Techno-News Blog

By Dian Schaffhauser, Campus Technology

Purdue University found a way to create a flexible and inviting learning space for on-campus learners while also delivering high-quality audio and video recording for distance students. Determined to provide a better experience for everybody, the university laid out specific requirements for the new physical space: soundproofing, acoustic panels and ceiling mics (which would be out of the way and less intimidating for students physically present). To be able to turn lectures around quickly for online use, Conrad’s team chose Telestream appliances to do the encoding, which would allow the school to provide recordings within 20 minutes from the time the lecture was completed. The encoding process would capture the lecture, creating a massive file, then compress that down into an MPEG-4 file and push it onto a Web server. To make sure lectures weren’t lost due to technical difficulty, the division used two layers of backup. And for real-time lecture streaming, the staff implemented a Wowza Media Systems server too.

http://campustechnology.com/articles/2015/06/24/designing-learning-spaces-for-both-online-and-on-campus-delivery.aspx

By Rhea Kelly, Campus Technology

“Bring Your Own Device,” or BYOD, has been an ed tech buzzword for so long that it’s hard to imagine a learning environment without student-owned laptops, tablets, smartphones and the like. In fact, in its 2015 Top 10 IT Issues, Educause referred to BYOD as part of “the new normal,” pointing out that technologies such as mobile, online education, cloud and BYOD are forcing IT to retool and redefine its support strategies and security policies. “What began in the last decade as a faculty or staff member connecting a personal laptop to the campus network has exploded into an ever-growing ecosystem of personally owned smartphones, tablets, cloud storage, processing, and other individually owned technologies that are everywhere we are,” wrote Mark Askren, CIO at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, in the ECAR research report “The Consumerization of Technology and the Bring-Your-Own-Everything (BYOE) Era of Higher Education.”

http://campustechnology.com/articles/2015/06/25/tackling-byoe-in-higher-ed.aspx

By Dennis Pierce, eSchool News

At E.L. Haynes High School in Washington, D.C., 44 percent of students are English language learners, have special needs, or both. Yet all of the students in this urban charter school’s first graduating class have been accepted into college, said Principal Caroline Hill—and she attributed this success to a personalized, self-paced approach made possible by technology. E.L. Haynes has a one-to-one laptop program, and students also can bring their own devices to school. Using a flipped learning approach, teachers record their lessons and post them online, so students can watch the content over and over again until they understand—and class time is used to provide more personalized support.

http://www.eschoolnews.com/2015/06/29/flipped-special-ed-618/

By Ron Bethke, eCampus News

A new coding platform has a mission to elevate the state of coding education in higher-ed classrooms around the world; and one way it’s doing this is through professor buy-in. Bloomberg’s CodeCon platform, which features new weekly challenges this summer, is a browser-based, e-learning platform that enables cloud-hosted programming contests and seeks to reshape the way people improve their coding skills. Contests are based largely on efficiency and problem solving. Participants are asked to write optimized code that solves problems with real-world applications within a specified amount of time and memory constraints while accounting for all possible test cases.

http://www.ecampusnews.com/top-news/codecon-coding-education-777/

by Christine Greenhow & Andy Henion, MSU Today

Social-networking sites such as Facebook can help students learn scientific literacy and other complex subjects that often receive short shrift in today’s time-strapped classrooms. In a first-of-its-kind study, Michigan State University’s Christine Greenhow found that high school and college students engaged in vigorous, intelligent debate about scientific issues in a voluntary Facebook forum. Such informal learning not only could supplement the content knowledge students acquire in class, but also connect them with professionals and experts in the field, spur interest in careers and inspire civic engagement.

http://msutoday.msu.edu/news/2015/is-facebook-the-next-frontier-for-online-learning/

by VICTOR JOHNSON, Immortal

Electrical engineers have made a major breakthrough in fiber optic communications which has the potential to lead to super-fast, cheap Internet. When sending data through fiber optic systems — such as those which serve as the backbone of the Internet, cable, wireless and landline networks — the distance data travels before it becomes indecipherable has proven to be a major setback when it comes to data transmission rates. But this hurdle has been overcome by photonics researchers at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) who managed to send data a record-breaking 12,000 kilometers through fiber lines with standard amplifiers and no repeaters, Phys.org reported.

http://www.immortal.org/10582/fast-cheap-fiber-optic-internet/

By Tara García Mathewson, Education Dive

The for-profit college industry has lost a second round in the battle over the U.S. Department of Education’s gainful employment regulations. The New York Times reports that U.S. District Court Judge John D. Bates in the District of Columbia ruled Tuesday that the department has a right to require colleges to prove their graduates make enough to pay back their student loans in order to be eligible for federal student aid dollars. According to The Chronicle of Higher Education, the lawsuit was the highest hurdle preventing implementation of the regulation, but lawmakers still could block the rules by refusing to fund the department’s enforcement of them.

http://www.educationdive.com/news/gainful-employment-rule-upheld-by-dc-judge/401268/

by Jacqueline Thomsen, Inside Higher Ed

One women’s college is making sure that all students who want a degree can earn one. Alverno College, an all-women’s institution in Wisconsin, is phasing out its once popular weekend courses in favor of a hybrid option for students, a move the college’s president said will allow the student body to better balance personal and professional demands while still pursuing a degree. President Mary Meehan said when the weekend program at Alverno began more than 40 years ago, the institution would see women travel from as far as Colorado to attend the courses. But over the years, students found working full-time during the week and giving up weekends to be too demanding. Enrollment numbers fell from about 1,000 a decade ago to roughly 100 now, and the college started exploring other options.

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/06/29/one-womens-college-introduces-hybrid-degree-program-help-women-juggle-their

By Amy X. Wang, Future Tense

Carnegie Mellon University has a problem. It’s a good one, this time—unlike when it lost dozens of researchers and scientists to Uber. The university’s new problem is not one of lack but of excess: Too many students are interested in taking a popular computer science course, and there’s not enough physical space in the classroom to accommodate them all. Rather than move the course to a football stadium, the Pittsburgh-based university plans to open the course up to more students by moving the majority of its instructional content from the classroom to the Internet. But it’s not just uploading a series of lectures and calling it an online course. The university will rely on a “blended learning” approach, combining video lectures, optional minilectures, and a handful of face-to-face group meetings between students and instructors for concepts that need to be reinforced in person.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2015/06/29/blended_learning_carnegie_mellon_university_will_debut_new_online_instructional.html

by Peter Stokes, Inside Higher Ed

We see millions of students pursuing degrees wholly online and millions more taking the odd online course for credit, while still millions more are signing up for non-credit-bearing MOOCs. That goes some way to underscoring the fact that online learning is an established and maturing field. But it’s also flattening out. Today the growth has slowed, almost to a standstill, and thus the high-octane revenue growth phase may be behind us. This may explain, in part, why the field is starting to be talked about in new ways, particularly as new sorts of institutions get involved, as the motivations for deploying an ever-growing number of learning technologies gradually begin to shift, as learning scientists leverage the growing quantities of data captured by these technologies and as the organizational structures online learning operates under begin to take new shape.

https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2015/07/30/its-time-shift-discussion-online-learning-digital-strategy-essay

By Ian Quillen, US News

By forming online learning institutes and collecting data about student progress, programs hope to improve virtual learning. The University of Phoenix and DeVry University have implemented systems that run an analysis to look for troubling patterns in a student’s progress. For many online students, the flexibility of an online degree or certification program outweighs the possibility of a less immersive student experience. As a result, some programs are using innovative methods to foster an online educational experience that is more supportive, engaging, and responsive to student demands. Among those tactics are the use of big, integrated data and analytics to help identify and support struggling students, the creation of research bodies devoted to studying online learning methods, and the development of collaborative relationships with virtual student clubs and associations.

http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/articles/2015/06/29/3-ways-colleges-are-working-to-improve-online-learning

by Danny Crichton, Tech Crunch

With the rise of the internet, it seemed like education was on the cusp of a complete revolution. Today, though, you would be excused for not seeing much of a difference between the way we learn and how we did so twenty years ago. I have attempted to tease out these challenges in two previous essays on what the modern university still offers us and how we might learn in the future. One thesis that becomes more clearer over time is simply that we have ignored the more human aspects of education, replacing it instead with a “give ’em tablets and they will learn” mentality. The next wave of education innovation won’t come from dumping technology on the problem. Instead, it will come from deeply engaging with people and empowering them to make learning all their own.

http://techcrunch.com/2015/06/27/education-next-wave/

By Joshua Bolkan, THE Journal

The University of California, Irvine (UCI) Extension is offering two new online courses designed to help teachers develop their skills in cognitive and student-centered learning. The courses, “Building Cognitive Curriculum” and “Motivation and Responsibility in the Student-Centered Classroom,” are currently open for registration and will run July 6-September 13. Both courses are requirements for a larger program, “Student-Centered Learning Specialized Studies,” launching in the fall and designed to offer educators insight into classroom practices that can be implemented immediately.

http://thejournal.com/articles/2015/06/25/u-california-irvine-extension-launches-online-courses-in-student-centered-learning.aspx

by L. Lamar Nisly, Sarah Cecire, Melissa Friesen, and Amanda Sensenig, Tomorrow’s Professor

Miller (2011) defined student engagement as “students’ willingness to actively participate in the learning process and to persist despite obstacles and challenges. Indicators of student engagement include class attendance and participation, submission of required work, involvement in the learning environment, and participation in the extra-curricular learning opportunities provided on their campus” (2). Each of the three case studies presented here details an example of course assignments that led to significant engagement by students.

http://cgi.stanford.edu/~dept-ctl/cgi-bin/tomprof/enewsletter.php?msgno=1424

by Chunfang Zhou, Aparna Purushothaman, iJet

This paper provides a literature review aiming to discuss the need for fostering creativity and digital inclusion among women students in developing contexts by addressing the second order digital divide in online skills. As the literature review indicates, we are in the change towards creative society and creativity is the core competency of students to be mastered in the digital age. The digital technologies also provide conditions of developing creativity, for example, YouTube can be regarded as a creative platform. This paper also discusses the links between creativity, learning and knowledge, digital divide in developing contexts especially the second order digital divide as the main barrier to women students’ learning. This further implies how to teach creativity more effectively in the future.

http://online-journals.org/index.php/i-jet/article/view/4248

by Larissa Garza, Phoenix Business Journal

The Apple Watch is being banned in universities and standardized testing centers worldwide to prevent cheating. The Apple Watch, along with other wearable technology, is forcing a number of universities and colleges to institute bans on the technology to curb potential cheating on exams and tests. While no university in Arizona has instituted such bans on wearable tech, the Chronicle for Higher Education reports that universities in Australia have recently placed restrictions on smart watches. The University of New South Wales also banned wristbands during exams.

http://www.bizjournals.com/phoenix/news/2015/06/23/apple-watch-wearable-technology-raising-cheating.html

by Digital Journal

It’s free to access and free to teach. How did education get so simple? Launched in May with an innovative approach, Learnquiq.com combines social networking with online learning. Quite literally becoming an ‘information super highway’ the new platform already offers over 75 self-paced courses and an education-based newsfeed. Illuminating students on everything from self-improvement to technology one could ask, what’s in it for the teachers? Answer being, a commission-based payout structure and the satisfaction of working with students hungry to learn.

http://www.digitaljournal.com/pr/2594775

by The Virginian-Pilot

Every Virginia student enrolling in high school this fall must take a course online, or part of a course, in order to fulfill state-mandated requirements for graduation. The move, approved three years ago by state lawmakers, was designed to familiarize students with technologies reshaping education, business and every other aspect of contemporary life. Online learning has grown exponentially in the past decade, particularly in higher education, where more and more colleges and universities have embraced the flexibility it allows. And Virtual Virginia, the commonwealth’s online high school program, is poised to recruit as many as 100 students to pilot the state’s first full-time online diploma program.

http://hamptonroads.com/2015/06/more-steps-toward-online-school

By ROGER MCKINNEY, Columbia Tribune

The University of Missouri has established a 10 percent tuition discount for online courses available to current military members, veterans and their spouses and children. The discount applies to base tuition for a maximum of 150 hours of undergraduate credits and 75 hours of graduate credits through Mizzou Online. Recipients must be seeking a degree. Those who qualify for the award must maintain a minimum 2.0 GPA to remain eligible. The discount was created because many veterans have exhausted their military educational benefits or don’t qualify for full coverage, MU officials said. MU Chancellor R. Bowen Loftin said during a Wednesday news conference that the tuition discount will improve access to higher education.

http://www.columbiatribune.com/news/education/mu-to-offer-military-discount-for-online-classes/article_b455cd73-16ea-544d-b9e6-db4218a4f3e8.html

by Kunal Chawla, EdSurge

Learning online can be a very lonely process. You sit with your computer, working for the most part in a quarantined digital island, unaware of your peers and their struggles in the course. In this post I want to highlight some ways of connecting online students and creating a vibrant learning community. Here are some ideas I have tried while making courses on Python Programming and iPhone App Development with Udacity.

https://www.edsurge.com/n/2015-06-24-5-essential-steps-to-building-community-for-your-online-course

by WGBH The Takeaway

Three years ago, Harvard University and MIT embarked on a unique experiment when they launched a nonprofit called edX. The start-up promised a free online education, with university-level classes for anyone living anywhere across the globe. The massive open online courses (MOOCs) offered by edX held the promise of potentially revolutionizing higher education and helping with the problem of skyrocketing college costs. The Takeaway talks with Drew Gilpin Faust, the president of Harvard, and Rafael Reif, the president of MIT, about the most important lessons they have learned from their pioneering venture.

http://blogs.wgbh.org/on-campus/2015/6/23/harvard-mit-presidents-share-lessons-online-learning-experiment/