious explorations of the potential of an approach to instruction and remediation that uses technology and accumulated data to provide customized program adjustments based on an individual student’s level of demonstrated mastery. That last sentence contains a pretty good definition of “adaptive learning,” but the term is so often used synonymously with “personalization” or “personalized learning” that it’s reasonable to ask, What’s the difference?

http://campustechnology.com/articles/2014/04/16/the-great-adaptive-learning-experiment.aspx

By Denise Paster, Alan J. Reid, Campus Technology

This coming fall, Coastal Carolina University in Conway, SC will be rolling out a unique curricular initiative throughout its English Department that administers digital badges to students who demonstrate mastery in the critical skills outlined in first-year writing courses. Denise Paster, assistant professor and coordinator of composition, and Alan Reid, teaching associate, have designed an online model that adds an additional fourth credit hour to the traditionally three-credit-hour English courses taken by students in the first two semesters — English 101: Composition and English 102: Composition and Critical Reading. The program is titled Coastal Composition Commons, or CCC for short, and it takes an innovative approach to scaffolding the foundational skills central to college writing.

http://campustechnology.com/Articles/2014/04/17/A-Digital-Badge-Initiative-in-First-Year-Writing-Courses.aspx?Page=1

By Stephen Noonoo, THE Journal

One project, called Digiteen, is designed for students in grades 8-12. Teams consisting of students in two or more classrooms around the world introduce themselves via Edmodo and Skype and then, together, explore different aspects of digital citizenship, eventually co-creating a Wikispaces page on a given theme. Individual schools then work on an action project that students can share with their peers at school, across the street or around the world. Other Flat Connections projects focus on bringing students together for debates or to foster cultural awareness among young learners through the creation and use of multimedia. “The goal is that schools offer a global collaborative opportunity at every grade level,” Lindsay said, adding that teachers often interpret that advice to mean they have to be doing global collaboration projects all the time. “It’s hard work. You cannot do it all the time, but it’s important that every student at every grade level needs at least one experience.”

http://thejournal.com/articles/2014/03/26/global-collaboration-projects-that-go-way-beyond-skype.aspx

by the Clayton Christensen Institute

Through the lens of three high-performing schools, the content explores how to support students and teachers in the transition from traditional learning to blended learning to combine the best of traditional schools with the transformative power of technology. .Brian Greenberg of the Silicon Schools Fund and Michael Horn of the Clayton Christensen Institute lead the blended learning discussions, touring real classrooms using blended learning and providing insights on the operational challenges and potential solutions. “Blended learning isn’t just about putting computers in classrooms,” said Horn, co-founder and executive director of education at the Christensen Institute. “It’s about combining the best methods of online learning with one-on-one mentoring from teachers and small-group interaction to educate students in a way that gives them what they need, when they need it.”

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/khan-academy-launches-blended-learning-155700181.html

By Tanya Roscorla, Center for Digital Education

Cloud computing will power the largest network in the world: the Internet. That’s what Larry Peterson, chief architect of the Open Networking Lab, predicted in a keynote speech on the Internet’s future at the Internet2 Global Summit on April 9. Cloudification, as he called it, will bring scalable, elastic technology to the Internet in a network built by service blocks. “Cloudification says the services are the key thing,” Peterson said. “Devices are just implementation choices.”

http://www.centerdigitaled.com/news/The-Cloudification-of-the-Internet.html

by Martin Williams, the Guardian

“Open online classes provide a way to reach an amazing group of students that do not have access to traditional higher education,” says David Evans, associate professor of computer science at the University of Virginia. He says: “Most of the content is presented in short videos, with lots of interactive quizzes and exercises between them. There are also problem sets that involve solving some more challenging problems, as well as puzzles that apply ideas from the course.”  Amy Woodgate, project coordinator of distance education initiative and Moocs at the University of Edinburgh says: “Many people think that there are certain programmes that you can’t do online and others that are better geared to online study, but actually we haven’t found that.” “You can learn almost anything online nowadays,” says Lloyd Bingham, who did an online preparatory course for a diploma in translation, run by London Metropolitan University.

http://www.theguardian.com/education/2013/nov/11/niche-subjects-online-learning-students

By Tanya Roscorla, Center for Digital Education

“In this era of big data and big science, universities must serve as a crossroads for collaboration more than they ever have,” said Shirley Ann Jackson, president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, during a general session at the 2014 Internet2 Global Summit in Denver on Tuesday, April 8. This crossroads for collaboration doesn’t just mean that researchers should talk to each other. It also means collaboration between research and IT in a way that doesn’t always happen, said Michael McRobbie, president of Indiana University. Researchers need the support of IT leaders who take the time to understand what’s needed technologically and can then provide it. As university leaders support their campuses’ missions, they face four major challenges on the road to unlocking the potential of big data and science.

http://www.centerdigitaled.com/news/4-Big-Data-Challenges.html

By Andrew Ujifusa, McClatchy News Service

As the appetite for educational data on students has grown across the K-12 sector, so has the stated desire among many state lawmakers to try to protect the privacy and security of sensitive student information. Spurred by concerns that the rise of education technology and the increasing prevalence of new assessments will place student data in unreliable hands or be put to nefarious uses, lawmakers in dozens of states have acted this year to clarify who has what access to student data and to specify the best practices for shielding that data. In total, for the 2014 legislative sessions, 83 bills in 32 states have addressed student-data protection issues, according to the Data Quality Campaign, a Washington-based group that seeks to promote the use of educational data to inform classroom and policy decisions.

http://www.centerdigitaled.com/news/State-Lawmakers-Ramp-Up-Attention-to-Data-Privacy.html

By Colleen Lee, Edudemic

You know when you spoke with me the other day and told me that that introducing more tech into my class was fine for me because I was ‘into it’ and ‘understood’ it? That you were not going to try a new way of doing things (edtech-wise) because your students would see that you weren’t an expert. Well I need to let you in on a secret. Neither am I. It would probably shock you that me, a proponent of choice/more edtech started exactly where you are now in terms of knowledge and confidence. It took, it takes, some courage, and a big leap of faith to step out and try something new in class – in front of 30 teenagers? How do I do it? I remember 3 key things linked below.

http://www.edudemic.com/nervous-edtech-tips/

by Amanda Paulson, Christian Science Monitor

Fourteen-year-old Gabi Directo is technically in the middle of her freshman year. But in bursts of learning, hunched over her laptop in her Summit Shasta High School classroom, she has managed to zoom at her own rapid pace to the completion of all of her ninth-grade English, history, science, and math classes. By February, she was digging into her sophomore year Advanced Placement biology, physics, and Algebra II classes. But in her school’s “blended learning” program, Gabi has had as much face-time with teachers and classmates as solitary face-to-screen time. The serious and soft-spoken teen is able to “blend” the best of online learning (progress at her own pace through subject content) with the best of classroom work (practicing new knowledge with peers and teachers).

http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Education/2014/0420/Blended-learning-revolution-Tech-meets-tradition-in-the-classroom

By Meghan DeMaria, USA Today

For many people, when they think of online learning they associate it with working adults or students with disabilities. But with internships, part-time jobs and other commitments, a growing number of traditional students are choosing to take online courses in addition to courses in the traditional classroom setting. And colleges and universities are beginning to recognize and cater to this trend. The availability and variety of online courses for both traditional and nontraditional students is increasing steadily, and colleges are doing everything in their power to make these courses as accessible as possible for all students.

http://college.usatoday.com/2012/03/07/more-students-taking-online-courses/

by Tony Bates, Online Learning and Distance Education Resources

Public institutions such as UBC now face a much more diverse student population, with very different needs. Thus UBC has both young residential and young commuting students, local, national and international students, pre-university, undergraduate, graduate and lifelong learners, students with different levels of English language ability, gregarious and shy learners, and on and on. Every one of these groups probably needs a different range of options regarding the campus experience and the delivery of learning. Thus I would argue that UBC also needs to focus just as much on fully online learning, or distance education, as on blended learning, or on improving the campus, as important as that is. In particular the lifelong learning market is growing rapidly, and is increasingly important economically in a highly competitive knowledge-based economy.

http://www.tonybates.ca/2014/04/20/synergies-between-online-learning-on-campus-teaching-and-flexible-learning/

by Doree Armstrong, U Washington

The University of Washington is expanding online course evaluations to reduce its use of paper. The online evaluations are expected to save the university tens of thousands of dollars every year in paper costs while giving faculty and administrators more direct access to evaluation results. The UW’s Information School and Law School, and UW Tacoma, have been using online evaluations for two years as part of a pilot project. Last quarter, more than 600 courses at the Seattle campus were evaluated online. The Office of Educational Assessment is advertising the service to the entire campus this quarter. The current total cost of paper evaluations at UW Seattle is about $150,000 annually.

http://www.washington.edu/news/2014/04/18/uw-moving-to-online-course-evaluations-to-save-paper-money/

by WADE ROUSH, xEconomy

Founder Nelson, 38, has called Minerva a “perfect university” that will trade huge lecture courses for small faculty-led seminars, and physical classrooms for online video exchanges. The for-profit company won $25 million in seed funding from Benchmark in 2012, and three weeks ago it admitted 45 students to its first class. The students won’t attend classes, exactly; instead they’ll use their laptops and webcams to log into Minerva’s Web-based platform for virtual seminars. They won’t be graded through papers or tests, but instead by faculty reviewing recordings of seminar interactions to see whether they’re picking up key concepts and habits of mind. They won’t even stay in San Francisco: for their sophomore year the entire class will be transplanted to another world city, such as Mumbai. (The actual locations of Minerva’s second, third, and fourth campuses haven’t yet been announced.)

http://www.xconomy.com/national/2014/04/18/minervas-plan-to-disrupt-universities-a-talk-with-ceo-ben-nelson/

By Melissa Turtinen, Bring-me-the-news

A new kind of school set to open in the south suburbs this fall is part of a relatively small movement toward schools that blend online learning with live in-school teachers. The approach offers students personalized web-based curriculum with the teacher support many of them need, the concept’s supporters say. “Learning is really a social experience and we want to take what that online learning opportunity has, but really reinforce it and support it with strong instruction from a classroom teacher,” Greg Gentle, who will be principal of Flex Academy in Richfield this fall, told KSTP.

http://www.bringmethenews.com/2014/04/17/blended-learning-new-minnesota-school-brings-online-courses-to-the-classroom/

by John Friend, Huffington Post

In the coming years, a lot of the legwork, and the burdensome aspects of teaching will be assisted by technology. Some may think that a gloomy prospect. Certainly there are people concerned that technology in the classroom may diminish the role of the teacher. But I think this is due to a lack of understanding of the things technology brings to the classroom. As a developer of education software, I have seen first hand what an incredibly empowering thing technology can be for both students, teachers, and parents too. Technology can enable a teacher to oversee a greater number of pupils, to know how well or poorly they are progressing, and even design lessons to give them the right amount of challenges. If pupils are given work that is too easy, or too hard, they will inevitably lose interest or get frustrated. But with tailored lessons, everybody gets to learn at just the right level.

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/john-friend/how-technology-is-creating-super-teachers-of-the-future_b_5165283.html

by Brian Feldt, St. Louis Business Journal

Anant Agarwal, CEO of EdX, the online learning platform founded by Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, refers to what LaunchCode is doing here as the “St. Louis experiment.” And he said results of the pilot have far exceeded his expectations. That’s why Agarwal is ready to assist LaunchCode in its efforts to expand outside of St. Louis. LaunchCode is the paired-programming initiative founded by Jim McKelvey that is placing up-and-coming computer programmers with 100 of St. Louis’ most notable corporations. McKelvey said the company is eying a national expansion into places including Miami, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Denver and a location somewhere on the West Coast.

http://www.bizjournals.com/stlouis/blog/biznext/2014/04/edx-ceo-launchcode-s-st-louis-experiment-a-wild.html

BY CHRIS PARR, Times Higher Education

The course, Constitutional Struggles in the Muslim World, was taught by Ebrahim Afsah, associate professor of public international law at the University of Copenhagen. It ran for 10 weeks, from December 2013, on the US Mooc platform Coursera. “If you are teaching a controversial course, there is a risk of physical and reputational damage to you,” he told a conference for partners of Coursera, held in London last month, adding that he had “almost” lost his job because of the controversy his Mooc attracted. On a recent trip to Iran, Professor Afsah continued, he had a “nice friendly chat, for four hours, with the Iranian secret service”, who knew everything about his Mooc and wanted to talk about it in a little more detail. “If you want to touch the hornets’ nest you need to be prepared for the repercussions,” he told delegates.

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/news/controversial-mooc-nearly-costs-professor-his-job/2012647.article

by Greg Pollack, Huffington Post

Not everyone is meant to be a coder though–or has the motivation to code. This has left a huge part of the population wondering how to respond to the “learn to code” movement, and what actually makes sense for them to do. It’s one of the reasons why I believe the “learn to code” conversation is distracting us from a much more important question, which is this: “What should everyone know about code, even if they don’t learn to program?” In my view, the answer is basic code literacy, which ultimately boils down to knowing enough to successfully communicate in the technology-powered environment we live in. If your occupation requires you to speak to or email programmers, you’ll have a leg up if you have a basic knowledge of code.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gregg-pollack/no-not-everyone-needs-to-_b_5155549.html