Techno-News Blog

By Steve Kolowich, Chronicle of Higher Ed

The U.S. Education Department wants to encourage colleges and the tech companies they work with to protect student data from misuse. But the agency’s power to protect the privacy of people taking free, online courses is essentially nonexistent. “Data in the higher-education context for MOOCs is seldom Ferpa-protected,” Kathleen Styles, the Education Department’s chief privacy officer, said on Tuesday at a symposium on student privacy. In other words, people who take free online courses known as MOOCs, or massive open online courses, are not covered under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, known as Ferpa, which stipulates how colleges must protect the “education records” of their students.

http://chronicle.com/article/Are-MOOC-Takers-Students-/150325/

by Bernard Lane, the Australian

Professor Armando Fox, the computer scientist who helped launch the first MOOC for the University of California at Berkeley, reaches back to the staid early history of movies to explain where online education is today. “When the first motion picture camera was invented, they pointed it at a stage with live actors,” he says. “It took people a while to realise that it was actually a medium that allowed you to do things quite differently. “That’s a little bit like where we are with MOOCs now. We’re taking elements that are familiar from residential education — such as lectures, homework assignments, and syllabi that stretch out several weeks — and we’re sort of trying to reproduce those elements online.” The radical possibility of MOOCs is hard to imagine.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/higher-education/mooc-learnings-fast-evolution-makes-it-a-work-in-progress/story-e6frgcjx-1227142463746?nk=03d0b7a2bea6ff8eefc95b96fdea0f5d

by SAM WOOD, PHILLY.COM

Laurie Pickard wanted an education from a world-class business school. She didn’t want to pay the $168,000 for a degree from Wharton. So she found a way to get the education — though minus the sheepskin — for next to nothing. Pickard is the creator of the No Pay MBA, and she is perhaps the first person to ever pursue a complete business education through massive open online courses (MOOCs) on the Internet. During the past year, she’s taken free courses from Harvard, Yale, MIT, the Darden School — and Wharton.

http://www.philly.com/philly/business/A_world-class_business_education_for_free_No_Pay_MBA.html

by CCAP, Forbes

Higher education has seen a proliferation of new models in response to growing market demands. For-profit universities, massive open online courses, and competency-based pedagogies have all vied for a piece of the pie. Adaptive learning – a personalized, technology- and data-driven approach which responds and adapts to both teachers and learners – could provide the answer, and Smart Sparrow, an Australia-based adaptive “eLearning” platform, is leading the way. Within Smart Sparrow’s eLearning Platform, analytic dashboards are provided to help instructors evaluate student performance and progress. Knowledge Analytics™, as it is called, gives instructors the opportunity to identify difficult concepts through specific data points.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/ccap/2014/12/01/the-adaptive-advantage-how-e-learning-will-change-higher-ed/

http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/ED1412/S00021/technology-vital-for-accessible-education-says-expert.htm

By CHRISTINE ARMARIO, Associated Press

FBI agents seized 20 boxes of documents related to Los Angeles Unified School District’s beleaguered $1 billion iPad project, officials confirmed Tuesday. Agents confiscated documents at the district’s offices Monday regarding procurement practices involving the Common Core Technology project, LAUSD’s plan to equip all schools with 21st century learning devices. The FBI confirmed an investigation into the district, but would not provide any further information, citing the ongoing probe. “The L.A Unified School District will offer its full cooperation to federal authorities during the course of the investigation,” Interim Superintendent Ramon Cortines said in a statement. The FBI action was first reported by The Los Angeles Times.

http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/fbi-seizes-los-angeles-schools-ipad-documents-27311468

by Chicago Tribune

Q:How many young women does it take to design and program a computer game?

A. None. Only boys know how to do that.

This, believe it or not, is the message to 4- and 5-year-old girls in the Barbie book, “I Can Be … a Computer Engineer.”

Written for beginning readers, the book tells the tale of a teen Barbie who is creating a computer game but crashes her laptop. She immediately gives up on the idea of solving the problem herself. Barbie also confesses to little sister Skipper that she can’t write software code. “I’ll need Steven’s and Brian’s help to turn it into a real game!” Barbie says.  The Barbie book, published in 2010 and available on Amazon.com, has taken a recent pummeling on the internet as misogynistic trash. Amazon last week showed 165 reviews–148 gave the book one star. One critic created a website called Feminist Hacker Barbie that invited contributors to, er, revise the book’s message by rewriting scenes.

http://www.eschoolnews.com/2014/12/02/barbie-geek-ceiling-372/

by eCampus News

Annual survey reveal what college students increasingly value about their higher-ed experience. 68 percent of students said the availability of online classes would be important to their educational experience, and campus administration is all about collaboration. These are just two interesting findings from a recent annual survey of more than 500 currently enrolled colleges students about what they value most in education, as well as what changes they’re seeing in campus management. The survey, conducted by Vital Source Technologies, Inc., Ingram Content Group’s e-textbook solution, revealed that today’s college students increasingly value online, social and mobile technology as essential educational tools. Fielded by Wakefield Research, an independent research consultancy, the survey of more than 500 currently enrolled college students also found more students are turning down certain colleges because the cost of tuition is too high and they worry about paying off student loans.

http://www.ecampusnews.com/technologies/trends-student-technology-289/

By Amanda Achtman, Winnipeg Free Press

While coding may be the most obvious skill to learn online, there are many other attempts to experiment with the possibilities and limits of online skills training and education across all fields and disciplines. Online education, far beyond learning how to write code, competes with and may even raise the standards of traditional education. One hopes online learning opportunities will retain the traits that make it a worthwhile supplement rather than a replacement of traditional classroom learning.

http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/opinion/analysis/learning-online-worth-the-cost-284293851.html

by Balint Szlanko, The Associated Press

Like most children his age, Denis Akimov spends hours daily on his computer surfing the Internet. It isn’t just for fun. As schools are forced to limit operations in the conflict-battered eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk, educators are turning to the Web to keep their charges learning. “It’s not comparable to normal school, because there is no proper atmosphere for studying,” said Akimov, 15, sitting in front of a laptop in the living room of his home. “Very often you get distracted because of all kinds of things, like websites.” Schools and kindergartens haven’t been spared death and destruction in the last seven months of fighting between government forces and Russian-backed separatists.

http://www.cp24.com/news/regular-classrooms-replaced-with-online-distance-learning-in-war-hit-eastern-ukraine-1.2126681

By RACHEL MORELLO, Indiana Public Media

President Obama is pushing for schools to increase their use of technology in the classroom. Teachers nationwide are introducing “Bring Your Own Device” policies, and beginning to use tools like Skype to bring in guest lecturers from around the world. Teachers in Indiana are being recognized for paving the way when it comes to new technology, but effectively incorporating it into teaching can be a challenge.

http://wbaa.org/post/tech-savvy-teaching-how-online-learning-helps-students-teachers

By Carl Straumsheim, Inside Higher Ed

Some of the country’s most rigorous research universities have a new obsession: flexibility. Institutions such as Duke and Harvard Universities and the Georgia and Massachusetts Institutes of Technology are laying the groundwork for curricula that will be delivered through a combination of face-to-face instruction, blended courses and distance education. A common goal is to offer students “flexibility” — a word several administrators used to summarize their institutions’ aspirations. Regardless of the definition, flexibility has much in common with MIT’s plans to “modularize” education — breaking courses down into smaller modules that can be taken on their own or shuffled and rearranged into a more personalized experience. In a preliminary report released last year, MIT toyed with the idea of “unbundling education and blurring boundaries” — combining distance and in-person instruction to the point where students could one day spend as little as two years on campus.

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/12/02/some-research-universities-flexibility-and-modularity-influence-long-term-plans

by Rob Furman, Huffington Post

Even today, we still have teachers across the country fighting the integration of educational technology into their classrooms. Many use similar excuses as to why they should not waste their time learning technology. The simple fact is that they typically are nervous to learn something new and possibly failing. I think everyone can understand that feeling (especially in front of our peers and our students). So… they make up a variety of reasons why they think it is a bad idea to spend time on technology use, or they simply just close their door and leave the technology in the corner of the room. What do we do? Here is a list of the top 5 things you should share with your teachers in regards to educational technology.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rob-furman/5-things-to-share-with-yo_b_6218982.html

by The Open University

The annual Innovating Pedagogy report explores new forms of teaching, learning and assessment for an interactive world, to guide teachers and policy makers in productive innovation. Produced by the Institute of Educational Technology at The Open University, the report identifies ten educational terms, theories and practices that have the potential to provoke major shifts in educational practice in the near future.

http://www.openuniversity.edu/news/news/2014-innovating-pedagogy-report

by Ron Bethke, eCampusNews

New report suggests investors should focus on companies servicing the “Learner Revolution,” which creates pathways of success that guide individual students. The Ed Tech Revolution is on its way out, and something new is set to take its place: The Learner Revolution. According to a new Education Design Lab report released during the recent National Education Week conference in Washington

D.C., investment in education has been mostly relegated to surface-level areas where returns are quick, but which are unfocused on the personal experiences of students. As a result, the report suggests that investors should shift their focus to companies leading the charge towards utilizing mobile, software, and analytical platforms in order to offer services that create pathways of success and assistance for the individual learner.

http://www.ecampusnews.com/technologies/learner-revolution-invest-522/

By Matthew Stoltzfus, Campus Technology

Professor condenses what he’s learned about implementing Flipped Learning over the last three years. The flipped classroom model has undeniably become a go-to learning model in the digital age of higher education, but what have educators learned since the model’s debut? What are the best practices that work? As a form of blended learning, the flipped classroom model typically requires students to study new content by reading or watching video online before class, leaving class time for discussion and other activities that can be customized to focus on content that students are struggling to understand. I’ve been utilizing the flipped classroom model for my chemistry course at Ohio State University (OSU) and have seen great results. Based on what I’ve been reading and hearing about in education, it looks like I’m not alone.

http://www.ecampusnews.com/technologies/4-best-practices-flipped-classroom-implementation/

by David Poplar, EDUCAUSE Review

Based on the theory of connectivism, MOOCs originally sought to leverage the Internet as a collaborative communications platform to facilitate connections among learners and dissolve traditional ideas of “knowledge giver” and “knowledge receiver.” Today’s MOOCs have drifted far from this vision and typically treat the communications platform as simply a new tool for delivering the same old content rather than as inseparable from pedagogy itself. The University of Pennsylvania’s ModPo MOOC takes a hybrid approach, adopting contemporary MOOC structures — such as a detailed course syllabus and discussion forums — while also taking advantage of the platform’s ability to create a massive global community of interacting learners and incorporating this dynamic into the pedagogical approach.

http://www.educause.edu/ero/article/mooc-evolution-and-one-poetry-mooc%E2%80%99s-hybrid-approach

By Catherine Candisky & Jim Siegel, Columbus Dispatch

Students in Dublin schools can pick among dozens of rigorous courses such as Advanced Placement studio art, computer science and calculus, along with engineering design, statistics, theater and a variety of International Baccalaureate classes. In all, Dublin offers 92 advanced courses to students. That’s 10 times as many as are available to Hamilton Local students on the other end of Franklin County. According to state data, they have nine available. Some state legislators want to take a more serious look at ways to level the field, including interactive distance learning, in which a teacher can present a class to students in a number of districts. State data show that 99 percent of high-school courses are taught face to face.

http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/local/2014/11/30/rural-kids-get-fewer-ap-classes.html

by Brandon Busteed, Executive Director of Gallup Education

We may learn that the real disruptive innovation in education is the need for a human support system and deep learning experiences. Though colleges and universities might be threatened by disruption from online courses, they should have an advantage on fundamentals like mentoring, caring professors and deep and experiential learning. But institutions will only capitalize on these advantages if they intentionally invest in them. So far, most are not. In a world entrenched in technology, we need to work harder to be more human — and we need to be more human than ever before. Colleges and universities that make intentional efforts to embrace the fundamentals of human development will thrive. Online courses can help lower costs and increase efficiency and effectiveness in certain aspects of learning. But online learning will never reach its full potential — much like higher education itself — unless there is human-driven emotional engagement and deep experiential learning at its core.

http://www.gallup.com/businessjournal/179564/real-disruptive-innovation-education.aspx

by Phillip Dawson, Phys.org

If you have studied an online course at a university over the past couple of decades, you’ve probably already experienced a SPOC, or Small Private Online Course. SPOC is a new term for an old concept, which appears to be frustrating members of the distance education community. The first two letters of SPOC are intentionally the opposite of the first two letters of MOOC, or Massive Open Online Course. MOOCs are massive, taught to thousands or tens of thousands of students at once, whereas SPOCs are small, and studied by tens or hundreds. MOOCs are open and free, whereas SPOCs are private and sometimes costly. Both are online courses.

http://phys.org/news/2014-11-small-private-online.html

by eSchool News

Answering President Obama’s call to help schools embrace technology and digital learning in U.S. classrooms, edX will offer professional development courses for teachers. As part of ConnectEd, edX partner universities and colleges will offer teacher professional development courses, along with courses to prepare students for AP exams. “EdX and our university partners are pleased to stand with President Obama to offer U.S. teachers and school districts free, innovative resources to improve teaching and learning outcomes,” said Anant Agarwal, edX CEO. “These courses will empower teachers to use technology in the classroom in creative and personalized ways.”

http://www.eschoolnews.com/2014/11/21/edx-connected-pd-632/