Techno-News Blog

By Joshua Bolkan, Campus Technology

Penn State World Campus is partnering with the National Football League Players Association (NFLPA) to offer union members the opportunity to finish their degrees online. Offered through World Campus’ Corporate Alliance program, the partnership will provide access to Penn State’s online courses and educational services. “World Campus provides students with admissions and advising counseling,” according to a news release. “Players who have credits from another university will work with staff to determine how to complete their degree at Penn State online or through another university. Staff also will also work with players who want to start a new undergraduate or graduate degree from among the more than 125 online academic programs in fields including business, health care, liberal arts and sciences.”

https://campustechnology.com/articles/2016/01/05/penn-state-partners-with-nfl-players-association-on-distance-ed-for-athletes.aspx

By Jordan Friedman, US News

Experts agree that online education certainly has its benefits for introverts, particularly when it comes to partaking in group discussions and thriving in more personal settings. Introverts are also usually good listeners and can better express themselves through their writing rather than verbally. Still, online education has its drawbacks for introverts as well. The most obvious benefit of online learning for introverts centers on class participation, experts say, because in many online courses, students have more time to answer questions. “You don’t have this notion of a 10-second wait time from a teacher to have to respond to; you can respond an hour later or a day later – whenever you feel you have contemplated on the idea enough,” says Curt Bonk, professor of education at Indiana University—Bloomington and author of ​”The World is Open: How Web Technology is Revolutionizing Education.”

http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/articles/2016/01/05/examine-the-benefits-drawbacks-of-online-learning-for-introverts

by James Q. Lynch, the Gazette

Despite what seems to be 24/7 coverage, Iowa’s first-in-the-nation precinct caucuses remain a mystery to many people — including Iowans, according to Steffen Schmidt, an Iowa State University political science professor who fields caucus questions from media outlets around the globe. So beginning Tuesday, Schmidt will be offering answers to anyone curious about the caucuses that kick off the presidential nomination process for both Democrats and Republicans. It’s all part of ISU’s first MOOC — massive open online course — that runs through Feb. 2 at www.iowacaucusesmooc.org/. Schmidt will present the history of the Iowa caucuses, which began to play a significant role in the nomination process in the 1970s. He’ll discuss famous events that propelled Iowa to the forefront and share caucus anecdotes.

http://www.thegazette.com/subject/news/government/elections/explore-caucuses-through-free-iowa-state-university-online-course-20160104

by Amy Scott, Marketplace

The U.S. Department of Education has a new boss, albeit a temporary one. With the new year, John King, Jr. became Acting U.S. Secretary of Education, after the departure of Arne Duncan. King’s main task now will be implementing the Every Student Succeeds Act just passed by Congress, said Michael Petrilli with the Fordham Institute, an education policy think tank. King is a former education commissioner of New York State, and more recently Duncan’s second-in-command. Michael Hansen with the Brookings Institution’s Brown Center on Education Policy says “Where I do see King perhaps being more active in the immediate future would be on the higher education side,” he said. King could push for more transparency at the college level, Hansen said, particularly among for-profit companies. Not that he has much time, with just over a year before a new administration takes over.

http://www.marketplace.org/2015/12/31/world/what-expect-new-education-chief-john-king

By Alexandra Pannoni, US News

Some older adults may be thinking that this is the year they’ll go back to college – which might lead to better job prospects and offer personal satisfaction. And with online and in-person options at traditional schools and community colleges,​ adults past the usual college-going age have plenty of choices. But pursuing higher education can be a significant investment of ​time and money so adults should consider their options carefully. We asked Twitter users to share their thoughts on why adults should consider pursuing higher education this year – and rounded up​ online resources to help adults make decisions about going back to school. Many Twitter users told U.S. News adults should think about going back to school to stay competitive in the job market.

http://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/2016-01-04/determine-if-returning-to-college-makes-sense-as-an-older-adult-in-2016

Meris Stansbury, eCampus News

From predictions on data governance to the influence of elections, higher-ed leaders say 2016 will shape up to be a rollercoaster of a year for student services and campus operations. Virtual Reality is the technology that will dominate 2016, and data will basically permeate every aspect of campus decision-making. At least, that’s what a handful of higher-ed’s innovation and technology visionaries are predicting. Talking to higher-ed speakers that made the 2015 conference circuit, as well as prominent think-tank leaders, in-the-know bloggers, university leadership, IT specialists, and popular vendors, it seems that 2016 will continue its reinvention—focusing heavily on flexible IT infrastructures with technologies that support one another, as well as whatever it takes to attract and retain students.

http://www.ecampusnews.com/top-news/2016-higher-predictions-872/

By Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed

Study finds that attractive female students earn higher grades than unattractive female students do. For male students, looks don’t seem to matter. The study was conducted at Metropolitan State University of Denver (an open-enrollment institution with many nontraditional-age students), by two economists there, Rey Hernández-Julián and Christina Peters. Comparing similar groups of students, the study found that the grade punishment for unattractive women disappears in online education.

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/01/05/new-study-finds-women-who-are-not-considered-attractive-receive-lower-grades

By Dian Schaffhauser, Campus Technology

Where do you go after you leave a high-profile position in the Obama administration? Back home. That’s where United States Department of Education Secretary Arne Duncan headed at the end of the year when he returned to Chicago. And now, so is Richard Culatta, who is stepping down as director of the Office of Educational Technology within the same federal agency. He joined the department in 2011 as the deputy director to Karen Cator’s directorship. When she left to run Digital Promise, he took on the director role. Shortly after the announcement of his pending departure, another news source reported that he’d be returning to Rhode Island to work with Governor Gina Raimondo on education initiatives.

https://campustechnology.com/articles/2016/01/04/eds-top-tech-director-steps-down-to-head-home.aspx

by Esraa Haidar, Wamda

The life of an entrepreneur is hectic, with nonstop demands and success often depending on learning and growing in changing conditions. Wamda is an education advocate, whether it’s a thorough grounding in theory at the university level or the practical education that comes from nurturing a startup. Although most of us don’t have the time or the money to invest in an MBA, there is no shortage of massive open online courses (MOOC) offering practical instruction, often by experts in their fields. We’ve curated seven startup relevant MOOCs from the thousands online.

http://www.wamda.com/2016/01/7-online-courses-for-startups

By JOHN MARKOFF, NY Times

The world’s most popular online course is a general introduction to the art of learning, taught jointly by an educator and a neuroscientist. “Learning How To Learn,” which was created by Barbara Oakley, an electrical engineer, and Terry Sejnowski, a neuroscientist, has been ranked as the leading class by enrollment in a survey of the 50 largest online courses released earlier this month by the Online Course Report website. The course is “aimed at a broad audience of learners who wanted to improve their learning performance based on what we know about how brains learn,” said Dr. Sejnowski, the director of the Computational Neurobiology Laboratory at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif.

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/12/29/the-most-popular-online-course-teaches-you-to-learn/?_r=0

by Neville Lazarus, Sky News

Students in India are working online with 200 “grannies” across the globe as part of an education initiative aimed at helping children learn. The School in the Cloud project sees women from Britain, France and other countries volunteer an hour each day to talk to students in India via Skype. The students – many from underprivileged backgrounds – say it helps them learn English while familiarising them with computers and the internet. The project was established in Newcastle by Professor Sugata Mitra.

http://news.sky.com/story/1615732/online-learning-connects-pupils-with-the-world

by Best Online Courses

One of the most popular categories on Udemy, and in online learning in general, is web development. This growing field offers loads of opportunities when it comes to landing a lucrative career or starting your own business. Even though there are seemingly endless course choices within the web development category, a perfect place to start is The Complete Web Developer Course – Build 14 Websites. The course is for students who are seeking a well-rounded program that tackles everything relevant in the world of web development today. In a mere 6 weeks, you can advance from someone with zero experience to someone with professional skills, whether you’re hoping for a career change or to advance your existing career.

http://www.bestonlinecourses.info/become-a-web-developer-in-6-weeks-with-this-complete-online-course/

by Christophe Pappas, eLearning Industry

Evaluating your online training program is essential; only by doing so you can measure the effectiveness of your training outcomes. eLearning assessments are a great way to establish whether the skills and the abilities of your employees have been aligned with your company’s needs and goals. In this article, I’ll share 7 top tips on how to create effective eLearning assessments in order to ensure that your online training courses are truly effective.

http://elearningindustry.com/7-tips-create-effective-elearning-assessments-measure-online-training

by Wired

Andrew Ng hands me a tiny device that wraps around my ear and connects to a smartphone via a small cable. Ng, co-founder of Coursera, is the chief scientist at Chinese tech giant Baidu, and this is one of the company’s latest prototypes. It’s called DuLight. The device contains a tiny camera that captures whatever is in front of you and sends the images to an app on your smartphone. The app analyzes the images, determines what they depict, and generates an audio description that’s heard through to your earpiece. Ng’s prototype relies on a technology called deep learning. Inside the massive computer data centers that underpin Baidu’s online services, the company runs massive neural networks—networks of hardware and software that approximate the web of neurons in the human brain. By analyzing enormous collections of digital images, these networks can learn to identify objects, written words, even human faces.

http://www.wired.com/2016/01/2015-was-the-year-ai-finally-entered-the-everyday-world/

by the Shanghai Daily

The British Council is launching a six-week course on Shakespeare for non-native speakers who are trying to improve their language skills while learning more about the prolific author’s life and work. The course, available online on FutureLearn website, is entirely free for participants. Shakespeare Lives is supporting English language learning in China. Shakespeare’s 37 plays and 154 sonnets have added more than 3000 new words and hundreds of idioms to the English language.

http://www.shanghaidaily.com/sunday/technology/Free-English-course-about-Shakespeare/shdaily.shtml

by Allan Golston, President, U.S. Program, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

Forward movement in education, like any type of progress, happens in waves. And as we approach the end of the year, I’ve been thinking a lot about how access to good data and smart uses of it can lead us to the next wave of progress.We are fortunate to live in an era awash in information of all kinds. Our challenge is to ensure we are best utilizing that information to close gaps in education and help all students succeed. We’re inspired and encouraged by the work our partners, leading institutions and programs, and educators have done throughout 2016 to make information accessible, actionable, and relevant to improving education for all students, and we look forward to continuing these efforts in 2017 and beyond.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/allan-golston-/whats-working-harnessing_b_13721372.html

by Associated Press

Portland State University in Oregon started an online business of craft brewing program in 2013, with the first cohort filling up in the first week with around 40 people. It’s become one of the school’s most successful professional certificate programs, drawing people from around the world, said Scott Gallagher, the university’s director of communications. “We discovered that there’s a huge need for people who wanted to get a certificate. They didn’t necessarily want to go to college or already had a college degree and wanted to open up a brew pub,” Gallagher said. They needed some basic and more advanced knowledge, such as in marketing, he said. The demand is so high that PSU is looking at how to develop and expand the program, Gallagher said.

http://www.newsadvance.com/work_it_lynchburg/news/universities-tap-into-craft-beer-growth-with-online-classes/article_7ebe677c-b100-11e5-af11-e36502ac848d.html

By Jordan Friedman, US News

For online students, social media is an opportunity to personalize and enhance their experience, allowing them to interact with classmates, ask each other questions and collaborate on group assignments, experts say. “Your learning experiences are no longer limited to the physical borders of a college campus,” says Dawn Edmiston, clinical associate professor of marketing at the Mason School of Business at the College of William and Mary,​ ​who has taught online courses at several different universities. “Literally the world becomes your classroom, and social media is a great channel for exploring that classroom.” “The world is now engaging on social media,” says Connie Johnson, provost and chief academic officer at Colorado Technical University, which offers online degrees. “The benefit is that we can reach students through a number of different avenues that they are on anyway.”

http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/articles/2015-12-30/4-ways-to-use-social-media-as-an-online-student

by Information Week

New documents filed with the FCC show an updated design for Google Glass 2, including a folding frame, and other details about the hardware’s construction. Documents filed with the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) have revealed new details about Google Glass 2, the search giant’s updated augmented reality device, including the hardware’s ability to fold. The FCC filing, first spotted by the blog 9to5Google, also shows the power button has now been moved to the back of the device, while the camera button is located on top near the display. The flat area on the side of the device is called the touchpad, which is used to navigate different cards on the display.

http://www.informationweek.com/mobile/mobile-devices/google-glass-2-sports-foldable-frame-fcc-filing-shows/d/d-id/1323713

by Minati Singha, Times of India

An interesting trend seen amongst Bhubaneswar teens is to break free from the organized learning environment and move towards the online learning space, indicating that the popularity of DIY and collaborative learning is gaining ground. This was revealed in the TCS Gen Z Survey 2015 conducted among 1,000 residents of several city schools. The survey aimed to capture the digital habits of children in the age group of 12 and 18 years. The survey also observed that boys are more active online and on social networking sites as compared to girls. About 29% of the respondents use video chat to learn a new hobby and 16% go online to do school assignments, the survey said.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/bhubaneswar/Teens-break-info-barrier-embrace-online-learning/articleshow/50362101.cms

By Jordan Friedman, US News

When students are researching potential online programs, they should understand how the course instructor will use learning management systems and other technologies to enhance the overall educational experience, says George Kroner, an enterprise solutions architect at University of Maryland University College, which ​offers online degrees and certificates. “A learning management system is really just an empty shell,” says Kroner. ​”What really matters most is how the institution is taking advantage of the technology they have to provide the ideal experience and optimal outcome for students.” Experts say prospective students​ assessing the quality of an online program should consider course delivery and structure as major factors in their decision. They can find this information by looking at school websites, speaking with faculty or alumni, and if the option is available, demoing or previewing the platform. In the process of doing their research, they should ask these questions​.

http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/articles/2015-12-28/6-questions-to-ask-about-course-delivery-in-online-programs