Techno-News Blog

By Dian Schaffhauser, Campus Technology

Instructors at two universities on opposite sides of the country, both with extensive experience in flipped learning, are continuing to tweak the model, according to articles recently published in their respective student newspapers. In flipped learning lecture is typically delivered through pre-recorded lectures that students watch before coming to class; then class time is dedicated to other activities. Harvard University has been holding “active learning” lunches for faculty interested in flipping their courses. An article by student reporters C. Ramsey Fahs and Daniel Wood reported an increase by faculty in the flipped model, as well as “logistical challenges and student concerns.”

https://campustechnology.com/articles/2015/10/20/flipped-classes-continue-evolving-at-stanford-and-harvard.aspx?admgarea=topic.software

By Dian Schaffhauser, Campus Technology

The University of Alaska Anchorage shares best practices from its institution-wide electronic portfolio implementation and new approaches to gain rapid traction among faculty and students. The University of Alaska Anchorage introduced e-portfolios to the campus in a big way this year, rolling out the technology across the entire institution. And as anyone who has attempted such a feat quickly realizes, large-scale e-portfolio adoption takes more energy and commitment than the typical technology project. That’s because a healthy digital portfolio program requires ongoing support for adoption among faculty and students. Here’s how U Alaska is tackling the work.

https://campustechnology.com/articles/2015/10/21/5-lessons-worth-learning-about-e-portfolios.aspx

By Dian Schaffhauser, THE Journal

Tremendous pressure for broadband access is being placed on schools, stemming in part from educational needs, in part from the demands of online testing and in part from the motivation to provide equitable access for all students. To alleviate that pressure, advised a group of education technology experts, it’s high time those schools considered tapping into the massive capacity and high speeds of research and education (R&E) networks. That’s the overall suggestion of a research project jointly produced by the New Media Consortium (NMC), a global community of institutions of higher education and research centers, and Internet2, a similar organization that runs one such network for academic and research institutions in the United States.

https://thejournal.com/articles/2015/10/23/report-research-education-networks-make-sense-for-k12-as-bandwidth-demands-increase.aspx

By David Raths, Campus Technology

In a recent Educause Review essay, Joshua Kim noted that campus CIOs must have one foot in daily technology operations, one foot in strategic decision-making and one foot in the larger discussion of how higher education is evolving. “You will notice the CIO needs three feet — an indication of why the role seems so impossible,” wrote Kim, director of digital learning initiatives for the Dartmouth (NH) Center for the Advancement of Learning. Indeed, being a three-footed CIO increasingly requires more communication skills than technical knowledge. In an April 2015 CT interview, Mark Askren, CIO of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, said having a technology background helps in the CIO role — but communication skills are the most important to have. “Beyond just speaking skills, you need emotional intelligence, the ability to listen, be authentic and earn trust,” he said. “We are change agents. You have to embrace change and reduce the fear level.”

https://campustechnology.com/articles/2015/10/22/8-cio-tips-for-leading-change-in-higher-education.aspx

by Phil Tann, Android.net

As part of a seemingly long running partnership, Google has today announced a new collaboration with Udacity in the form of a new course focusing on Android Wear development. The course includes practical advice, code snippets and sample code, the clear aim of which appears to be to get more developers involved with Android Wear and make it the dominant wearable platform. The best part about the course from Udacity is that its not an expensive course, in fact; it’s free. They’re looking at 6 hours per week from developers to work through the course and expect it to take most users around 2 weeks so it’s not a huge commitment to take your app to greater heights on Android Wear.

http://ausdroid.net/2015/10/22/udacity-google-collaborate-help-developers-get-best-android-wear/

by Harvard University

Welcome to your window into online learning at Harvard. Curated by Harvard Alumni Association alumni volunteers, this selection of courses reflects the variety of topics, platforms, and structures the University has to offer. Engage with classes that interest you at your own time and pace, wherever and whenever you want. Offerings will be refreshed throughout the year, so check back for updates. This is just a starting point. If you don’t find what you’re looking for on this page, explore the rest of the Online Learning site. You can use the tools at the top of the page to sort by category or course title. Harvard Online Learning provides opportunities for lifelong learning, including open courses from HarvardX, for-credit programs from Harvard’s Division of Continuing Education, and a selection of offerings from across Harvard’s professional schools, from business to public health. Dive in now and learn something new.

http://online-learning.harvard.edu/alumni

by Benzinga

With Shmoop’s new customizable course option, teachers are no longer subject to the whims of online course providers. Now they can create the course that works best for their students. J.K. Rowling might not be thrilled if fans decided the Harry Potter books were better read in reverse order. But Shmoop (http://www.shmoop.com), a digital publisher known for its award-winning Test Prep and certified Online Courses, is all about mixing things up. Users with a Shmoop subscription or license can now mix and match any of Shmoop’s course content to fit their needs, whether those needs lean more toward Hufflepuff or Dark Lord. No one’s judging. Shmoop still provides the teen-friendly content—over 200 courses ranging from short units on Photoshop to year-long core courses in ELA, math, and history—but educators can now take it apart and put it back together again however they’d like.

http://www.benzinga.com/pressreleases/15/10/p5935812/shmoop-offers-customizable-online-courses-giving-teachers-the-flexibili

BY SUSAN FISER, the Concordian

Concordia has joined with the Council of Independent Colleges, an organization dedicated to helping small liberal arts colleges, in offering a new program called Consortium for Online Humanities Instruction this year. Concordia was among 100 colleges who applied to be a part of the program, and was one of 21 colleges who were accepted, according to Dr. George Connell, chair of the humanities department. The program was mostly sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which helps promote and support the department of humanities in the United States. Each college offers two classes to the program.

http://theconcordian.org/2015/10/22/humanities-courses-go-online

by KSAT

The University of Texas System is the largest state institution in the country that offers free online college-level courses to high school students. Four courses were made available this fall and do not have prerequisites. They are Intro to Engineering, Discover Pre-Calculus, Intro to Sociology, Solving Problems using Python and Human Geography. A fifth course is in the works, the UT System said. Instructors for the courses are at the UT Arlington, UT Austin and UT Permian Basin campuses. The engineering course runs 13 weeks and teaches students to use math to solve engineering problems. The Python programming course provides an understanding of writing Python code to solve problems.

http://www.ksat.com/news/ut-system-offers-free-online-courses-to-high-school-students

By Joshua Kim, Inside Higher Ed

If I worked for any of the open online learning platforms – EdX or Coursera or NovoEd or OpenLearn – I’d create a dedicated mobile only team. I’d send the team to China (or India) and have them design an open app learning platform from scratch. I would accept that the future of higher education is in the emerging countries of East and South Asia, Africa, and South America. If the future of learning is digital, and the digital future of learning is mobile, will that future unfold on the mobile web or the app? Do learning platform providers have the bandwidth to code for both the mobile web and the app? Is trying to do both mobile web and apps for education limiting the quality and reach of both?

https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/technology-and-learning/mobile-learning-apps-vs-web

By Dian Schaffhauser, THE Journal

A majority of schools in Ohio are using some form of blended learning, primarily in high schools or schools that house grades K-12. The big motivators are facilitating personalized learning for students, providing more course choice and improving academic outcomes. Of those that aren’t blending, nearly a third expect to do so. Those results surfaced in a survey among all of the schools in Ohio conducted earlier this year by the Ohio Blended Learning Network, the Learning Accelerator and the Clayton Christensen Institute. All 994 district and charter schools in the state were invited to participate; 211 schools responded. As the survey found, 58 percent of schools have some type of blended learning going on — most of those in and around three large cities, Cincinnati, Cleveland and Columbus.

https://thejournal.com/articles/2015/10/20/ohio-schools-go-big-with-blended-learning.aspx

by Mir Juned Hussain, Tech Portal

Google, during its I/O 2015 developer conference in May had announced a partnership with Udacity to launch a six-course Android Development Nanodegree. The company wanted to allow developers to learn how to write apps for Google’s mobile operating system. Surprisingly, these new Nanodegrees turned out to the most popular ones by Udacity, attracting more than 300,000 people to enrol in the courses. As a part of that initiative, Google has now introduced a new Nanodegree, which will consist of a Tech Entrepreneurship certificate, access to coaches, guidance on your project, help staying on track and career counseling. If all you want is the content, quizzes, and projects, all of that is available online for free at udacity.com/google.

http://thetechportal.in/2015/10/19/google-teams-up-with-udacity-introduces-tech-entrepreneur-nanodegree/

By Tara García Mathewson, Education Dive

Kennesaw State University in Georgia has dubbed its entry into the world of massive open online courses a success — not by the traditional standard of course completion, but based on branding, student access, and return on investment. According to eCampus News, MOOCs have increased the brand visibility for the university and expanded student access to KSU course materials. Researchers also measured the ROI, defined by the number of MOOC participants who later enrolled in a university program, and in the first year, KSU far exceeded its goal to simply break even.

http://www.educationdive.com/news/value-of-moocs-more-nuanced-than-completion-rates/407548/

by Susan Groenwald, The Philadelphia Inquirer

Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates have some company. Today, more than one in five working-age Americans is a college dropout. Unfortunately, most dropouts aren’t tech billionaires. Many are nontraditional students who leave school not because of academic concerns, but because of issues specific to their stage of life: a sick family member, a job loss, a lack of family support or just the pure shock of returning to school after a long hiatus. Colleges must do more to reverse this trend. After all, they bear at least some responsibility for the fact that 20 percent of their students walk away. Schools can drive down the dropout rate — and get more students to graduate — by investing in staffing support and resources for high-risk students.

http://www.dailyegyptian.com/opinion/article_885bfc2e-76c5-11e5-b949-d3c41c451a76.html

By Harold Reutter, the Independent

Last Tuesday afternoon, Walnut students Destiny Deleon, Julio Chamul and Ralph Deleon were using their Thinkpads to complete homework assignments. Destiny, a sixth-grader, was doing work for her 21st Century Learning class. She said she was creating a presentation “on a kid named Charles.” Her brother, Ralph, and their friend, Julio, were each working on a seventh-grade social studies assignment, learning about the Aztecs and the Incas. There’s nothing unusual about middle school students doing homework, except perhaps the location. The trio was sitting near Lincoln Elementary while working. As Destiny explained, she and the other students “need the Internet” to do their homework assignments and they do not have a home Internet connection. So they sit near Lincoln Elementary to use the school’s wireless connection.

http://www.theindependent.com/news/local/students-use-local-schools-wi-fi-to-finish-homework-after/article_9f131020-7548-11e5-b575-2bf261ed3324.html

by Nathan Bernard, The Next Web

Over the last several months my co-founder Chirag and I have spent a lot of time thinking about micro-learning as we build our startup, Lrn. We are big supporters of the micro-learning format -specifically on mobile- and believe it can make educational content easily accessible to a global audience. In this post we hope to shed some light on the current trend and why micro-learning makes a ton of sense right now. Micro-learning is learning in short, focused bursts of information. For example, a typical micro-learning activity could be viewing a flashcard, memorizing a word, listening to a short podcast, watching a brief video or answering a series of questions in a quiz.

http://tnw.to/c4kUR

by Malinda Rust, Lawton Constitution

It’s nice, according to Fourth District U.S. Rep. Tom Cole, to know that for once the federal government has spent nearly a half a million dollars “on something worthwhile.” That “something worthwhile” is right here in Southwest Oklahoma thanks to a partnership among Great Plains Technology Center, Cameron University and Western Oklahoma State College, and over a dozen rural schools. During a trip to Lawton last week, Cole visited Great Plains to experience a demonstration of the newly installed GPNet distance learning system. Kevin Chambers, the tech center’s director of information technology, initiated a conference call using a touchscreen panel on the wall, and within minutes the auditorium of the Worley Seminar Center was transformed into a digital classroom.

http://www.swoknews.com/local/rural-schools-get-linked-college-courses

by Karen MacGregor, University World News

Boundaries between contact and distance universities are rapidly blurring, and boundaries between institutions and developers of technology-enhanced learning ought to be broken down if both worlds are to benefit from each other’s expertise in the interests of sustainable development, thought leaders told a global conference on open, distance and e-learning. Major shifts and challenges for open and distance learning, and how it might support the newly adopted United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, were explored by a panel at last week’s conference of the International Council for Open and Distance Education, or ICDE.

http://www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=20151017100641870

By Leila Meyer, Campus Technology

Sensory messaging devices, stress-reducing headpieces, biometric authentication bands and more — these cutting-edge wearables could soon be coming to your campus. From the Apple Watch to the plethora of activity trackers such as Fitbit, wearable technology is becoming more common — and companies are creating a steady stream of new devices that we can wear on our eyes, head, wrist and body to communicate, consume and compute. Here are seven cutting-edge wearable technologies and some of their potential applications in and out of the classroom.

https://campustechnology.com/articles/2015/10/14/7-up-and-coming-wearable-technologies.aspx

By Pamela DeLoatch, Edudemic

A report from The President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology revealed that active learning, versus the lecture method, improves students’ abilities to retain information and exercise critical thinking. It also increases students’ pursuit of STEM majors in college. Research has long shown that students learn more when they participate in the process in various ways—discussion, review, practice or application. Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy has also guided education toward an emphasis in creation and innovation—in other words, more active learning in the classroom. Active learning activities also take into account the different learning styles that students have, and provide activities that may better engage the visual, aural, verbal, physical, logical, social or solitary learner.

http://www.edudemic.com/active-learning-in-classroom/