Techno-News Blog

By Laura Devaney, eCampusNews

A partnership between two universities seeks to predict where students will struggle academically to help better inform instructor strategies. A method of analyzing what students post in academic forums, and using those posts to help instructors identify where students are struggling most with reading materials, could help improve learning and instruction. Researchers at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) and MIT are using a new method to analyze students’ online academic forum posts to predict questions so teachers can intervene.

http://www.ecampusnews.com/top-news/students-online-posts-682/

By Georgia Mariani, eCampus News

Higher education analytics leaders speak out on building support. Have you ever had a great idea for an analytics project only to see it end up in approval purgatory? Or maybe you’ve had some initial successes with analytics and you’re ready to expand a program, but are struggling with new funding? I talked to four analytics leaders in higher education to get their advice on how to gain buy-in for analytics projects.

http://www.ecampusnews.com/technologies/gain-buy-analytics-166/

by Seb Murray, Business Because

Business Because speaks to executives of edX, Coursera, Udacity, FutureLearn and ALISON to get their predictions for how online learning will be shaped in 2016. Anant Agarwal, CEO of edX, says that employers and universities will increasingly accept certificates for Mooc courses. Udacity is so confident it can find users jobs that it is guaranteeing them placement, or will refund their tuition. Vish Makhijani, COO of Udacity, says “For us, helping people learn so they can advance their careers is the cornerstone of online education.” Julia Stiglitz, director of business development and international at Coursera, which has 17 million users, anticipates rapid growth in mobile and tablet learning.

http://www.businessbecause.com/news/mba-distance-learning/3751/five-edtech-trends-for-2016

by Judy Verses, Huffington Post

Thanks to technological advances made over the last two decades, students are no longer limited to learning in traditional classroom environments. Online education options have proliferated, with significant growth occurring at state-sponsored virtual schools allowing students and parents to choose virtual schooling as a viable educational option. During the 2012-2013 school year, 400 full-time virtual schools enrolling nearly 261,000 students were in operation across the country. In addition, students can take online courses from virtual schools to augment their brick and mortar classroom. Online learning offers school districts, teachers and students access to courses and resources that might not be available in their school.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/judy-verses/school-districts-turn-to-_b_9077528.html

By Joshua Kim, Inside Higher Ed

A consistent challenge faced by anyone teaching college today is how students use their technology during class. As Carl Straumsheim writes in his 1/26 article on Digital Distractions: “Students waste about one-fifth of class time on laptops, smartphones and tablets, even though they admit such behavior can harm their grades….” I’d like to suggest 3 principles that can help us think about classroom technology policies and educator choices. By starting with principles, my hope is that our community can find progressive and flexible responses to the challenge of technology distraction during class time.

https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/technology-and-learning/3-principles-student-devices-classroom

by Jon Brodkin – Ars Technica

Millimeter wave tech will achieve high speeds, launching first in Boston. A startup led by the founder of Aereo says it plans to sell wireless Internet service with speeds of 1Gbps in Boston and then other cities. Project Decibel’s “Starry” Internet service “will launch its first beta in the Greater Boston area in the summer of 2016,” with additional cities being announced later in the year, the company said. Project Decibel is based both in Boston and New York City.

http://arstechnica.com/business/2016/01/aereo-founders-next-business-wireless-gigabit-home-internet/

By Dian Schaffhauser, eCampus News

Ballhaus likes what he sees at the company he now leads, especially the breadth of its offerings and its capabilities. Analytics is an exciting new space for us and for our clients. When we think about what our clients are really trying to accomplish, it’s outcomes — and the ability to use analytics to help them improve those outcomes. For instance, I just met with one of our customers, which is one of the largest universities in the world in terms of student count. A big challenge is that they have hundreds of thousands of passive students. So getting through the heart of understanding why they’re passive, what has happened, some of the trends that led them from being active to being passive and things they can do to bring those passive learners back into the active educational community to improve outcomes, is a great example of the role that analytics can play in improving our client’s ability to achieve better outcomes .It’s an area that we’ll continue to invest in and continue to develop.

https://campustechnology.com/articles/2016/01/27/new-blackboard-ceo-bill-ballhaus-reflects-on-his-first-weeks-at-the-helm.aspx

by Gina Howard, Evolllution

Though it can be difficult to build high-quality, evidence-rich badges, there are certain affordances that can help streamline the process. Building on an earlier EvoLLLution article, “Recognizing, Supporting, and Attracting Adult Learners with Digital Badges,” which takes a “macro” approach to badging, we now propose a framework to work through the technical aspects of building and supporting badges in a thriving ecosystem. This includes information about the appearance of the badge, what information the badge should contain, and how the contents of the badge should be shared.

http://evolllution.com/programming/credentials/six-steps-to-building-high-quality-open-digital-badges/

By Marie Solis, identities.mic

After a semester of pop quizzes, all-nighters and 12-page research papers, college students have only one card to play against their professors: the course evaluation. While students may think they’re dealing evenly, a new study shows most are harder on their female instructors. French economist Anne Boring led the study which resulted in two sets of results: one for French students and another for American students. According to NPR, male French students gave their male professors higher ratings overall after being randomly assigned male and female instructors across a range of different courses. In the study with American students, Boring and her colleagues built in an extra control: Students would never meet their professor. Instead, they took an online course in which they were only told their instructor’s name. Half of the male professors who participated in the study were given female names.

http://mic.com/articles/133460/student-course-evaluations-are-biased-against-female-professors-study-says#.AIiRWdLMY

by CATHERINE KNOWLES, Educators

According to MoocLab ranking, EdX comes top of the list of overall MOOC platforms. Khan Academy is ranked as number one of the free and low-cost online course providers, and the Open University’s OpenLearn, comes first of the open courseware provider list. For those interested in learning to code, TheCodePlayer website tops the free online coding course providers, and Treehouse is ranked the best provider of low-cost online coding courses. Flatiron School’s Learn-Verified Web Developer programme comes in first place among the online coding bootcamp providers. MoocLab says it ranks online course providers according to a number of factors relating to the type of offering, such as the number of courses on offer, the quality of the instruction and content, the standing of partner institutions, assessment, accreditation, practicality, social tools and interface usability.

https://educators.co.nz/story/best-online-course-provider-revealed/

By JOE KARAGANIS and DAVID McCLURE, NY Times

Over the past two years, we and our partners at the Open Syllabus Project (based at the American Assembly at Columbia) have collected more than a million syllabuses from university websites. We have also begun to extract some of their key components — their metadata — starting with their dates, their schools, their fields of study and the texts that they assign. This past week, we made available online a beta version of our Syllabus Explorer,  http://explorer.opensyllabusproject.org/, which allows this database to be searched. Our hope and expectation is that this tool will enable people to learn new things about teaching, publishing and intellectual history.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/24/opinion/sunday/what-a-million-syllabuses-can-teach-us.html

By Dian Schaffhauser, Campus Technology

Students are more distracted than ever. They tend to check their digital devices, particularly, their smartphones, an average of 11.43 times during class for non-classroom activities. A solid 12 percent do texting, emailing, checking the time or other activities in class more than 30 times a day. A study published in the Journal of Media Education this week reported that students spend a fifth of their time in class doing things on their devices that have nothing to do with their school work. The research was undertaken by Associate Professor Barney McCoy, who teaches multimedia and news courses at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Two years ago McCoy ran a similar study that found similar results, but now the level of distraction has worsened.

https://campustechnology.com/articles/2016/01/20/research-college-students-more-distracted-than-ever.aspx

by Beth Baker, Next Avenue

Each week, the Virtual Senior Center offers some 30 online classes to homebound clients, from tai chi and exercise to contemporary history discussions and gallery talks with museum curators, as well as music appreciation and singing — even Mandarin. Participants use a simple touch-screen computer to join in, as well as to Skype, play games or use the Internet. Selfhelp partnered with Microsoft and the City of New York to develop the center. “The whole point is to marry technology with homebound seniors, to alleviate loneliness and depression,” explains Carmella Chessen, Selfhelp’s outreach/volunteer coordinator. “We want them to join four classes a week as a minimum. They have to want to be social and to learn the computer.” They also cannot have cognitive issues, she adds.

http://www.nextavenue.org/the-online-classes-that-help-the-homebound-connect/

By Michael Hart, Campus Technology

It took some time as well as a lot of planning and discussion, but Ribble and his colleagues got what they wanted when the new Center for Sciences and Innovation opened in early 2015. The $127-million, five-story, 280,000-square foot building is home to eight academic departments, the McNair Scholars Program, the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship — and “The Cube.” The official name of “The Cube” is the Innovation Center, an approximately 10,000-square-foot glass-enclosed space that ostensibly is the site of the university’s engineering science and computer teaching lab. However, it is best known as the hub of the entire building, a place that Chemistry professor Nancy Mills said offers students and faculty a rare opportunity.

https://campustechnology.com/articles/2016/01/20/creating-a-collaboration-hub.aspx

https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2016/01/25/coursera-removes-free-track-some-moocs

by Mark Walton, Ars Technica

While nearly every big tech company has some sort of plan in place to deal with the upcoming onslaught of virtual reality and augmented reality technology, there’s been one rather large holdout: Apple. According to a report from the Financial Times, however, Apple now has its own VR/AR expert. Doug Bowman is joining Apple following a sabbatical from his position as a professor of computer science and the director of the Center for Human-Computer Interaction at Virginia Tech. Bowman, who was the lead author of 3D User Interfaces: Theory and Practice, has an impressive background in virtual reality tech. His research focused on “three-dimensional user interface design and the benefits of immersion in virtual environments,” according to his academic profile.

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2016/01/apple-hires-top-virtual-and-augmented-reality-expert-ft-reports/

by  John Timmer, Ars Technica

We recently published a bit of a rant about many Wikipedia science entries leaving a lot to be desired. In response, we were informed that an effort to improve that situation was already brewing. In fact, we’re now happy to point out that the Wiki Education Foundation has declared 2016 the Wikipedia Year of Science. A variety of activities aim to beef up the encyclopedia’s science content. The Wiki Education Foundation is a nonprofit that helps provide teachers and college-level instructors with the tools they need to get their students engaged in projects intended to improve Wikipedia. For example, the teachers could assign a class to improve entires in a specific topic area and use materials provided by the foundation to help the students edit entries and provide proper references.

http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/01/wiki-education-says-2016-is-the-wikipedia-year-of-science/

By DAVID MURPHY, PC Magazine

Step one: Make virtual reality headset. Step two: Make virtual reality experiences people can enjoy using said headset. Step three: Sit back and profit. It’s a simple version of what’s likely Samsung’s plan, we’ll admit, but it’s probably pretty close to the truth. According to a new report from CNET, Samsung executives appearing at this year’s Sundance film festival annonuced that the company is going to be opening up a special studio in New York that will be tasked with creating new virtual reality content.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2498343,00.asp

by Mark Milliron, EDUCAUSE Review

In the world of higher education, the needs are great, possibilities powerful, and partners diverse. Students are facing a future that increasingly requires deeper learning and labor-market-valued credentials, along with relevant work experience and civic engagement opportunities to help them take meaningful steps on the path toward living well and actively participating in today’s rowdy digital democracy. In the United States, state and federal governments, foundations, and associations are constantly calling for more—and more diverse—students to successfully complete higher education journeys to fuel the economy and brace us for a road ahead that promises innovation and uncertainty.

http://er.educause.edu/articles/2016/1/engaging-on-purpose-in-higher-education

By Richard Garrett, Eduventures

Sticker price may be soaring but net price, what students actually pay, is more modest and stable. The wage premium that comes with a degree has never been higher, calming fears about student debt. Still, it’s hard to feel good about these three data points: Graduation Rates. According to the National Student Clearinghouse, the six-year undergraduate completion rate is a mere 55%—and it’s declining. Employability. In 2012, the OECD ran its first international survey of adult skills. Only 8-16% of U.S. adults achieved literacy, numeracy, and problem-solving proficiency at a level judged to be equivalent to a bachelor’s degree, yet 34% had such a degree. Premium. Yes, the degree wage premium is higher than ever, 95% for those with a bachelor’s degree and 136% for those with a master’s degree when compared to high school graduates.

http://www.eduventures.com/2015/12/alternative-credentials-fresh-perspectives/#img