Educational Technology

by Open Education Database

Both online and traditional higher education has pros and cons. In the end, it is up to each individual to figure out how much time he or she will have to devote to earning a degree, what type of degree program he or she is interested in, and how much he or she can spend on education. For some, online programs are a perfect fit. Those who need a more structured learning environment, though, should try a traditional college degree program instead. However, it is also possible to have the best of both worlds in a hybrid program, in which some of your courses are online and some face-to-face. It’s also possible that individual courses themselves may contain both elements of interaction. The choice will depend on a student’s individual academic needs.

http://oedb.org/advice/how-online-colleges-schools-stack-up-to-traditional-colleges/

by Brittany Corona, the Foundry

Idaho has established the first statewide pilot of the Khan Academy. Thanks to donations from the J. A. and Kathryn Albertson Foundation, nearly $1.5 million in grants will be awarded to 47 Idaho schools for technology, professional development, and research. With this private donation, 10,000 students in nearly four dozen schools across Idaho will be using the Khan Academy in the 2013–2014 school year. The Khan Academy believes that the focus on mastery learning allows students to move at their own pace, creating ownership and responsibility in learning. The Khan Academy began when Sal Khan, an MIT and Harvard graduate, began recording math lectures and delivering them to his cousin who was struggling with traditional learning techniques. He eventually began posting the lectures online—after getting over his initial concern that “YouTube is for cats playing pianos, not serious mathematics.”

http://blog.heritage.org/2013/05/19/idahos-khan-academy-initiative-embracing-educational-technology/

By KECIA BAL, Daily American

Administrators at The Learning Lamp have expanded their online tutoring program to any student from kindergarten to 12th grade, and they are hoping the idea catches on with parents who want to give their kids an educational boost. “I think when people think of online tutoring, they’re thinking it’s just something where you log on and play a game or two,” said Kristi Emerick, assistant director of tutoring and special services at The Learning Lamp. “With our program, there’s an actual tutor who logs on and works one-on-one with students. We thought it was a really convenient option to add.”

http://www.dailyamerican.com/news/somerset/da-ot-online-tutoring-offers-convenient-help-20130518,0,2629293.story

by the Associated Press

The Navy lieutenant needed armed guards and an armored car to get to an exam site, in Kabul, Afghanistan. A deadly bomb attack also caused him to his miss classes _ transmitted live via the Internet _ but he persevered and earned a master’s degree in engineering from the University of Southern California while commanding a top security team. His class graduated on Friday, as he joins a growing number of service members earning college degrees while deployed in a war zone. “Not only was he out there living on the edge, but he had to get his homework done,” USC professor Frank Alvidrez said.

http://dailyjournalonline.com/news/national/navy-pilot-earns-degree-in-combat-zone/article_193f5b28-1723-576d-9e80-7dc7fd4f1486.html

by: Jeanne Grunert, Business Admin Info

South Carolina residents who have successfully completed at least 60 college credits can now complete their Bachelor’s degrees from anywhere thanks to a new online college launching this spring. Palmetto College, part of the University of South Carolina, offers degrees in liberal arts, organizational leadership, nursing, business administration, criminal justice, elementary education and human services. Enrollment is open to both in-state and out-of-state students, as long as they meet the University of South Carolina’s enrollment requirements and have at least 60 college credits earned at any accredited institution. Students who do not reside in South Carolina can take the online courses, but will pay a higher tuition rate.

http://www.businessadministrationinformation.com/news/new-online-college-provides-opportunities-for-students-to-complete-bachelors-degrees

by Megan Rose Dickey, Business Insider

The Georgia Institute of Technology will soon offer an online, three-year masters degree in computer science for less than $7,000. That’s about one-sixth of the cost of its traditional program, but officials maintain that the two degrees will be comparable, The Wall Street Journal reports. The program, which is offered in collaboration with education startup Udacity and AT&T, aims to open enrollment for fall 2014. As part of the deal, Udacity will get 40% of the revenue and Georgia Tech will take the rest. AT&T is subsiding the program to ensure it breaks even in its first year. Initially, enrollment will be limited to just a few hundred students. But Georgia Tech plans to gradually expand its student population over the next three years.

http://www.businessinsider.com/georgia-techs-7000-masters-degree-2013-5

By Emma Brown, the Washington Post

Microsoft has donated $1 million to help D.C. teachers redesign their classrooms using a “blended learning” approach that combines online learning with face-to-face instruction. Blended learning has drawn both excitement and skepticism as it has exploded in popularity in recent years. Boosters believe that technology could transform schools and give students a more personalized learning experience, while critics fear that when executed poorly, blended approaches reduce learning to clicks on a computer. The donation will help expand a D.C. program — known as the Education Innovation Fellowship — that exposes teachers to the latest thinking in the field and then encourages them to adapt those ideas into their own classrooms.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/microsoft-donates-1-million-to-help-expand-blended-learning-in-dc/2013/05/16/f14f7f76-be58-11e2-97d4-a479289a31f9_story.html

by Freek Vermeulen, Forbes

It would be naïve to think that online resources are not going to alter traditional business school education; they will and they should. Business schools better think hard how they are going to integrate online education into their courses and curricula. But this means that it offers opportunities rather than a threat. And research on the effects of disruptive innovation – for example in newspapers – has also shown that established players who treat the arrival of a new technology as an opportunity, rather than as direct substitute, are the ones that are most likely to survive and prosper.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/freekvermeulen/2013/05/16/antiquated-to-be-annihilated-is-an-on-line-revolution-brewing-in-business-education/

by Ry Rivard, Iside Higher Ed

Three top-tier universities have backed away from a partnership with their peers and the company 2U to create a pool of for-credit online courses. Despite a year of considerable hype as leading colleges and universities created online partnerships to try to redefine higher education, a recent spate of strong faculty reactions make clear that tradition will not change easily or silently, especially at institutions with a strong history of faculty influence. Citing a variety of reasons, the three universities’ decisions offer a spectrum of reactions to a new wave of online learning and the companies, in this case 2U, that are trying to drive that change.  Inside Higher Ed a group of 10 top-tier universities that said last November they planned to offer courses through 2U for a project, billed as “one of a kind,” known as Semester Online. But as this fall’s launch date approached, these institutions backed away.

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/05/17/three-universities-back-away-plan-pool-courses-online

by COREY MURRAY, EdTech Magazine

Buoyed by her own experiences, and with support from administrators at Cyprus High School in the Anaheim Union High School District, Citlau launched one of the school system’s first online courses. Five years later, the district boasts a full slate of curriculum-approved, teacher-generated online courses, with 23 optional classes scheduled for the 2013–2014 school year. That success is just one of the reasons why iNACOL, a national nonprofit that supports the use of technology in U.S. schools, and the Southern Regional Education Board chose Citlau as their National Online Teacher of the Year. I was fortunate to catch up with Citlau while she was in Washington, D.C., last week to meet with education officials and representatives for learning management systems provider Blackboard, Inc. Itching to launch an online course at your school? Here are five steps the nation’s best online teacher says every program should take.

http://www.edtechmagazine.com/k12/article/2013/05/5-must-have-elements-every-online-class

by Yale Daily News

Following a December report that encouraged the University to prioritize online education, Yale is answering the call. In a Wednesday email to the Yale community, Provost Benjamin Polak announced the University’s new partnership with Coursera, an online education platform used by Princeton, Columbia, Stanford and the University of Pennsylvania. Polak also announced the creation of a new standing committee on online education and the appointment of music professor Craig Wright to the new position of academic director of online education. In the email, Polak stressed the importance of using online education to explore new teaching strategies that can be used in Yale classrooms.

http://yaledailynews.com/crosscampus/2013/05/15/yale-expands-online-education-appoints-new-director/

by Aarti Shahani, Marketplace

Some of the nation’s most elite professors are taking up a new teaching fad: Massively Open Online Courses. MOOCs rhymes with nukes, and the reach is about the same. These classes streamed on the Internet have millions of students around the world enrolling. They’re free of charge. But when you add up all the work it takes on and off camera to make a MOOC, the cost to professors is pretty high. As Prof. Kevin Werbach can attest, the life of a MOOCs rockstar is not pure glitz.

http://www.marketplace.org/topics/tech/education/life-online-professor

by Christina Farr, Venture Beat

 Why do students cheat — and how are they getting away with it? One unintended use for massive open online courses, dubbed “MOOCs,” is to help professors better understand the mechanics of cheating in online learning. Bernard Bull, an assistant vice president for academics at Concordia University Wisconsin, will ask his class to cheat for the purposes of anthropological research. Students will then be asked to disclose exactly how they cheated. The assignment is a unit in a new class, “Understanding Cheating in Online Courses,” which is offered through the Canvas MOOC platform run by Instructure, a course-management company.

New online course encourages students to cheat… for science

by Globe Newswire

Saylor.org, the free education initiative of the Saylor Foundation, announced today the launch of its new K-12 program of open online courses. The academic courses are aligned to the Common Core State Standards and use open educational resources (OER) extensively, making the courses, as well as their contents, widely reusable by students, teachers, and parents nationwide. “People want lessons that are good quality, targeted to the right grade level, that they can trust,” said Angelyn Pinter, K-12 Content Development Manager at the Saylor Foundation. “With something like hundreds, or even thousands, of lesson plan databases for teachers, we’re here to vet and organize existing content. Saylor.org can become your first go-to for teachers, students, and parents.”

http://online.wsj.com/article/PR-CO-20130515-912759.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

By Ben Waber, Technology Review

Data science and personal information are converging to shape the Internet’s most powerful and surprising consumer products. Can we use data about people to alter physical reality, even in real time, and improve their performance at work or in life? That is the question being asked by a developing field called augmented social reality. Here’s a simple example. A few years ago, with Sandy Pentland’s human dynamics research group at MIT’s Media Lab, I created what I termed an “augmented cubicle.” It had two desks separated by a wall of plexiglass with an actuator-controlled window blind in the middle. Depending on whether we wanted different people to be talking to each other, the blinds would change position at night every few days or weeks.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/514371/augmenting-social-reality-in-the-workplace/

By Milwaukee Journal Sentinal

Universities are taking online degrees to a whole new level, giving college students opportunities and experiences that are not often found in a traditional college classroom. Online education has become a desirable choice of study at colleges and universities. More students are pursuing online degrees than in previous years. Millions of students are taking advantage of online education to fulfill academic opportunities and achieve professional success previously unavailable with traditional forms of study. Catering to these students in a virtual setting requires customization of programs, something George Washington University’s School of Business is doing with its connected Digital Community. This Digital Community creates classroom conversations that might not be available in the traditional classroom setting; for example, connecting business students with mentors working in Shanghai, or having an alum share business management tips from an office in Los Angeles. These business programs are 99 percent online, allowing students to study anywhere – on campus, in a study abroad setting or while already employed – and connecting them to the same professors teaching the classroom courses.

http://www.jsonline.com/sponsoredarticles/education/online-college-courses-connect-students-digitally8077710101-207232781.html

By Aimee Claire, TSB Contributor

Young people in many countries across the world are increasingly taking advantage of online learning as part of their overall education, often with the goal of entering a profession or getting a step ahead in a profession in which they have already a foothold. This is as true of young professionals in McKinney, as it is of aspiring young lawyers, doctors, business managers, and others in towns and cities everywhere.

http://townsquarebuzz.com/ams/52013/young-professionals-attracted-online-learning/0/ams/52013

by Troy Onink, Forbes

Georgia Institute of Technology has announced a partnership with Udacity to offer an online Masters Degree in Computer Science for $7,000, down 80% from the existing cost of $40,000 for the on-campus, instructor led program. Suddenly, masters programs around the country will have to compete with Georgia Tech‘s $7,000 program, and that won’t be easy or fast in coming. The traditionally taught graduate degree in computer science at Georgia Tech is a very well regarded program that is in high demand and has very positive outcomes in terms of jobs and earnings. Georgia Tech graduates tend to do very well in earnings upon graduation, especially in computer science. Now students from around the world will be able to obtain the same degree online at an 80% discount – which is, no doubt, a sonic boom rattling the windows in the offices of college administrators across the country.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/troyonink/2013/05/15/georgia-tech-udacity-shock-higher-ed-with-7000-degree/

By Tanya Roscorla, Center for Digital Ed

A world without network, storage and computer barriers could become reality if research and education network Internet2 has its way. The organization has set a high goal of knocking down these barriers in higher education. As the fields of digital content, video and cloud storage continue to advance, they provide opportunities to recreate an educational experience that has no limits. “We don’t want barriers to be the network, we don’t want barriers to be the storage, we don’t want barriers to be the computer,” said Shelton Waggener, senior vice president of Internet2. “If we can share and access the total capacity of higher education, we can live in a barrierless world.”

http://www.centerdigitaled.com/news/Internet2-Seeks-to-Knock-Down-Technology-Barriers.html

By Dylan Scott, Center for Digital Ed

The conventional wisdom these days is that the United States needs more people trained in the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). In a future with global competition built around advanced manufacturing, the thinking goes, young Americans are going to need those skills to succeed. How to translate that need into a revamped K-12 and higher education system, though, is an ongoing debate. President Obama wants to recruit and train 100,000 new teachers in the STEM subjects. The Common Core standards, which will be implemented in nearly every state starting next year, are tailored toward STEM. But a few conservative governors want to go a step farther. They’ve suggested it’s time to stop spending money on a traditional liberal arts education and instead focus our resources on classes and degrees connected directly to those new jobs in advanced manufacturing.

http://www.centerdigitaled.com/news/Should-Universities-Move-Away-From-a-Liberal-Arts-Education.html

By Tanya Roscorla, Center for Digital Ed

Predictive analytics is on the rise in education, being used to pull together student information such as GPAs, majors and course success — all to project how well individual students will do in certain classes. But not to worry; predictive analytics won’t replace instruction. According to education software company Desire2Learn, it will help colleges serve students better.

http://www.centerdigitaled.com/news/Predictive-Analytics-is-Not-a-Scary-Machine.html