Techno-News Blog

August 31, 2015

5 ways to expand federal educational OER

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By Laura Devaney, eSchool News

In a letter sent earlier this month, a group of ed-tech stakeholders urged the Obama administration to make federally-funded educational materials available as Open Educational Resources (OER). Creating OER, which are free to use, share, and edit, would help increase educators’ access to educational, training, and instructional materials, according to the more than 85 stakeholder organizations that signed the letter. The letter was a response to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy’s request for suggestions around how to strengthen the U.S. Open Government National Action Plan.

http://www.eschoolnews.com/2015/08/24/open-educational-resources-095/

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Campuses transition to the ‘Internet of Things’

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By Travis Seekins, University Business

Human-to human communications have been the bedrock of our lives. More recently, machine-to-machine streaming has become a dominant and often disruptive dance partner in the communication landscape. And now we are glimpsing a world where human-to-machine links culminate in one seamlessly orchestrated waltz. Imagine smart sensors embedded in the school parking garage, alerting you to a much coveted, and now suddenly available, spot right by your office. Real-time, actionable data will help schools know exactly when to service equipment and achieve savings from the most optimal use of facilities and energy. Smart doors and security cameras will know when to open, shut, lock and monitor movement through a space. The mobile devices flooding campuses today are the first wave of an era of interconnected devices, aptly named the Internet of Things, or IoT. By tapping into the data transmitted by inanimate objects around us, schools can achieve greater revenue and value by moving away from transactional interactions with students, staff, providers and assets.

http://www.universitybusiness.com/article/campuses-transition-%E2%80%98internet-things

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25 ways to strengthen workforce education

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by eCampus News

California Community Colleges Task Force on Workforce Education recommends ways to increase competitiveness, job creation: Key recommendations of the task force call on the college system to:

• Revise career technical education (CTE) curriculum approval processes to ensure that instructional programs keep pace with industry needs.

• Increase the pool of qualified CTE instructors through hiring practices and consider options for meeting minimum qualifications to better integrate experienced industry professionals into instructional programs.

• Expand partnerships with employers to increase student work-based learning opportunities such as apprenticeships and internships that provide real workplace experience.

• Strengthen students’ career planning, work readiness, employability and technology skills as they build their occupation-specific skills.

• Establish a sustained, supplemental funding source to increase community college capacity to create, adapt and maintain quality CTE courses and programs responsive to regional labor market needs.

http://www.ecampusnews.com/top-news/strengthen-workforce-education-035/

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August 30, 2015

8 Tips and Tools for Teaching Digital Citizenship

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By Cory Hurst, THE Journal

Digital citizenship must be taught from a young age, and from many different angles. Teaching students every aspect of online behavior and etiquette can be daunting. To make this necessary process less intimidating, I have compiled a list of four tips and four tools that will allow every educator to create lessons and units that can help make all of your students better digital citizens. First, the tips.

http://thejournal.com/articles/2015/08/04/8-tips-and-tools-for-teaching-digital-citizenship.aspx

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Drake U Supports Diverse Student Devices With Virtualized Applications

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By Leila Meyer, Campus Technology

When the time came to refresh the computer hardware in Drake University’s labs, the Infrastructure and Security Services (ISS) team turned to virtualization to reduce their hardware needs while providing students with anytime, anywhere access to applications on their own devices. Many of the students at Drake bring Mac laptops to campus, whereas much of university’s software is Windows-based. The university wanted to implement a virtualization system that would let students access applications regardless of the type of device they were using. “We were looking essentially for a seamless environment that would work for both Windows or Mac users, or really on any platform — iPads, mobile phones,” said Chris Mielke, team lead of ISS Infrastructure Services.

http://campustechnology.com/articles/2015/08/17/drake-u-supports-diverse-student-devices-with-virtualized-applications.aspx

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Online Learning Brings Opportunities and Challenges for Students with Disabilities

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By JEFF HILES, WYSO

College students are surrounded by technology inside and outside of the classroom. And increasingly educators are reaching learners through smart phones and laptops. Community Voices producer Jeff Hiles is an instructional designer at Wright State University. He finds that for some students with disabilities, the move to online learning brings new opportunities and new challenges.

http://wyso.org/post/online-learning-brings-opportunities-and-challenges-students-disabilities

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August 29, 2015

Student loan debt: America’s next big crisis

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by Mitchell D. Weiss, Detroit Free Press
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York released its latest Report on Household Debt and Credit Developments, and the news isn’t good for student-borrowers. As of the second calendar quarter ending June 30, seriously delinquent student loans (which the FRBNY describes as those whose payments are 90 or more days past due), increased to 11.5% of the $1.19 trillion dollars’ worth of education loans, versus 11.1% in the first quarter. Before you dismiss four-tenths of one percent as decimal dust, consider this: Although student loans make up only 10% of all consumer debt, the amount of seriously past due student loan payments total nearly one-third of all seriously past-due debt payments. What’s more, of the total $1.19 trillion in outstanding education-related loans, only about half that amount is actually in repayment at this time (the balance is deferred because the borrowers are still in school). So instead of 11.5% being seriously delinquent, it’s actually twice that amount: 23%.
http://www.freep.com/story/money/personalfinance/2015/08/23/credit-dotcom-student-loan-crisis/32015421/
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Who hacked Rutgers? University spending up to $3M to stop next cyber attack

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By Kelly Heyboer, NJ Advance

The identity of the hacker or hackers who crippled Rutgers University computer networks at least four times during the last school year is still a mystery. But Rutgers is spending big money to make sure cyber attackers don’t knock the school offline again. The state university has hired three cyber security firms to help protect the school against another attack, according to Rutgers officials and documents obtained through the state’s Open Public Records Act.

http://www.nj.com/education/2015/08/who_hacked_rutgers_university_spending_up_to_3m_to.html

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UC MERCED EXPANSION DELAYED BY BUDGET CUTS, ONLINE CLASSES

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By MATT KRUPNICK, The Hechinger Report

A decade has passed since America’s newest research university opened amid farmland in central California. And surprisingly little on the landscape has changed. Cows still graze alongside the University of California, Merced. There’s no student union, and some researchers are based miles away at a former Air Force base. Merced’s experience should be a warning, said Henry Eyring, co-author of “The Innovative University: Changing the DNA of Higher Education from the Inside Out” and academic vice president at Brigham Young University’s Idaho campus. As much as politicians like to cut ribbons in front of new campuses, he said, traditional colleges have become much more expensive than online courses and other new means of delivering education.

http://abc30.com/education/uc-merced-expansion-delayed-by-budget-cuts-online-classes/952452/

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August 28, 2015

Data, Technology, and the Great Unbundling of Higher Education

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by Ryan Craig and Allison Williams, EDUCAUSE Review

In other industries, unbundling has driven fundamental change. Over the past decade, sales of recorded music are down 50 percent and continue to fall each year. Digital technology has forced a revolution in a business model that, in the past, relied on bundling the music that consumers wanted (singles) with the music that they didn’t want (the rest of the album). Now, in a music industry unbundled by technology, consumers purchase only the products they want. In the television industry, viewers now watch individual shows, thanks to DVRs and Netflix, rather than channels or networks. Once viewers are given a mechanism for paying only for the shows they watch rather than the thousands they don’t, cable and satellite TV bills will collapse. Where does this leave the higher education bundle? At present, degrees remain the currency of the labor market. But as currency, they’re about as portable as the giant stone coins used on the island of Yap. What if technology could produce a finer currency that would be accepted by consumers and employers alike?

http://er.educause.edu/articles/2015/8/data-technology-and-the-great-unbundling-of-higher-education

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Stanford PERTS Intros Mindset Kits for Educators

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By Joshua Bolkan, Campus Technology

Stanford University’s Project for Education Research that Scales (PERTS) has launched a set of free online resources, dubbed the Mindset Kit, designed to help educators and parents understand how to help students develop learning mindsets. “When students have learning mindsets — for example, when they believe that intelligence is something they can develop and feel they belong and can succeed in the classroom — they are more motivated, engaged and resilient,” according to a Stanford news release. “Studies have also shown that certain messages can help students develop learning mindsets and, in turn, do better in school.”

http://campustechnology.com/articles/2015/08/20/stanford-perts-debuts-mindset-kits-for-educators.aspx

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U California System Promotes Digital Portfolio to Grads and Students

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By Dian Schaffhauser, Campus Technology

A company that helps users link their achievements documented in their digital portfolios with firms that may be seeking those kinds of skills has inked a deal with the University of California System to make it available to current students and graduates. Portfolium could draw on the system’s 239,000 current students as well as living alumni to document their work and make it visible to hiring managers. The agreement comes after a year-long pilot at the University of California San Diego. There, the alumni department made the online service available as a benefit to graduates. The program allows users to upload work samples and make them visible in online profiles in LinkedIn and Facebook. Portfolium created a widget that allowed people to confirm their university status and set up their profile.

http://campustechnology.com/articles/2015/08/20/u-california-system-promotes-digital-portfolio-to-grads-and-students.aspx

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August 27, 2015

Assessing competency-based education in terms of outcomes

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By Tara García Mathewson, Education Dive

Higher education has long been consumed with access rather than outcomes, but developing metrics for monitoring competency-based programs could provide an opportunity to change that. If nontraditional programs are going to get federal education dollars to operate, Michael B. Horn, the co-founder of the Clayton Christensen Institute and executive director of its education program, advises awarding dollars based on student outcomes. He also suggests in an op-ed for CompetencyWorks and reposted by eCampus News that policy makers move away from all-or-nothing access to such funding so programs are incentivized to do better rather than meet bare minimums.

http://www.educationdive.com/news/assessing-competency-based-education-in-terms-of-outcomes/404160/

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How Coursera Cracked The Chinese Market

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by Dhawal Shah – Tech Crunch

Coursera announced in July that they crossed 1 million registrations as China became their second largest market, overtaking India. Most U.S. consumer Internet companies have a hard time breaking into China. Cultural differences and the Internet firewall are a huge barrier to entry. Even tech giants like Google, Facebook and Twitter have pulled out or found themselves on the wrong side of the Chinese firewall. So how did Coursera, a relatively young company, achieve this significant milestone?

http://techcrunch.com/2015/08/21/how-coursera-cracked-the-chinese-market/

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Myths and Realities of Online Training

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by Donald V. McCain, TD

Even after many years of online training in business, industry, and academia, there remain many myths concerning this method of delivery. Online training is impersonal. Online training can be made personal. The leader can post his profile, engage in discussions with the participants, and be available through video, chat, or email. Try using the coffee shop method by creating an informal virtual gathering place to share noncourse-related areas of interest….

https://www.td.org/Publications/Newsletters/Links/2015/08/Myths-and-Realities-of-Online-Training

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August 26, 2015

ASU’s MOOC lets students around globe earn freshman-year credit online

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by Kaila White, The Republic

More than 12,500 people from 163 countries have enrolled in ASU’s first for-credit massive open online course, or MOOC, which launched Thursday. Arizona State University has launched the first class of its Global Freshman Academy, which gives anyone in the world the opportunity to earn freshman-level university credit online without having to go through the college admissions process. The countries with the most students are the U.S., India and the United Kingdom.

http://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/tempe/2015/08/20/asu-mooc-global-freshman-academy-edx/32074313/

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8 little-known video resources popular with teachers

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By Laura Devaney, eSchool News

The use of video in education is growing by leaps and bounds. Videos are used in classrooms to support student learning, they play a critical role in flipped learning, and they also figure prominently in teacher professional development. One of the best parts about educational videos? Educators can usually find a free high-quality video to suit any number of needs. OpenEd, creator of an online library of free and open K-12 resources, recently analyzed the use of videos in its resource library. Eight video publishers appeared as lesser-known — that is to say, you’re probably not on a first-name basis with them — but still popular among teachers. The eight video publishers emerged as resources that teachers frequently assign. Those publishers include:

http://www.eschoolnews.com/2015/08/20/eight-video-resources-095/

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Should students learn coding? Students, schools disagree

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By Marco della Cava, USA Today

Parents across the U.S. are eager for their children to learn coding and other computer science skills, but their message hasn’t yet hit the in-box of school administrators. That’s the finding of a new Gallup study commissioned by Google that spotlights a potentially perilous economic disconnect as tech companies struggle to enlarge their engineering talent pools. Among key and contrasting findings are the facts while 90 percent of parents see computer science, or CS, as “a good use of school resources” (and 66 percent say CS should be required learning alongside other core classes), fewer than 8 percent of administrators believe parent demand is high. They also cite a lack of trained teachers as a top barrier to offering CS courses. Three quarters of principals report no CS programs in their school.

http://www.eschoolnews.com/2015/08/21/coding-students-survey-672/

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August 25, 2015

‘Women Supporting Women Online’

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By Carl Straumsheim, Inside Higher Ed

Bay Path University is having to adjust downward the number of students it believes will want to study online through its American Women’s College, but university leaders say they see fully online education as one of many endeavors that will help them remain a financially sound women’s college in the future. Bay Path, a private university in Longmeadow, Mass., had hoped to enroll as many as 5,000 adult women in the first five years of the fully online college, which launched in 2013. With roughly 450 students on track to begin studying this fall and a total online enrollment of about 800, the university is less than one-fifth of the way there. “We overestimated the enrollment,” said Carol A. Leary, the university’s president. “But it will get to 4-5,000,” she added. “I can guarantee it, because you’ll have more and more digital natives wanting this kind of education in the future.”

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/08/21/bay-path-u-seeks-build-data-driven-online-college-women

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Survey: Here’s why technology matters to college students

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By Ron Bethke, eCampus News

Students break down what aspects of technology are most useful to them in the classroom in a new survey. According to the results of a new survey from VitalSource Technologies, college students overwhelmingly agree that technology boosts grades, improves their overall learning experience and alleviates costs. In the fifth annual survey of its kind, 500 currently enrolled college students were polled in order to gauge how much importance they place on the growing role of technology in higher education classrooms.

http://www.ecampusnews.com/technologies/survey-technology-student-123/

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Candy Crush: is it a model for online courses?

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BY CHRIS HAVERGAL, Times Higher Education

Lecturers who find themselves competing with Candy Crush for their students’ attention may not be fans of the mobile game. But a new paper argues that, far from complaining about the tile-matching puzzle, academics should harness its addictive appeal in order to tackle the problem of poor retention on online courses. Writing in the International Journal of Information and Learning Technology, mother-and-daughter researchers Evangeline and Maria Varonis say that many of the structural features of Candy Crush could be emulated in programme design. These include the way that the game groups content into identifiable, compact modules, allows access to these levels only when previous units have been completed, and provides clear, measurable objectives for the behaviour expected of learners.

https://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/news/candy-crush-it-model-online-courses

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