by ANUSHREE SINGH, Business Insider India
Leaders at Udacity, an education startup disrupting learning technologies globally, have observed trends related to online courses in Android, Machine Learning, and Data Analysis in India, US, and around the world this year. One of them is that Indians are completing online courses faster than their US counterparts.
Share on FacebookBy A.J. O’Connell, Campus Technology
In June of 2015, leaders in adaptive learning hashed out the definitions of personalized and adaptive learning at a summit in Santa Fe, NM, hosted by WCET (the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education’s Cooperative for Educational Technologies). And now, more than a year later, the adaptive learning community has moved on. The terms have been defined: “personalized learning” is any customization of learning by an instructor, while “adaptive” refers to technology that monitors student progress in a course and uses that data to modify instruction in real time. The formal discussion of what those terms mean, at least among experts, is over.
Share on Facebookby Bloomberg News
VIPKid has raised $125 million and signed up 50,000 kids to study English, math and science online. Cindy Mi leans forward on a couch in her sun-filled Beijing office to explain how she first got interested in education. She loved English so much as a child that she spent her lunch money on books and magazines to practice. By 15, she was good enough that she began to tutor other students. At 17, she dropped out of high school to start a language-instruction company with her uncle. Today, Mi is 33 and founder of a startup that aims to give Chinese kids the kind of education American children receive in top U.S. schools. Called VIPKid, the company matches Chinese students aged five to 12 with predominantly North American instructors to study English, math, science and other subjects. Classes take place online, typically for two or three 25-minute sessions each week.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-19/if-the-u-s-won-t-pay-its-teachers-china-will
Share on FacebookBy Tim Sarchet, Personnel Today
If we accept that social interaction is key to teaching certain subjects, and that the current problem facing online learning experiences is effectiveness, then one thing matters more than anything else: cohorts. Learning in groups has long been a feature of effective learning and a core metric for measuring academic institutions. The QS World Universities Ranking attributes 20% of their overall assessment to faculty-student ratio, while the Times Higher Education World University Rankings assigns teaching quality, of which faculty-student ratio is one of the most important factors, 30% of their overall assessment. While there is some disagreement as to the optimum class size, it is hard to find any argument or research in favour of very large classes. Simply put, relatively small groups are hugely beneficial to learning outcomes, but while many companies may appreciate this, the perceived logistical and cost implications mean individually taken, web-based programmes continue to be the norm in business learning.
http://www.personneltoday.com/hr/creating-cohorts-solve-online-learning-conundrum/
Share on Facebookby Ken Mazaika, Forbes
Delivery of the right content, at the right time, in the right medium. Let me explain through an example. Say you’re trying to learn about software development in a physical classroom. The quality of your experience would be limited by four key things: The structure/pacing of your course materials/outline. How fast/slow your classmates can learn software development. The mediums available to teach software development in a physical space. The depth of knowledge of your teacher in software development. When done correctly, online education has the power to break every single one of these limitations. It can flip the way we learn completely upside down by ushering in a brand new model. People sometimes refer to this as the student-led model, which, through technology, gives students the power to get the right content, at the right time, in the right medium.
Share on Facebookby Shayna Cook, New America
This report aims to answer those last two questions, which represent new and unexplored terrain in early childhood education policy. To investigate the intersection of issues in teacher preparation, early childhood policy, and online degree programs, we synthesized findings from published reports on the state of teacher preparation, conducted interviews with experts, culled information from websites of institutions offering online degree programs, and analyzed national data sets on early childhood teacher preparation programs, as well as surveys of the early childhood workforce. We focused primarily on the segment of the early childhood workforce that is closest to achieving the bachelor’s degree credential and commensurate compensation: pre-K lead teachers. Our findings show how online degrees can provide teachers with greater access to programs, but also point to the need for better higher education data and the benefits of degree programs that provide teachers with financial supports.
Share on Facebookby Surajit Dasgupta, NDTV
Coursera has 1.8 million learners from India out of 23 million registered learners globally – its second largest base of online learners after the US.
The 10 Most Popular Coursera Courses of 2016 (based on total Indian enrollments):
1. Machine Learning – Stanford University
2. Programming for Everybody (Getting Started with Python) – University of Michigan
3. R Programming – Johns Hopkins University
4. Learning How to Learn: Powerful mental tools to help you master tough subjects – University of California, San Diego
5. The Data Scientist’s Toolbox – Johns Hopkins University
Share on Facebookby Jarrett Carter, Education dive
The U.S. Department of Education has finalized its guidance on colleges and universities offering online degrees in states and territories beyond their home location, requiring that schools receive authorization from every state where domestic students do, or could pursue degrees. The guidance allows for continuation of the State Authorization Reciprocity Agreement, which allows degree offerings in 44 states so far. According to Inside Higher Ed, some observers are not sure if the new guidance will be maintained under the incoming Trump Administration, which has shared on the record a desire to rollback several key elements of educational regulation.
http://www.educationdive.com/news/ed-publishes-final-rules-on-distance-education/432747/
Share on FacebookBy Dian Schaffhauser, Campus Technology
Earthquake preparedness, violent explosions of massive stars at the end of their lives, effectiveness of climate change response policy and teaching students about high-performance computing: These are some of the 130 projects undertaken in the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign this year, tapping into the computing power of Blue Waters, the center’s high-performance computing system. Among all of the research undertaken, at least one percent of them — 60 million core hours of computational capacity — each year is dedicated to “educational work,” projects intended to support the development of a national workforce with expertise in petascale computing.
by Mathew Lynch, Edvocate
Modern technology offers a plethora of cognitive tools for implementation in your classroom. You’re likely familiar with pedagogical tools and teaching resources, but you may also be wondering what exactly a “cognitive tool” is. Cognitive tools are tools what, when used outside of the classroom, play a role in productivity. They include word-processing programs, spreadsheets, and e-mail programs. Applied to the classroom, these become cognitive tools, because they improve the learning process, enhancing thinking and understanding. Let’s look at some examples:
http://www.theedadvocate.org/hacked-cognitive-tools/
Share on FacebookBy Jeffrey R. Young, EdSurge
It sounds like a fake news story: Two professors plan a free online course on how to write fake news. But this course is real—as well as an act of satire. It’s called “How to Write and Read Fake News: Journalism in the Age of Trump,” and it’s being offered as a kind of performance art to draw attention to the problem of the influential falsehoods that are spreading online. The course is the latest offering from a long-running satirical project called UnderAcademy College, whose previous courses included “Grammar Porn” and “Underwater Procrastination and Advanced Desublimation Techniques.”
Share on Facebookby Michigan State University
Michigan State University researchers studied laptop use in an introductory psychology course and found the average time spent browsing the web for non-class-related purposes was 37 minutes. Students spent the most time on social media, reading email, shopping for items such as clothes and watching videos. And their academic performance suffered. Internet use was a significant predictor of students’ final exam score even when their intelligence and motivation were taken into account, said Susan Ravizza, associate professor of psychology and lead author of the study. “The detrimental relationship associated with non-academic internet use,” Ravizza said, “raises questions about the policy of encouraging students to bring their laptops to class when they are unnecessary for class use.” Funded by the National Science Foundation, the findings are published online in the journal Psychological Science. The article is titled “Logged in and zoned out: How laptop internet use impacts classroom learning.”
http://msutoday.msu.edu/news/2016/internet-use-in-class-tied-to-lower-test-scores/
Share on Facebookby Dyllan Furness, Digital Trends
Dubbed the Biology Cloud Lab, the interactive platform is designed to engage scientists of all ages by letting them remotely control LEDs around communities of light-responsive cells. Although the single-celled organisms (Euglena) depend on light to make energy, they retreat when the light source is too strong. By manipulating the light’s direction and intensity, users can watch the Euglena react in real time and, later, hypothesize about the cells’ behavior. “Classic microscopy is just passive observation,” Stanford assistant professor of bioengineering and co-lead of the project, Ingmar Reidel-Kruse, told Digital Trends. “The Cloud Lab is interactive, i.e. a user can push a button, turn on a light, and see a cell responding. That is a paradigm change, which enables a totally new type of firsthand experience.”
https://www.yahoo.com/tech/let-light-online-platform-lets-211339148.html
Share on Facebookby Associated Press
Three 10th-graders gathered in a pod working on a project they hope would ultimately lead to more civil discourse in America. “A lot of people are neglecting other points of view,” said Sam Humrichouse, 15, who lives in Meridian, reflecting upon the vitriolic campaign rhetoric the country experienced in the presidential campaign. He and his two classmates were at work on a plan to create a website where people could come, tell their stories and answer questions about their lives. As people visit the website, they would see the diversity in those stories and it would help “create an opportunity to practice civil discourse online,” said Harry Northrop, 14, of Boise.
http://www.ccenterdispatch.com/news/state/article_8760e00f-34d0-52ec-828a-b7a9fa4d9138.html
Share on Facebookby ZD Net
1. Cybersecurity: Data breaches accelerate
2. Cloud: AWS built on its lead as cloud providers mature
3. Apple: Can’t get out of its own way
4. The PC: Dead like vinyl records
5. Governments: The underfunded giants are at risk in tech
http://www.zdnet.com/article/the-5-biggest-tech-trends-of-2016-zdnet-editors-sound-off/
Share on FacebookBy Frank Matys, Simcoe.com
Decades after earning a diploma in chemical engineering technology, Rettinger — who entered policing in 1990 after initially working in the private sector — enrolled in online studies at Georgian College. “Most of my peers at Georgian weren’t even born when I graduated the first time,” he told Simcoe.com. Eligible for retirement from his job as staff sergeant with the Midland Police Service in 2018, Rettinger decided to pursue a degree in police studies in the hope of joining the college faculty part-time and training students in law enforcement.
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