Educational Technology

by the News Herald

Perhaps overlooked in the frantic activity at the end of the 2013 legislative session was the bold progress Florida made regarding distance learning. Distance learning, or online education, is an evolving trend nationwide. And Florida accelerated that trend when Gov. Rick Scott signed an education bill in April that would expand online education at the state’s public colleges and universities. This is a big step forward. The new law affirms education doesn’t have to be tied to a campus or brick-and-mortar classrooms. The law also stresses employers’ needs. Online education will help employers train their employees.

http://www.newsherald.com/opinions/editorials/revolution-in-learning-1.141343

David F. Carr, Information Week

What do you get when you cross learning software with predictive analysis more often seen in movie rental sites? You might get something like the latest release of learning management system (LMS) Desire2Learn. The upgrade, released last week, brings predictive analytics to both students and instructors, says Desire2Learn. For students, it offers Amazon.com-style “if you liked that course, you’ll probably like this course” recommendations to help them choose classes they are most likely to succeed in. For instructors, it offers feedback on which students are in trouble.

http://www.informationweek.com/education/online-learning/desire2learn-predicts-students-best-clas/240154683

By William J. Owen, Online Learning Tips

Oh, no! I have to take a college math course!

“I’m not good at math.” …. “I don’t like math.” …. “I’ve never been good at it.” ….. “No one in my family has ever done well in math.”…. “I’m too old to take math.” ….. “Math takes too much time.” “I never used math and don’t expect I ever will use it.” These are some typical reactions from many working adults when they get the news that they need to take a mathematics or statistics course as part of their degree programs. It’s really devastating news for many working adult students and they come up with a lot of reasons to fail. Typically, the reasons are very personal and negative. While the students might arrive in a mathematics course with negative attitudes and perceptions, it is possible to overcome them and succeed in the course. I’ve found that there are several ways to find success in taking a college math course. I’ll address three of those and provide some tips for math success for busy, working adults.

http://onlinelearningtips.com/2013/05/13/math-success-tips-for-working-adults/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=math-success-tips-for-working-adults

by the Billings Gazette

The Billings Career Center library has several bookshelves. But most of its space is occupied by rows of computers with flat-screen monitors — and students at the keyboards. On one morning last week, one side of the library was filled with English students writing literary analyses of “Catcher in the Rye” on computers. On the other side, home construction and geometry students sat at a bank of computers to take a national standardized test to earn three college credits. The testing was made possible through a partnership between the Career Center and City College. “We are paperless out here,” said Scott Anderson, Career Center principal. “We have a smart board in every classroom. We do everything digitally.”

http://billingsgazette.com/news/opinion/editorial/gazette-opinion/gazette-opinion-school-technology-integral-to-student-success/article_d4ef733e-5863-56cd-bb44-a74113ee6833.html

By John Pavlus, Technology Review

Why should only computers, smartphones, and tablets be able to send a tweet? In the hopes of challenging this idea, Twitter recently developed a whimsical tweet-enabled cuckoo clock. It uses a toolkit that could help other designers and engineers test ways for new products to contribute to, and feed on, the social network’s chatter. Twitter created the clock, called #Flock, last month in partnership with London-based technology consultancy Berg; the clock responds to incoming tweets, @-messages, and retweets by animating small wooden puppets. The toolkit made by Berg is designed to make it easier for consumer-tech companies to prototype similar “connected products” and experiment with their novel user experiences.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/514541/twitter-tests-a-toolkit-that-puts-the-internet-in-things/

By Duncan Geere, Technology Review

Data science and personal information are converging to shape the Internet’s most powerful and surprising consumer products. “We want to provide people with a perfect photographic memory,” says Martin Källström, CEO of Memoto. His startup is creating a tiny clip-on camera that takes a picture every 30 seconds, capturing whatever you are looking at, and then applies algorithms to the resulting mountain of images to find the most interesting ones. Just 36 by 36 by 9 millimeters, the inconspicuous plastic camera has a lot crammed inside. The most important component is a five-megapixel image sensor originally designed for mobile phones. An ARM 9 processor running Linux powers a program that wakes the device twice a minute; takes a picture and a reading from the GPS sensor, accelerometer, and magnetometer; and promptly puts the device back to sleep.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/514361/logging-life-with-a-lapel-camera/

by Harvard Magazine

THE 2013 Harvard Initiative for Learning and Teaching (HILT) conference, which nearly filled the largest Science Center lecture hall on May 8, demonstrated wide interest across the University in improving pedagogy. Ever since HILT was launched in the fall of 2011, during Harvard’s 375th-anniversary celebration, it has catalyzed campus conversation on cognition and learning, course and curriculum design, classroom spaces, educational technology, assessment, and more, through an annual symposium and a series of innovation grants to faculty members. This second symposium—addressed by both the president and the provost, and attended by several deans among the audience of hundreds—suggested the variety and reach of educational experiments under way involving professors in every Harvard school, and their hundreds or thousands of students.

http://harvardmagazine.com/2013/05/harvard-learning-and-teaching-innovations

by Associated Press

In teacher Rob Lamb’s chemistry class, students are embracing a new classroom concept being used this school year in a few classes at Pattonville High School. Called a flipped classroom, students review a short lecture video at home and do what’s considered homework or labwork in class, enabling them to take a more in-depth look at a subject or get more teacher help, the Suburban Journals of Greater St. Louis (http://bit.ly/112Vgh4) reported. Lamb said the flipped classroom has given him more time to focus on concepts, do more labs and spend more one-on-one time working with students and answering questions.

http://dailyjournalonline.com/news/state-and-regional/flipped-classroom-transforms-traditional-teaching/article_185d8b12-4f1f-583d-b45a-348ab1858462.html

by Chris Kenrick, Palo Alto Weekly

Despite an explosion in biomedical knowledge, the method of teaching first-year medical students through lectures has changed little since the Wright brothers were tinkering at Kitty Hawk over a century ago, says Stanford University pediatric infectious disease specialist Charles Prober. Prober, who also is associate dean for medical education at the School of Medicine, aims to improve on that. By making lessons “stickier” — more memorable and comprehensible — and embracing self-paced and mastery-based approaches, he hopes to make better use of students’ time in their task of absorbing the ever-expanding medical canon.

http://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/show_story.php?id=29579

by The News Tribune

The Internet keeps on disrupting higher education – sometimes even in a good way. The latest example is the Open Course Library just completed by Washington’s two-year colleges. The library (opencourselibrary.org) is an online trove of free courses and free or low-cost textbooks developed by local faculty members. The materials cover 81 of Washington’s most popular lower-division classes – principles of accounting, microbiology, symbolic logic, English composition, etc. The whole enterprise, begun in 2011, bypasses the traditional trappings of college. No big, expensive textbooks, no snoozing in the back of lecture halls, no classrooms.

http://blog.thenewstribune.com/opinion/2013/05/06/a-web-raid-on-traditional-higher-ed/

by Christina Farr, VB/Entrepreneur

Coursera, the online course provider, is one of the fastest-growing startups that is transforming how we learn. Today, the company announced a partnership with a fellow ed-tech startup, Chegg, and is striking deals with the largest publishers. The goal is to make it easier for students of online courses to access relevant academic content on the web. Large publishing companies, including Cengage Learning, Macmillan Higher Education, Oxford University Press, SAGE, and Wiley will experiment with offering Coursera students versions of their digital textbooks, delivered via Chegg’s e-Reader. Students won’t be charged to access these materials while they’re enrolled on a course.

http://venturebeat.com/2013/05/08/coursera-partners-with-publishers-to-bring-digital-textbooks-to-the-masses/

By Patrick Tucker, Technology Review

As digital data expands, anonymity may become a mathematical impossibility. Data science and personal information are converging to shape the Internet’s most powerful and surprising consumer products. In 1995, the European Union introduced privacy legislation that defined “personal data” as any information that could identify a person, directly or indirectly. The legislators were apparently thinking of things like documents with an identification number, and they wanted them protected just as if they carried your name.  Today, that definition encompasses far more information than those European legislators could ever have imagined—easily more than all the bits and bytes in the entire world when they wrote their law 18 years ago.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/514351/has-big-data-made-anonymity-impossible/

by SRI

Speaking at the Ed Tech Industry Summit in San Francisco, Jeremy Roschelle, Ph.D., co-director of SRI International’s Center for Technology in Learning, highlighted how education researchers can best leverage the vast amount of data about online learning that is now available for their studies. In a shift from traditional research methods, Dr. Roschelle described how both researchers and developers can use large amounts of detailed data to evaluate student learning outcomes and enhance educational products. The presentation at the annual gathering for educational technology industry executives followed a well-attended workshop last year, which gathered extensive input from leaders on their needs for research, their frustrations with the slowness of traditional research methods, and their ideas on how to use newly available online learning data to improve products and students’ outcomes. The presentation highlighted the new synergies possible among learning scientists and the educational technology industry, in which learning scientists can play a key role in harvesting data for innovation.

http://online.wsj.com/article/PR-CO-20130506-904001.html

By Don Clark, Wall Street Journal

Computer-based educational systems have long helped impart information to students and assess their understanding of it. The next step, one company in the field says, is using their behavior to make predictions. That’s the aim of technology being announced Tuesday by Desire2Learn, a Canadian company that specializes in cloud-based based learning systems it markets to colleges, schools and companies. Desire2Learn, launched in 1999, competes with companies like Blackboard and Instructure. It claims that 10 million learners at a range of institutions have made use of its technology, including some at big U.S. university systems.

http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2013/05/07/online-learning-system-aims-at-predicting-success-or-failure/

By SARA K. SATULLO, The Express-Times

Mansour Farhat’s accounting students at Northampton Community College won’t find him standing up and lecturing for the entire class. In fact, in some sections of Farhat’s classes students will rarely sit through a 50-minute lecture on campus. Farhat is one of many Lehigh Valley higher educators testing the concept of a flipped classroom that inverts the traditional college teaching model of in-class lectures and homework outside of class. Farhat’s students watch lectures online before class and read the textbook. They fill out practice quizzes and post discussion questions on the online class forum. The quizzes give Farhat a glimpse of the concepts that students understand and what they’re struggling with, so he can hone in on problem areas and avoid repetition in class. If a question comes up often Farhat creates a video on the concept and posts it online.

http://www.poconorecord.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20130505/NEWS90/305050330/-1/NEWS

by Sci-Tech Today

Online learning hub Coursera is now offering teacher development courses via the web. A new range of partners includes education schools and, in a first, non-degree granting institutions such as the American Museum of Natural History that help train teachers. The classes could prove to be more flexible for busy teachers seeking advancement. A leading platform for the popular “massive open online courses” offered by elite universities is moving into a new realm: the expansive field of continuing education for teachers. Coursera, the California-based for-profit platform for MOOCs from 62 leading universities such as Stanford, Princeton and the University of Pennsylvania, planned to announce Wednesday a new range of partners that include education schools and, in a first, non-degree granting institutions such as the American Museum of Natural History that help train teachers. The announcement would give teachers pursuing their continuing education requirements, or courses that could give them a salary boost, a new set of options to learn from master professors at leading education schools such as Vanderbilt and the University of Virginia, along with a handful of museums and other institutions.

http://www.sci-tech-today.com/news/Coursera-Offers-New-MOOC-Options/story.xhtml?story_id=011001CEN1KV&full_skip=1

by Tara Becker, Quad Cities Times

Rhavon Cox-Bey doesn’t consider cyber-learning as home school. Rather, it’s school at home. Last year, the Davenport woman enrolled her children De-Andria, 18, Jhavon, 15, Anaiaha, 10, and niece Alesia, 17, in the newly launched Iowa Connections Academy, a tuition-free online public school for students K-12. Although the program is not for everybody, Cox-Bey said she likes the flexibility the school has to offer and has seen major improvements in her children’s academic progress and in their interest in learning. “It just gives us the freedom and also helps them stay on track with their homework and their assignments and what they’re needing help in,” she said.

http://qctimes.com/news/local/education/online-k–learning-on-the-rise-in-iowa/article_01b7e810-4a1e-514a-8f84-a5102f52a6f3.html?comment_form=true

By David Talbot, Technology Review

Early next year, an emerging wireless technology known as LTE Broadcast will essentially make it possible for carriers to put a TV-like broadcast stream within LTE cellular signals. Putting data in broadcast mode reduces congestion but makes the most sense in situations where everyone is watching the same newscast, sports match, or other special piece of content at the same time. In such situations, using LTE Broadcast mode, a carriers’ transmitter needs to just send a signal out over one channel rather than separate ones for each mobile device. That’s how the traditional TV broadcast works: it doesn’t matter if 100 or a million people are watching, because the content is out there for the taking.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/513311/broadcast-video-will-soon-be-packed-into-smartphone-signals/

By Aaron, educarelab

A growing number of universities are now offering online courses which have come as a boon for working professionals looking to continue their education. There is a lot of flexibility in online courses, and they are accessible to anyone with an internet connection. However, since the setup is different than a traditional classroom, students of online courses need to strategize their learning process in a different way than traditional courses. Since the classes are all online, one of the most common problems of online learning is that students tend to procrastinate in the absence of supervision. Only a self-motivated student can successfully complete an online course.

http://www.educarelab.com/2013/05/05/what-are-some-effective-study-strategies-for-students-of-online-courses/#.UYehIKLP2nI

By Dale Singer, Beacon staff

Governor Jay Nixon is pushing a new, private nonprofit university, a potential competitor to more established public and private schools in the state, that wants to persuade tens of thousands of Missourians that they should complete the college career they left behind years ago. It’s Western Governors University, formed back in 1995 by a group of governors in Western states – not including Missouri – to lure would-be students. For a flat-fee tuition of $6,000 a year, students can take as many courses as they think they can handle.

https://www.stlbeacon.org/#!/content/30678/western_governors_university?coverpage=3199

by Inside Higher Ed

The board of the National Education Association, which represents college faculty members in addition to elementary and secondary school teachers, on Friday approved a new statement on digital learning that is likely to be adopted as official policy for the union by its Representative Assembly in July. The policy, which applies to both K-12 and higher education: Endorses “hybrid” teaching — involving both technology and teachers — as the best approach. “Optimal learning environments should neither be totally technology free, nor should they be totally online and devoid of educator interaction,” the statement says. Calls for teachers to be centrally involved in decisions about how to use technology in classrooms.

http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2013/05/06/nea-prepares-new-statement-digital-learning