Techno-News Blog

By Shawn Annarelli, Centre Daily Times

Penn State Law is tentatively scheduled to open the Intellectual Property Clinic in the fall of 2016. Students in the clinic will work with those in the Penn State Law Entrepreneur Assistance Clinic, which launched in the fall of 2015. The clinics, according to the university, are expected to play a large role in Invent Penn State, a $30-million economic development initiative aimed at turning ideas at Penn State into business ventures. The university sees clinics like the IPC as a key component of the initiative.

http://www.ecampusnews.com/business-news/psu-intellectual-property-528/

by MIT Office of Digital Learning

MIT is collaborating with Boeing and NASA to develop a four-part online, certificate-based program: “Architecture and Systems Engineering: Models and Methods to Manage Complex Systems.” The program aims to ensure that the engineering workforce has continual training and access to the latest knowledge and methods to design and develop products in a rapidly changing environment. The four courses, which will be delivered by MIT Professional Education via the edX platform, will marry the research and knowledge of MIT’s world-renowned faculty with lessons and case studies in industry and government from Boeing and NASA professionals.

http://news.mit.edu/2016/mit-boeing-nasa-edx-launch-online-architecture-systems-engineering-program-0216

by David Raths, Campus Technology

Blogger and self-proclaimed “troublemaker” Audrey Watters discusses venture capital in education, learning analytics, artificial intelligence and more. If you want to catch an interesting glimpse of the views that certain people have about the future of education, look at venture capitalists. Those narratives are probably unrecognizable to those working within education, according to Audrey Watters, author of the popular Hack Education blog. “They are not disruptive or innovative. They are not particularly radical,” she said, pointing out that money is flowing into things like test preparation and tutoring and helping schools move services online as well as the student loan sector.

https://campustechnology.com/articles/2016/02/12/how-venture-capital-misses-the-boat-with-higher-education-technology.aspx

by eCampus News

Students can create a business model, infographic, Android app, or comic book in applied project-based courses.  In a Feb. 11 blog post, Coursera announced it is offering 12 new project-based courses in topics from persuasive writing to computer construction. The blog post references research showing that tackling real-life challenges is a powerful way to master new content, improve general problem-solving abilities, and prepare for increasingly difficult tasks. In a project-based course, students can master content efficiently by applying new concepts to a real-world project as they learn, the blog post explains. Students will receive guidance and suggestions from an instructor and a community of learners with similar goals, and when they complete the course, they’ll have a finished project to use and share.

http://www.ecampusnews.com/top-news/project-based-courses-476/

By Meris Stansbury, eCampus News

Research delves into issues when trying to gauge instructional and design quality in MOOCs for credit. As more institutions consider offering MOOCs for credit, often the MOOCs provided by third-party platforms, researchers say it’s imperative to gauge instructional and design effectiveness…but how, and with what quality standards? These are the main questions posited by Patrick Lowenthal, assistant professor at the Educational Technology College of Education at Boise State University; and Dr. Charles Hodges, associate professor of Leadership, Technology & Human Development at Georgia Southern University, in their research study on trying to measure the quality of MOOCs.

http://www.ecampusnews.com/top-news/mooc-quality-standards-716/

by Hometown Life

The Plymouth District Library joined thousands of educators, librarians and digital learning advocates around the country on Digital Learning Day, Feb. 17. From a grassroots effort in 2012, this day was designed to highlight the use and availability of electronic tools to enhance the public school learning experience in grades k-12. Since then it has grown to a great nationwide salute to the process of digital learning.

http://www.hometownlife.com/story/news/local/plymouth/2016/02/14/plymouth-library-celebrate-digital-day/80283082/

by Biz Carson, Business Insider

Faced with competition from not just from Verizon and Sprint, but also Google and Amazon, the telecommunications giant is working aggressively to make sure its employees catch up and get ahead of the changing technology of the times. Its CEO and Chairman, Randall Stephenson, isn’t afraid to mince words about will happen if his employees don’t. In an interview with the New York Times, Stephenson said those who don’t spend five to 10 hours a week learning online “will obsolete themselves with technology.” “There is a need to retool yourself, and you should not expect to stop,” Stephenson told the Times.

http://www.businessinsider.com/people-who-dont-spend-5-hours-a-week-online-learning-will-make-themselves-obsolete-says-att-ceo-2016-2

by Gabrielle Russon, Orlando Sentinel

Emily Long refuses to stay in her apartment all day, even though she won’t physically go to class until she is halfway through her bachelor’s degree at the University of Florida. “I’m like never home,” says Long, who rents an apartment 15 minutes from campus. “That’s a good thing.” Her friend Ethan Cassidy sometimes can’t shake the notion that he is missing out as he takes his online courses. To combat that, he has found friends whose paths to UF are similar. Cassidy and Long are among the 235 students in the second semester of their freshmen year under a new UF program that was criticized when it was announced a year ago.

http://www.orlandosentinel.com/features/education/os-uf-online-only-student-20160212-story.html

By Rhea Kelly, Campus Technology

A new Textbook Liberation Fund offers grants for “faculty members or departments who want to transition their courses away from high-priced textbooks.” The $500,000 fund was launched today by Skyepack, the digital publishing platform for open educational resources (OER), with the goal of saving college students $1 billion. “We believe students deserve cost-effective and simple alternatives to the textbook ecosystem most of us are familiar with,” said Skyepack Chief Executive Officer Brady Kalb in a press release. “Getting your books or course required reading shouldn’t necessitate a student loan.”

https://campustechnology.com/articles/2016/02/10/new-textbook-liberation-fund-will-help-faculty-ditch-high-priced-textbooks.aspx

By Noah DMello, CIO India

Technology has disrupted almost all sectors, but it has stayed away from education, said Anant Agarwal, CEO, edX on the third day of NASSCOM 2016. “Education has remained in our classrooms and it hasn’t evolved from there. Technology has not touched this space,” he said. edX, which is a not-for-profit massive open online course (MOOC) provider and runs on open source software, is one of the few companies that has disrupted the way education is being dealt with, he said. He also said that futuristic technologies such as artificial intelligence are bringing disruption to education. “From customizing courses for students to grading essays, technology is redefining education,” he said.

http://www.cio.in/news/youngsters-have-changed-education-system-has-not-anant-agarwal-edx-ceo

by David Schatsky, Huffington Post

I recently finished teaching a free, eight-week online course on artificial intelligence and cognitive technologies. Over 7,000 students registered for the course. Many of them were active participants in rich discussions throughout the eight weeks. I’d like to tell you what I learned from my students during the course, and invite you to register for the next run of the course, which starts on March 14. Students were fascinated with the ways in which perceptual technologies like speech recognition and computer vision make possible natural interfaces between humans and computers. And they actively debated the implications of cognitive technologies for businesses, workers, and society.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-schatsky/what-i-learned-teaching-a_b_9212496.html

by Alex Fitzpatrick, Time

On Feb. 12, Udemy announced that more than 10 million students have taken one of its courses. In the U.S., there were about 13 million students working toward a four-year degree during fall 2015 semester, according to the Department of Education. It is another example of the rising popularity of online education as college costs have boomed in the United States. Americans hold $1.2 trillion in student loan debt, second only to mortgages in terms of consumer obligations. Entering the workforce deep in the red could be a handicap that follows graduates the rest of their careers, economists say.

http://time.com/4215787/udemy-dennis-yang/

by Linda C. Hodges, Tomorrow’s Professor

Faculty typically spend a lot of time teaching—over 20 hours of a 50-hour workweek in one study (Bentley and Kyvik 2012). Are we spending that time productively? Obviously, whether or not we feel productive depends on what we hope to accomplish as instructors. For example, virtually all the faculty surveyed in the 2013–14 Higher Education Research Institute Faculty Survey felt that two learning outcomes were particularly key: 
developing students’ abilities to think critically (99.1%) and promoting students’ abilities to write effectively (92.7%). If these are our top goals for student learning, how do we direct our time most efficiently to achieve them? As more data become available on how people learn, the answer to this question may lie in our use of the flipped classroom.

https://tomprof.stanford.edu/posting/1463

By Eric Schulzke, Deseret News

Two new experiments seem to show that both college students and instructors carry biases when one rates the other. One study shows that better-looking female students have an advantage in the classroom, while another shows that male professors get better teaching evaluations than their female peers. In a large study at Metropolitan State University of Denver released in January, researchers found that attractive female students received measurably better grades than their less attractive peers — but only in traditional classrooms. That apppearance boost disappeared in online courses. The second study found that female instructors were consistently rated lower than male instructors.

http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865647235/Do-appearance-and-gender-really-matter-in-the-classroom.html

By Katherine Long, The Seattle Times

In Washington state, pending legislation could promote the use of online textbooks and open-source materials.  A student advocacy group, along with one of the University of Washington’s top librarians, is urging faculty members to take a good look at using more free online textbooks. And two bills in the state Legislature would promote and facilitate the use of such open-source textbooks and course materials. The problem is the high price of textbooks. U.S. Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) and student affiliates of that nonprofit, including WashPIRG, say the cost of textbooks has gone up 73 percent in the last decade –four times the rate of inflation.

http://www.ecampusnews.com/policy/legislation/open-source-textbooks-562/

By Peter Sclafani, eCampus News

Some of the country’s most-followed CIOs on social media outline how others can get started, what to avoid. Being a higher-ed leader, like a Chief Information Officer (CIO), at an institution today also means being active on social networking sites. For example, CIOs at universities across the county are being asked to help their institution’s brand outreach and community growth by embracing Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and other platforms, like LinkedIn.

http://www.ecampusnews.com/top-news/social-media-profile-676/

BY JESSICA LI, Daily Princetonion

After traditional, in-class lectures were replaced by ones held online, lecture ratings for COS 126: General Computer Science improved from 3.3 to 3.8, according to Professor of Computer Science and COS 126 course head Robert Sedgewick. COS 126 is the largest course in the University by annual enrollment, with 318 students having completed it in the fall semester and 405 students currently enrolled for the spring semester, according to the Office of the Registrar. COS 126 lectures, coined as ‘flipped lectures,’ have been offered exclusively online since this past fall semester, according to Sedgewick.

http://dailyprincetonian.com/news/2016/02/cos-126-ratings-improve-after-switching-to-online-lectures/

By Tara García Mathewson, Education Dive

Michael Kinsley writes for The Washington Post that the Internet may be higher education’s great disruptor, bringing down traditional institutions by taking away the power of prestige. The prestige factor that enshrines the nation’s most elite institutions comes with the selective admissions process, but when anyone can access the course content offered to the privileged few, Kinsley posits the $200,000 education may not seem so worth it. While online, for-profit universities have not yet posed much of a threat to the Harvards and Yales of the higher education sector, there is a chance that they’ll get better 10 or 20 years down the line, or that MOOCs will get better, and information once reserved for the privileged few can be had by many more, for far less.

http://www.educationdive.com/news/will-the-internet-remove-traditional-higher-eds-prestige-factor/413466/

by the Online Learning Consortium

Multi-year trend shows growth in online enrollments continues to outpace overall higher ed enrollments. Online Report Card – Tracking Online Education in the United States, is the 13th annual report of the state of online learning in U.S. Higher education. The 2015 Survey of Online Learning is conducted by the Babson Survey Research Group and co-sponsored by the Online Learning Consortium (OLC), Pearson, StudyPortals, WCET and Tyton Partners, is the leading barometer of online learning in the United States. Key report findings include: A year‐to‐year 3.9% increase in the number of distance education students, up from the 3.7% rate recorded last year. More than one in four students (28%) now take at least one distance education course (a total of 5,828,826 students, a year‐to‐year increase of 217,275). The total of 5.8 million fall 2014 distance education students is composed of 2.85 million taking all of their courses at a distance and 2.97 million taking some, but not all, distance courses.

http://onlinelearningconsortium.org/read/online-report-card-tracking-online-education-united-states-2015/

by the Center for Digital Education

In what seems a waterfall release of free services, Microsoft Philanthropies has revealed intentions to donate $1 billion in cloud tools to universities and nonprofits. The word comes from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who on Jan. 19 lauded the action as a new and vital resource for social and economic change. The resources are calculated to touch more than 70,000 organizations in a swift three-year span, with as much as $350 million donated in 2016. The reasoning, Nadella writes in a company blog post, is to confront an emerging digital divide, one rooted in the ecosystem of advanced technologies like predictive analytics and big data. Many nonprofits and research groups struggle to afford the tools, and Nadella said an intervention was the only foreseeable remedy.

http://www.centerdigitaled.com/higher-ed/Microsoft-Donates-1-Billion-in-Cloud-Services-to-Nonprofits-Universities.html

BY TANYA ROSCORLA, Center for Digital Education

Though the Americans with Disabilities Act has clear accessibility requirements, very rarely does anyone come knocking on college doors to find out whether they’re abiding by the law. The University of Illinois Springfield also encourages faculty members to adopt the Universal Design for Learning framework, and gives them the option to collaborate with instructional designers and faculty developers as they create their courses. With this strategy, the Center for Online Learning, Research and Service can take care of most students’ needs and work with the Office of Disability Services on technology accommodations for those who require extra support. “Sometimes we think, ‘Well, if we create an office of accessibility, we’ve done all we need to do,’ but it’s so much more than that,” said Vickie Cook, director of the Center for Online Learning, Research and Service at University of Illinois Springfield. “It’s really everyone’s job to think about accessibility, and that work is never done. Accessibility is an ongoing role and responsibility for everyone across campus.”

http://www.centerdigitaled.com/higher-ed/The-Struggle-to-Make-Online-Courses-Accessible-in-Higher-Ed.html