Techno-News Blog

by Jeremy Petranka, EDUCAUSE Review

That’s a parting comment familiar to every professor and student. And while bookmarking a course is useful, it’s also static, even limiting. Sure, the instructor issues assignments, but aside from group projects, class activities usually happen in isolation even though we know a collaborative environment expands and enriches education. What can we do? A current convergence of technology trends can help facilitate out-of-the-classroom engagement and collaboration, but also capitalize on technological infrastructures and behaviors already deeply ingrained in today’s students. This starts by recognizing that technology is a core and permanent part of student life — socially, organizationally, communicatively, and academically. By embracing appropriate technology in the classroom, we can realize its potential for supporting more engaging and effective pedagogy.

http://er.educause.edu/blogs/2015/10/how-technology-can-drive-active-perpetual-learning

by: Mark Leuba, EDUCAUSE Review

Competency-based education (CBE) has elicited strong interest among educators and education stakeholders due to its potential to meet students where they are in their education journey and provide a more personalized path to completion. A typical CBE program has a curriculum structured to demonstrate learning in clearly articulated competencies, is often self-paced, is agnostic as to the source of learning while maintaining clear and transparent learning standards, and has an emphasis on authentic assessment, which evaluates what the learner knows and can do through real-life demonstrations and projects. Unfortunately, the model’s practical benefits are tempered by the significant technology challenges and barriers to CBE program adoption, roadblocks due to limits in (and among) higher education software products.

http://er.educause.edu/articles/2015/10/competency-based-education-technology-challenges-and-opportunities

by Lauri Desautels, Edutopia

Although emotion and cognition originate in different parts of the brain, they interact and play a powerful role in learning and memory. According to neuroscientists like Eric Jensen, priming the brain for particular states of engagement — such as curiosity, intrigue, surprise, suspense, a bit of confusion, skepticism, and the feeling of safety — prepares the mind to learn. Furthermore, incorporating emotion into our instruction and content supports long-term memory. This might not be news to teachers, but not enough students know how to optimize their brain for learning. That’s why every child should have the opportunity to explore neuroscience in a brain lab.

http://www.edutopia.org/blog/brain-labs-enliven-learning-lori-desautels

by David Cutler, Edutopia

Plenty of students may know how to create digital media, but too few know how to produce engaging, high-quality content, the kind that makes them stand out not only to college admission officers, but also to potential employers. What does that kind of quality involve? We need to teach and encourage students to post original, outstanding content that will distinguish their unique identities in a sea of increasingly indistinguishable resumes — which are going the way of the typewriter. To help accomplish this task, I model creating a positive digital footprint by making effective use of social networking and blogging. I owe my students that much — after all, if they don’t take control of their online identities, someone else will.

http://www.edutopia.org/blog/modeling-constructive-online-behavior-david-cutler

by Penn State, eSchoolNews

Penn State develops new technology to create robot-written textbooks. A new technology developed at Penn State works with faculty to automatically build complete textbooks from open resources on the web. The texts are organized according to topics and keywords provided by a user. The system is helping to usher in a new genre of media: the bionic book. The tool, called BBookX, can be used to create a variety of media, ranging from study guides to textbooks. To begin, users fill in a digital table of contents — assigning each chapter a topic with text or as many related keywords or key phrases as they’d like. Using matching algorithms, BBookX then returns text, and users can keep the chapters as they are or mix with content of their own.

http://www.ecampusnews.com/top-news/textbooks-open-resources-984/

By Meris Stansbury, eCampusNews

New innovations in higher-ed technology and practice are popping up daily in higher education’s reinvention—but that doesn’t mean they have seals of approval. Textbook engagement analytics, cloud systems, career training programs, MOOCs, flipped learning, virtual worlds, game-based instruction…the list could continue for pages. And while institutions emphatically communicate that many of these technologies and practices part of higher education’s reinvention need further research, even some of the seemingly accepted innovations have yet to receive a clear green light. These “gray areas” on campuses across the country often occur due to technology-based changes in social practices; and though college and university staff often are eager to incorporate these practices in the classroom or within administration, conflicts over institutional mission, student satisfaction or learning quality can occur.

http://www.ecampusnews.com/technologies/higher-education-reinvention-829/

By Laura Devaney, eCampusNews

A new project focused on advancing learning outcomes has demonstrated that rubric-based assessment can be scaled and can offer up valid findings, along with actionable information, about student learning. This information could be used to improve curriculum and assessment design, and to improve program and class effectiveness in an effort to advance learning outcomes at colleges and universities. These findings come from the pilot year of the Multi-State Collaborative to Advance Learning Outcomes Assessment (MSC) project, which launched in 2011 and supported by the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) and the State Higher Education Executive Officers (SHEEO) Association.

http://www.ecampusnews.com/top-news/learning-outcomes-study-672/

by Stuart M. Butler, Brookings

To make college more affordable for low-income students we need to rethink what “college” means. The system needs much more than tweaks in financing or regulation; it requires an entirely different business model. Today, a student typically moves away from home for some years and chooses from a limited set of courses at a costly brick-and-mortar institution. Imagine instead a “general contractor” model of college, in which the contractor assembles a collection of courses from different places and delivers them in different ways. The contractor’s (college’s) role in this model is assembly and quality control, rather than running an institution. This model would also allow for much greater customization, with degrees better tailored to the student’s interests and needs—as well as their home and employment situation.

http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/social-mobility-memos/posts/2015/10/23-rethinking-college-disruptive-innovation-butler