Techno-News Blog

by Monique Brand, Cove Herald

I noticed over the last few weeks one particular patron stuck out like a sore thumb whenever we come to the Cove library. This patron always had an overstuffed bookbag, tons of books on the table, and every once in a while, would step outside to take a few sips of coffee. His name was Owen, a Marine veteran who by day was on the computer taking online classes at the library, only to travel to Temple to his job where he worked in a warehouse at night. It sparked my curiosity incredibly. Per Kevin Marsh, the library’s director, the Cove library has aided in patrons who want to continue their education, even those who do not have a personal laptop or computer at home. “Not many people think we have the resources to cater to those patrons but we do,” said Marsh. From special library time limits for students to books that are used inside accredited institutions, patrons who want to continue their education, even if feel they don’t have the resources, can no longer make an excuse.

http://kdhnews.com/copperas_cove_herald/community/library-offers-extra-help-for-students-taking-online-courses/article_13559cf8-445a-11e4-912f-0017a43b2370.html

by Edutopia

Edutopia is one of the many organizations, companies, and communities participating in the third annual Connected Educator Month (CEM), a celebration of online communities of practice originally developed by the U.S. Department of Education with partners. As with previous years, October 2014 is sure to include an array of rich opportunities for informal professional development, both for educators with established professional learning networks (PLNs) and for those just getting started. Explore the resources below as a guide to connecting, sharing, and collaborating with your network during October and all year long.

http://www.edutopia.org/connected-educator-month-resources

by Monica Von Dobeneck, PennLive

High school Principal Benjamin Ruby brought the issue to the school board Thursday night. He said some students are taking extra courses because they want to graduate early or just because they want the extra challenge. But the online courses cost $400, and some parents might be unwilling to spend that money. If the extra courses are calculated into GPA, that could boost a student’s class rank and help get college scholarships. But that might not be fair to those students who can’t afford the extra classes, Ruby said. Sometimes the GPAs of top students are separated by thousandths of a point, but the best scholarships only go to the top one or two in a class. School board members were divided between wanting to encourage students who have extra drive and being fair to those who can’t afford it.

http://www.pennlive.com/midstate/index.ssf/2014/09/palmyra_school_district_tackli.html

by Devon Haynie, US News

Class sizes can vary widely in online education, where enrollment is not limited by the constraints of a physical classroom. Massive open online courses, which some students can now take for credit, can contain thousands of students. Among the 187 ranked online bachelor’s programs that submitted data to U.S. News in 2013, meanwhile, average class size ranged from one to 150. The research behind class size in an online environment is inconclusive, says Kay Shattuck, director of research with Quality Matters, a nonprofit that helps universities and others design effective online courses. Still, plenty of experts believe that class size matters, and urge online students to think carefully about the size of their online classrooms before signing up for a course or a degree.

http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/articles/2014/09/26/experts-say-class-size-can-matter-for-online-students

BY ISSIE LAPOWSKY, Wired

The MOOC was The Next Big Thing—and then it was written off for dead. But for Anant Agarwal, one of the founding fathers of this online reboot of university education, it’s only just getting started. The way he sees it, effective uses of the MOOC model are only beginning to take shape. Enrollment in edX courses has doubled over last year, and he believes we’re on the verge of an era he calls MOOC 2.0. Such optimism is to be expected from a man who makes his livelihood from this model. But Agarwal isn’t alone in this opinion. This week, a team of researchers out of MIT, Harvard, and China’s Tsinghua University—all schools that offer MOOCs—released a study showing that students who attended a MIT physics class online learned as effectively as students who took the class in person. What’s more, the results were the same, regardless of how well the online students scored on a pre-test before taking the class.

http://www.wired.com/2014/09/free-online-classes-still-future-education/

By KAY LU, Harvard Crimson

Andrew Y. Ng, co-founder of Coursera, talks in a crowded lecture hall on Thursday at Maxwell Dworkin about deep learning in computer programs, inspired by human neural networks. Deep learning, a subfield of computer science, is currently being developed by computer scientists to handle massive amounts of information and data, which can be applied to speech and image recognition. Ng, who is also the chief scientist at the Chinese search engine Baidu and an associate professor of computer science at Stanford University, said that the main goal of his presentation was to “share with [the audience] some strategic views about deep learning and give [them] some general ideas about whether to work on deep learning in the future.”

http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2014/9/26/ng-deep-learning-talk/

By Carl Straumsheim, Inside Higher Ed

How do you tell high school students they’re going to attend — but not actually go to — college? It’s a conversation the University of Florida is having with potential students, parents and school counselors about UF Online, the institution’s degree-granting online arm. Now facing its first full academic year, UF Online is hitting its course development and enrollment targets, but it has so far attracted few first-time-in-college (FTIC) students. UF Online launched in January with 583 students — all of them transferring in. In March, university officials said they hoped to enroll 750 to 1,000 students by the fall semester, including 100 to 150 high school graduates starting as freshmen.

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/09/25/u-florida-online-considers-how-sell-studying-online-high-school-graduates