Educational Technology

by Fred Sitkins, Edudemic

Schools across the globe are disrupting the traditional educational model through the incorporation of technology into instruction. I can’t help thinking about how perfect the timing of this technological revolution is as it correlates perfectly with the adoption of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). The switch to the Common Core occurring at the same time as this wave of educational technology is as perfect as the combination of Twitter and your PLN. They fit together perfectly!

http://edudemic.com/2013/04/integrating-technology-into-the-common-core/

by Jamar Thrasher, Policy Mic

In an attempt to chart this phenomenon — known as massive open online courses — The Chronicle, attempted to reach every professor who has taught a MOOC (massive open online class). The online questionnaire was sent to 184 professors in late February, and 103 of them responded. The trend doesn’t look like it will stop anytime soon. Last year, Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced edX. “Online education is not an enemy of residential education,” said Susan Hockfield, president of MIT about edX. According to the article, “most professors who responded to The Chronicle’s survey said they believed that MOOCs would drive down the cost of college; 85 percent said the free courses would make traditional degrees at least marginally less expensive, and half of that group said it would lower the cost “significantly.” As far as awarding formal credit is concerned, most professors do not think their MOOCs are ready for prime time. Asked if students who succeed in their MOOCs deserve to get course credit from their home institutions, 72% said no.

http://www.policymic.com/articles/34185/online-education-benefits-professors-see-huge-potential-in-internet-courses

By Alex Boardman, Business 2 Community

Last week I got a glimpse into the future of education through the eyes of two visionaries: Salman Khan (founder of the Khan Academy) and Martin Bean (Vice President of the Open University). Both speakers talked about how online learning has had, and is still having a massive and transformative impact on education, and how it has the potential to vastly improve society. Khan’s website now has roughly 6.5 million unique users a month and it’s videos have had more than 200 million, while the Open University has had more than 1.5 million people graduate from their courses.

http://www.business2community.com/trends-news/the-future-of-education-how-the-khan-academy-is-changing-the-way-we-learn-0464770

by Jeff Dunn, Edudemic

The HotChalk Education Index surveyed more than 25,000 students, teachers, parents, and tutors over a period of 90 days. They then looked at more than 5 billion data points (with a b) to uncover the biggest trends in online learning that you may not yet know about. The Education Index is the first in what will become a series of reports from the HotChalk folks. They intend to build up their database, compare and contrast information, and more.

http://edudemic.com/2013/04/survey-uncovers-big-trends-in-online-learning/

by Ry Rivard, Inside Higher Ed

Software to detect student plagiarism is faced with renewed criticism from the faculty members who may confront more plagiarism than do most of their colleagues – college writing professors. Members of the Conference on College Composition and Communication passed a resolution at their annual convention last month to denounce plagiarism detection services, including products like Turnitin. According to the resolution, “plagiarism detection services can compromise academic integrity by potentially undermining students’ agency as writers, treating all students as always already plagiarists, creating a hostile learning environment, shifting the responsibility of identifying and interpreting source misuse from teachers to technology, and compelling students to agree to licensing agreements that threaten their privacy and rights to their own intellectual property.”

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/04/16/writing-professors-question-plagiarism-detection-software

by Richard Holmgren, Inside Higher Ed

More than 10 years ago, Herb Simon, the Carnegie Mellon University professor and Nobel laureate, declared, “Improvement in postsecondary education will require converting teaching from a solo sport to a community-based research activity.” The Open Learning Initiative (OLI) is an outgrowth of that vision and has been striving to realize it for more than a decade. Teams of cognitive scientists, technology consultants, designers, and disciplinary specialists are designing interactive, online courses that are available now from OLI. The program uses the latest research in cognitive science to inform course design, and it tests each element of the design by evaluating its effectiveness in promoting student learning. Creating such courses is capital-intensive, but since students interact solely with the computer when taking the course, the marginal cost to deliver the course to each additional student is minimal.

http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2013/04/15/essay-how-technology-and-new-ways-teaching-could-upend-colleges-traditional-models

by UNHCR

The UN refugee agency and the Jesuit Refugee Service (JRS), through its partner Jesuit Commons: Higher Education at the Margins initiative (JC:HEM), have signed an agreement to enhance higher education opportunities for refugees and other forcibly displaced people through online and on-site courses. The agreement expands access to Online courses are currently offered to refugees and other displaced students in Jordan, Kenya and Malawi. The agreement will expand the courses to Chad and several other countries where UNHCR and JRS operate. Assessment of students is already under way in Chad.

http://allafrica.com/stories/201304111064.html

by Adi Gaskell, Technorati

It’s been hard to ignore the publicity generated by online learning over the past year. Sites such as Coursera and Khan Academy have proved enormously popular with users from around the world. Khan Academy for instance has had over 150 million views of its online maths tutorials. Does such popularity transfer over to the grades students receive in actual degrees though? San Jose University believes they do.

http://technorati.com/social-media/article/online-learning-helps-undergraduates-get-better/

by Colleen Fell, Daily Nebraskan

Waiting weeks for exam results may become a thing of the past. EdX, a nonprofit company founded by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, recently unveiled auto-grade software. The software uses artificial intelligence to automatically grade essays and short-answer questions. The system’s functions are simple. An instructor must first manually grade 100 essays or other written pieces. The EdX system then bases its grading on how the instructor previously graded.

http://www.dailynebraskan.com/news/article_e4f5e06a-a24e-11e2-8d26-0019bb30f31a.html

By AMNA H. HASHMI, Harvard Crimson

San Jose State University will offer more courses that integrate Harvard’s virtual learning platform edX into their lesson plans, as well as work with other California universities to replicate this initiative at schools across the state, SJSU and edX announced Wednesday. In these blended courses, also known as flipped classrooms, students watch video sequences and complete online exercises at home. Class-time is then used to review the difficult concepts, ask the professor questions, and test understanding of the material through quizzes and practice problems.

http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2013/4/11/edx-san-jose-blended/

By Education Next

A new analysis examines two online programs in teacher preparation, one at the University of Southern California’s Rossier School of Education (MAT@USC) and the other at Western Governors University’s Teachers College (WGU). Author Meredith Liu writes that in contrast to sustaining innovations, by which education schools might add some new faculty or online course offerings but not change their brick-and-mortar model, fully-online degree programs offer the potential to “transform the industry into one that has lower costs and higher quality, and is more widely accessible.”

http://educationnext.org/online-teacher-education-a-%E2%80%9Cdisruptive-innovation%E2%80%9D-that-delivers-quality-at-lower-cost/

by Katie Lepi, Edudemic

For anyone who has ever had to write a paper, you know that getting the ideas down when they come to you is important. And for those of us who are (ahem) procrastinators (*looks away innocently*) getting the ideas down and the writing done when you’re inspired is key. For those of us who were educated in the dark ages before smartphones and tablets, if you wanted to write on the go you were pretty much out of luck. Now, there are a host of options for organizing your writing and writing on the go with different apps and web tools.

http://edudemic.com/2013/04/writing-apps-for-students/

by Jessica Leber, Technology Review

Experts gathered this week at Stanford’s Law School to discuss the robot revolution. As robotics software and hardware is commercialized, companies will face some interesting new condundrums, which may give them pause before adopting technologies ranging from workplace telepresence robots and robotic surgical tools, to driverless cars and commercial drones. But make no mistake, it will be the lawyers just as often as the technologists guiding purchasing decisions, and a hundred legal experts gathered at a conference at Stanford’s Law School yesterday to mull over wide-ranging legal questions posed by the robots marching over the commercial horizon.

http://www.technologyreview.com/view/513571/does-a-tele-robot-operator-need-a-visa-and-w-2/

By Katherine Bourzac, Technology Review

Transparent, shape-changing plastics could make touch screens and keyboards that stimulate users’ sense of touch. A very thin keyboard that uses shape-changing polymers to replicate the feel and sound of chunky, clicking buttons could be in laptops and ultrabooks next year. Strategic Polymers Sciences, the San Francisco-based company that developed the keyboard, is working on transparent coatings that would enable this feature in touch screens.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/513221/a-flexible-keyboard-with-buttons-that-feel-clickable/

By Tom Simonite, Technology Review

Unlike other currencies, Bitcoin is underwritten not by a government, but by a clever cryptographic scheme. For now, little can be bought with bitcoins, and the new currency is still a long way from competing with the dollar. But this explainer lays out what Bitcoin is, why it matters, and what needs to happen for it to succeed.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/424091/what-bitcoin-is-and-why-it-matters/

by Jeff Dunn, Edudemic

While flipping the classroom is still one of the hottest trends in education, it’s got nothing on time-saving and downright useful apps and web tools. In an effort to provide a quick look at some of the best web tools for flipped classrooms, I thought it would be useful to poll the @Edudemic Twitter followers. Including the tweets, I also got emails from friends, colleagues, and administrators from around the world. One thing stood out to me: there were a lot of repeats! Many folks who have tried the flipped classroom model or are currently deploying it have leveraged a lot of the same web tools.

http://edudemic.com/2013/04/web-tools-for-flipped-classrooms/

By DANNA HARMAN, NY Times

“This university consumes you, and you don’t get a break if you have a job, or even if you start your own company.” He adds with a grin: “You still have to pass advanced integral algebra.” But if the Technion refuses to coddle its charges — about 9,000 undergraduates and 3,800 graduate students — Intel, I.B.M., Microsoft and Yahoo and the like make up for it. All have set up offices along a direct bus route from student housing, recruit heavily from the student body and offer working hours that take those advanced integral algebra exams into account. Much as Silicon Valley popped up around Stanford, and Route 128 came to symbolize high technology because of its proximity to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, so the Technion has transformed the sleepy northern city of Haifa into a buzzy high-tech center.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/14/education/edlife/inside-the-technion-israels-premier-technological-institute-and-cornells-global-partner.html

by David Meyer, GigaOM

It’s easy to be sniffy about the concept of sending odors through the internet, but researchers are nonetheless hard at work on folding the sense of smell into the digital repertoire. The first world congress of the Digital Olfaction Society (tagline: “The Smell of Digital”), the stated goal of which is to “digitize, transmit, reproduce and recapture smells, flavors and fragrances” was recently held. You know that perennial April Fool’s joke about sending odors through the internet, most recently spun up by Google? The thing is, as my colleague Barb Darrow pointed out in the wake of Google’s gag this year, there really are serious efforts underway to make the digital capture and production of aromas a reality. The conference was small, but the participants spanned the disciplines of computer science, biochemistry, engineering, smart clothing design and perfume retail.

http://gigaom.com/2013/04/13/how-technology-is-slowly-developing-its-sense-of-smell/

by Ki Mae Heussner, GigaOM

Ambitious individuals who want to bulk up on new skills can turn to online learning site Udemy for lessons on everything from web development and programming to accounting and entrepreneurship. And it might not be long before their employers start picking up the tab. Online learning site Udemy is launching a corporate training option that enables companies to create private online learning sites for their employees.

http://gigaom.com/2013/04/12/udemy-adds-revenue-stream-with-private-online-learning-sites-for-companies/

By ANNE EISENBERG, NY Times
 
Factory robots are usually caged off from humans on the assembly line lest the machines’ powerful steel arms deliver an accidental, bone-crunching right hook. But now, gentler industrial robots, designed to work and play well with others, are coming out from behind their protective fences to work shoulder-to-shoulder with people. It’s an advance made possible by sophisticated algorithms and improvements in sensing technologies like computer vision.  The key to these new robots is the ability to respond more flexibly, anticipating and adjusting to what humans want.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/31/business/robots-and-humans-learning-to-work-together.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

BY ZACH LOZANO, Daily Texan

For engineering majors, the workload and level of difficulty in classes can make it a challenge to graduate in four years. A new app developed by the Cockrell School of Engineering called G4, in reference to the goal to graduate in four years, is available to engineering students and gives them a visual representation of a student’s degree plan to better assist course planning. Roughly 31 percent of entering freshman engineers will graduate with an engineering degree in four years, said Gregory Fenves, Dean of the Cockrell School of Engineering. He said 54 percent end up graduating in five years.

http://www.dailytexanonline.com/news/2013/04/05/engineering-students-have-new-online-tool-g4-to-improve-grad-rates