Techno-News Blog

by Tim Dodd, AFR

Coursera’s Learning to Teach Online MOOC is aimed at helping traditional educators who teach face-to-face make the switch to online learning but is being extended to corporations. Jeevan Joshi, founder of the professional learning community Learning Cafe, is offering organisations additional online learning to supplement a massive open online course (MOOC) being offered worldwide by United States MOOC provider Coursera. The course, Learning to Teach Online, from the University of NSW, is aimed at helping traditional educators who teach face-to-face make the switch to online learning, letting them draw on the knowledge of experienced online teachers. Corporations should take more advantage of free online material in providing learning and development for their employees, he said. Companies were often “suspicious of anything that is not built by them”, he said. “But that needs to change, because we live in a world where there are wonderful resources available on the internet and it would be a mistake not to curate and select the best from what’s available.”

http://www.afr.com/leadership/management/business-education/how-companies-can-use-moocs-to-teach-employees-20150614-ghjzec

by Jeanne Meister, Forbes

Companies have discovered the power of the MOOCs as a new way to design and deliver online learning, where learners become peer reviewers, collaborate with each other, are highly engaged in watching short videos, participate in threaded discussion groups and some arrange local meetups to continue their learning. And for those learners who complete all the assignments, there is the ability to earn a certificate from a university and post this on their LinkedIn LNKD -1.02% profile. The bar for corporate learning has been raised and the revolution there is now just beginning. Large organizations such as Microsoft MSFT and Tenaris are piloting their own custom created MOOCs. Others such as Bank of America BAC and Qualcomm are developing a strategy to curate publicly available MOOCs aligned to their core competencies.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeannemeister/2015/06/10/moocs-emerge-as-disruptors-to-corporate-learning/

By Josh Dulaney, Long Beach Press Telegram

Roughly 625,000 students are now enrolled in community college online classes throughout California. Only about 60 percent of them successfully complete the classes, with completion rates for black and Latino students even lower, according to a report by the Public Policy Institute of California, a nonpartisan think tank based in San Francisco. “Most students do successfully complete online courses, but it’s still a pretty high failure rate,” said Hans Johnson, PPIC senior fellow and co-author of the report. The report, titled “Successful Online Courses in California’s Community Colleges,” looked at data from the CCC’s Chancellor’s Office and found that the median passage rate was about 10 percentage points higher for traditional courses, at 69 percent, than for online courses, which was 59 percent.

http://www.presstelegram.com/social-affairs/20150610/community-college-online-classes-lag-behind-in-success-report-says

By Devon Haynie, US News

For prospective online students, searching for a degree program can sometimes feel like being adrift in the wilderness, with no map and no way of gauging the intention of approaching strangers. Students have so many online programs to choose from – some with promises of quick, effortless degrees that seem too good to be true. Unfortunately, they sometimes are. And students who are duped by the schemes are left with a hole in their wallet and no legitimate credential. While anyone can fall prey to an online degree scam, international students and first generation college students can be particularly vulnerable to degree mills, says Karen Pedersen, chief knowledge officer for the Online Learning Consortium, a group dedicated to advancing the quality of online learning. “If you don’t know what you don’t know, it can seem like a really intricate maze,” she says.

http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/articles/2015/06/09/7-warning-signs-an-online-degree-is-a-scam

by Inside Higher Ed

The Public Policy Institute of California released a report Tuesday identifying successful online courses in the state’s community colleges. Success was defined as having at least 70 percent of students earning a passing grade, and if student performance is at least as good as face-to-face versions of the same course. The study also defined success as when students in an online course continue to do well in subsequent same-subject classes either online or in a traditional setting. The study found about 11 percent of online courses in 2013-14 were “highly successful” and they varied widely from one another. The courses were successful due to their design and the way they were delivered to students, although there wasn’t a systematic pattern in online course success.

https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2015/06/10/report-finds-successful-online-2-year-college-courses-california

by Meg Bernhard, Chronicle of Higher Ed

The unaccredited education programs known as coding boot camps are proliferating, and gaining more students. This year the number of graduates from such programs is expected to hit 16,000, up from 6,740 in 2014, according to a recent survey by Course Report, a business that focuses on the sector. At the boot camps, which are not affiliated with colleges or universities and which offer in-person instruction, students can work and study programming for 10 hours a day — or more — for months at a time. One such program, AIT Learning, based in Washington, D.C., says on its website that prospective students should expect to study 10 to 14 hours a day and to “work with peers till late and make some real-world programs.” The programs aren’t cheap, either. A summary of the Course Report survey notes that the average cost of the courses is more than $11,000. There are about 70 of the programs in the United States and Canada today.

http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/coding-boot-camps-are-on-the-rise/56915

by MIT

MIT Professional Education will offer its first online course on Cybersecurity to a global audience of professionals from Sept. 15 – Oct. 27, 2015. This course, featuring 14 faculty from the world-renowned MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), is offered in support of a campus-wide MIT initiative to counter the real and damaging threat of cybersecurity attacks facing organizations around the globe. Additional sessions of the course will also be offered from Nov. 10 – Dec. 22, 2015 and Jan. 12 – Feb. 23, 2016. The course launching on Sept. 15 is being offered at an introductory price of $545.

http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20150609005477/en/MIT-Professional-Education-Launches-Online-Cybersecurity-Global#.VXeAxdJViko

by Meg Bernhard, Chronicle of Higher Ed

Representatives of the California Community Colleges on Monday announced upgrades in their online-course system, the California Virtual Campus, that are intended to improve students’ completion rates. The college system said the effort was designed to make it easier for students to find courses that fulfill transfer requirements and create pathways to the California State University system. Among the improvements are a design that works better on mobile phones and includes an improved search function. The community-college system also has increased efforts to improve the quality of its online courses, to better prepare students to take such courses, and to train instructors to teach them. Those efforts fall broadly under the system’s Online Education Initiative.

http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/2-year-colleges-in-calif-hope-online-course-upgrades-will-improve-completion/100429

By Meris Stansbury, eCampus News

Hundreds of thousands across the world enroll in a MOOC that targets English. The humanities aren’t often known for their pull when it comes to attracting a MOOC crowd, but one online learning platform may have found a global crowd pleaser with its current English Language Learning (ELL) course that’s quickly become the largest attended MOOC on record. The biggest single run of a free online course began on FutureLearn last month, with more than 400,000 learners enrolled from over 150 counties.

http://www.ecampusnews.com/top-news/largest-mooc-english-278/

by Jeffrey R. Young, Chronicle of Higher Ed

A few colleges are trying a new incentive to get professors to participate in professional-development workshops: digital badges. The idea of offering badges has become popular in education-technology circles in the past few years, in most cases as an alternative to a traditional college diploma, or even as a different way of giving grades in courses. The goal is to create an easy way for people to show employers they have attained a given skill. After all, who ever looks at a college transcript?

http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/can-digital-badges-help-encourage-professors-to-take-teaching-workshops/56901

by ANYA KAMENETZ, NPR

Barring a last-minute legal decision, as of July 1, the nation’s for-profit colleges are going to be subject to a new Education Department rule known as gainful employment. That is: Do students end up earning enough to pay off their loans? A trade group of career colleges is suing to stop the rule, but this is far from the only monkey on the sector’s back. As recently as 2010, these schools enrolled one in nine college students. Today, some are shutting down, cutting back, tanking in the stock market, even going bankrupt. The bellwether was the giant Corinthian Colleges a year ago, but many others are in trouble as well. Even the University of Phoenix, which five years ago had 460,000 students, has seen that number fall by half.

http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2015/06/08/412024783/the-forces-behind-the-decline-of-for-profit-colleges

By Mike Amante, eSchool News

pi-ipadPart of the magic of the magic of the iPad are all the great apps that can turn them into so much more than a tablet. With the maker movement in schools in full force across the country, it seems like students everywhere are excited and interested in learning about programming, electronics, robotics, and more. When apps can help them make and learn, all the better. How can these two ideas be melded together to create a stellar learning experience? This is where the Raspberry Pi, a small credit card size computer that was created in England just a few years ago, comes in. The Raspberry Pi, which runs an open source Linux operating system, was created with the intention of teaching programming and computer science concepts to students. The beauty of the Pi is that you can plug it into a TV or monitor, add a keyboard, and you have a fully functional computer for under $40.

http://www.eschoolnews.com/2015/06/08/raspberry-pi-ipad-136/

by Seb Murray, Business Because

Evolution of online learning forces business schools to rethink how they deliver content, as competition with innovative digital providers heats up. The digital revolution in education is in full swing, spearheaded by online companies deploying technology that is disrupting the sector with courses on everything from data analytics to advanced accounting. Digitally focused education companies such as Coursera, the Mooc or massive open online course developer and 2U, whose tech powers business school programs on the web, have emerged in the past decade along with dozens more who are shaking up the traditional university. The evolution of online learning has forced business schools to rethink how they deliver their content. Tech has enabled schools to provide flexible learning solutions by beaming lectures directly to computers and mobile devices.

http://www.businessbecause.com/news/mba-distance-learning/3305/blended-online-and-campus-learning-embraced

By Tara García Mathewson, Education Dive

Employers are increasingly seeing the promise of free schooling as a worthwhile benefit to offer employees. The New Hampshire Union Leader reports that Southern New Hampshire University is the latest to forge such a partnership, this time with health insurance company Anthem Inc., opening its online degree programs to 55,000 Anthem employees nationwide in the second stage of a pilot program that began in-state. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, analysts see this move, along with other recent partnerships by Starbucks and Fiat Chrysler, as the beginning of a trend toward employer-directed degree attainment.

http://www.educationdive.com/news/online-education-partnerships-increasingly-popular-among-employers/400174/

by Education World

A new report from CompetencyWorks called Implementing Competency Education in K-12 Systems: Insights from Local Leaders outlines effective ways districts have and can implement personalized learning models that meet individual student needs and teach competency-based skills. “This paper highlights strategies to engage, motivate, and teach all students to proficiency and mastery; depicts shifts in instruction toward deeper learning and meaningful assessments for learning; while exploring models of distributed leadership and educator empowerment,” according to the International Association for K-12 Online Learning.

http://www.educationworld.com/a_news/new-report-outlines-ways-implement-competency-based-learning-702222762

By Clea Simon, Harvard Gazette

Massive open online courses, or MOOCS, will not destroy the university as we know it, says Lawrence S. Bacow, member of the Harvard Corporation and former president of Tufts University. While this burgeoning educational trend may seem poised to undercut four-year residential colleges, it may not be the cost-conscious alternative it seems. But it may offer new opportunities — and new ideas — to revitalize higher education. This new technology must be understood to be utilized properly by universities — and by informed consumers. For starters, despite the apparent cost savings, online learning is actually expensive. Like most startups, it currently lacks a coherent business model, with the vast majority of costs falling to the university, or content provider. In addition to the expense of creating a class — including faculty training and salary — online learning requires up-to-date technological infrastructure to optimize delivery.

http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2015/06/a-clearer-role-for-moocs/

by Chuck Cohn, Forbes

Few CEOs would dispute the importance of continuing education and professional development for their team members. However, those same CEOs may be wondering how they can fit learning into their own days when each hour seems to be populated with meetings, progress reports, and pressing commitments. This challenge described my own situation during my first years as the CEO of Varsity Tutors. On some days, it still does. In recent years, I have been introduced to or found several resources that can help a busy CEO keep learning and growing professionally and personally.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckcohn/2015/06/05/how-to-keep-learning-as-a-busy-ceo/

by Alexandra Wolfe, Wall Street Journal

For now, Dr. Koller is looking forward to launching the online M.B.A. program. In it, students can get a full M.B.A. for a targeted cost of around $20,000, or choose blocks of expertise, such as digital marketing or accounting, in which to earn certificates (cost: $79 each). She also plans to continue expanding the company internationally by acquiring courses in different languages. Ultimately, Dr. Koller wants to make the school experience like “turning the tap—and great education comes out for anybody.” Eventually, “we’ll have data from hundreds of thousands, millions of people at a level that’s unprecedented,” she says. “I think we’re at the cusp of a revolution of treating human learning as science.”

http://www.wsj.com/articles/daphne-koller-on-the-future-of-online-education-1433532321

BY MOLLY BLOOM, Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Proponents of combining online and in-person teaching say it works for students who don’t learn by sitting through lectures, but critics say seniors at Atlanta’s Crim High School Googled their way to diplomas. Some seniors at Atlanta’s Crim High School Googled their way to diplomas this spring, looking up the answers to test questions on the internet while enrolled in a flawed online education pilot program, teachers told the Atlanta school board. Students in the pilot took classes in school computer labs supervised by teachers. The teachers were also available to help them with lessons, district accountability chief Bill Caritj said. Some of the seniors were catching up before graduation; others were taking courses for the first time, he said. But some teachers and parents said students cheated their way through the coursework in order to earn credit.

http://www.govtech.com/education/High-School-Seniors-Easily-Cheat-in-Flawed-Online-Education-Program.html

By Julie Davis, THE Journal

“The 4 Cs of Tech Implementation”: critical thinking, creativity, communication and collaboration. In other words, we will be looking at what can happen in the classroom when technology integration is implemented. I do not believe these things only happen in a tech-rich environment, I am just sharing firsthand with you what I have seen happen when technology is involved.

http://thejournal.com/articles/2015/06/04/the-4-cs-of-tech-implementation.aspx

By Amanda Wilcox, Times Warner Cable News

UNC system teachers from across the state are learning more about online teaching as the new education avenue continues to expand across the U.S. The National Center for Education Statistics reports more than 46,000 students took classes exclusively online through North Carolina universities in 2012. This week, 28 teachers from every UNC school are in Wilmington for the Instructional Innovation Incubator (i3) conference to learn more about teaching online. “Most of them have never taught online before. So they are brave and they are very motivated to learn more about teaching in online environments,” said Diana Ashe, with the UNCW Center for Teaching Excellence. The week-long conference is giving the instructors the opportunity to develop their own online courses. Thursday, they also learned about the tools available to them.

http://www.twcnews.com/nc/north-carolina/education/2015/06/4/educators-from-every-unc-university-expand-online-teaching-abilities.html