Educational Technology

By Jack M. Germain, Linux Insider

Online education company Udacity on Tuesday introduced a new “nanodegree” program in self-driving auto engineering. President Sebastian Thrun made the announcement during an interview at TechCrunch Disrupt. The goal is to build a crowdsourced, open source self-driving car, he said. The program is the first of its kind, according to Thrun. Students will learn the skills and techniques used by self-driving car teams at the most innovative companies in the world, Udacity has promised. The course spans three 12-week terms and covers deep learning, computer vision, sensor fusion, localization and controllers. Each of the three terms will cost US$800. The first term begins in mid-October.

http://www.linuxinsider.com/story/83896.html?rss=1

By Richard Chang, THE Journal

Natalie Hampton turned the hardest years of her life into a new app that can help other kids. The 16-year-old from Sherman Oaks, CA has created “Sit With Us,” a free mobile app that allows students to become “ambassadors” and privately invite other kids to join them in the cafeteria or lunchroom. Users may also find an “open table” where they can sit with other people. The app can help kids always find a lunch buddy and avoid the humiliation and embarrassment of being publicly rejected or isolated. Hampton experienced bullying in her own life in seventh and eight grade, and said she spent her entire seventh grade year eating alone. “I want to use social media, which can be harmful, and use it for a change and do something good,” she told the L.A. Daily News.

https://thejournal.com/articles/2016/09/13/sherman-oaks-teen-creates-anti-bullying-app.aspx

By Sri Ravipati, THE Journal

The Raspberry Pi Foundation has sold more than 10 million affordable microcomputers. To celebrate, the foundation is debuting a new starter kit. Since its launch in 2012, the foundation has sold more than 10 million of its $35 single board microcomputers to help students access computing and digital making skills. The “unashamedly premium” Raspberry Pi Starter Kit costs roughly $130, according to CEO Eben Upton.

https://thejournal.com/articles/2016/09/12/10-million-raspberry-pi-sold-company-releases-starter-kit.aspx

By Dian Schaffhauser, THE Journal

Over the next year K-12 will be placing more emphasis on coding as a form of literacy and on students as creators. Schools that don’t already have makerspaces will want to get them and online learning will start to look like something that’s typical rather than out of the norm. Those are the “short-term” trends and technologies that surfaced in the 2016 K-12 Edition of the NMC/CoSN Horizon Report. This annual publication charts a five-year horizon among school communities around the world, summarizing the latest research and discussions of a group of 59 technology and education experts working with the New Media Consortium (NMC) and the Consortium for School Networking (CoSN).

https://thejournal.com/articles/2016/09/15/newest-nmccosn-horizon-k12-report-emphasizes-kids-as-creators.aspx

By George Lorenzo, EdSurge

When four professors from the Borough of Manhattan Community College (BMCC) started collaborating on game-based learning (GBL) in developmental math and writing instruction in the mid-2000s, they had no idea what they were setting in motion. Today, more than 160 GBL researchers and practitioners contribute to the dynamic CUNY Games Network (CGN), housed within the City University of New York (CUNY), with its more than 540,000 students on 24 campuses. The network links educators across disciplines who are interested in using games and other forms of interactive teaching to improve student success. And participants are showing that gameplay is serious business: data from BMCC classes suggests that when students have fun learning they appear to have more meaningful learning experiences.

https://www.edsurge.com/news/2016-09-13-game-on-how-four-community-college-professors-spawned-the-cuny-games-network

by eSchool News

As the school year gets underway across the nation, many institutions are launching new technology initiatives and programs designed to improve teaching and learning. Educators love to share their successes, learn from the success of other institutions, and they also love to share lessons they learned along their journey. eSchool Media and Xirrus have teamed up on the Innovate to Educate Awards to give a national platform for educators to share what they’re most proud of in their colleges and universities. Here, we’ve highlighted the successes of four awards program applicants.

http://www.ecampusnews.com/curriculum/innovative-technology-initiatives/

by Oklahoma Horizon

The world of education is available with the click of the mouse. The popularity of online education lead several traditional universities to make their own courses more accessible to the public. OKLAHOMA HORIZON’s Austin Moore shares how one of those universities started their program by teaching ag online. The idea is straight forward: offer a class, offer it online, make it available to anyone and accept everyone. Hence the term, Massive Open Online Course (MOOC). Throughout this emerging industry, you’ll find courses offered for credit, some of certifications and others simply for the sake of learning. It is no small way, the wild, wild west of post-secondary education.

http://www.rfdtv.com/story/33093573/ag-goes-online-at-osu

by the Spokesman-Review

Teachers in rural areas will be able to advance their math education through online courses and video coaching under a $2.8 million National Science Foundation grant awarded to the University of Idaho College of Education and the University of Rochester in New York. The four-year grant from the foundation’s Discovery Research PreK-12 program will support research of an online-based professional development model. The goal is to increase the quality of professional development opportunities for rural school teachers who may have less access to such support. “This program will ensure teachers in remote areas of Idaho are receiving instructional support that will ultimately influence student learning in mathematics,” said Julie Amador, assistant professor in the UI College of Education and director of the Idaho Region 1 Match Center in Coeur d’Alene.

http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2016/sep/14/ui-to-use-grant-to-study-online-courses-for-rural-/

By Jarrett Carter, Education Dive

A new study authored by Course Report reveals surprising data about the economic and social benefits of the emerging for-profit training model. According to the study, more than 70% of bootcamp graduates report holding employment requiring use of the skills learned in the bootcamp, and more than 60% have received salary increases as a result of their completion. Women comprise more than 40% of the national bootcamp student profile, and African-Americans who complete coding bootcamps are the highest earners and most likely to be employed at a tech company.

http://www.educationdive.com/news/study-coding-bootcamps-yield-high-returns-on-job-placement-diversity/426349/

By Joshua Kim, Inside Higher Ed

My advice for running successful distributed meetings comes from what I have seen work in synchronous online learning. If you can get a synchronous online class session to run well – then you can also run a good distributed meeting. Note – my advice for distributed meetings has nothing to do with webinars. Webinars are almost bad because of issues of scale. There are too many people on most webinars to allow for meaningful conversation. Your model for good distributed meetings should not be webinars, but teaching.

https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/technology-and-learning/how-have-distributed-meeting

by JELANI GIBSON, Weatherford Democrat

Inclusive classrooms, expansion of the learning management system Canvas, increased Google cloud platform usage and other online-based solutions to learning will be among the Weatherford Independent School District’s educational priorities for the 2016—17 school year, the district’s board of trustees were told Monday. Interconnected goals and approaches to education are important, said Dr. Lance Campbell, the school district’s secondary education director. Personalized learning for summer school students is a priority as well, Campbell said. “We typically take kids from summer school and hire teachers … we can personalize our learning experiences for those kids. That’s where the whole idea came from. Teachers were assigned and worked with them individually.” Establishing relationships and a love of learning is something of importance, Campbell said.

http://www.weatherforddemocrat.com/news/local_news/online-based-learning-a-focus-for-wisd/article_dd91f3de-7266-56c1-a6aa-a8dd0edbb0fc.html

By Roger Riddell, Education Dive

IT leaders share their advice and words of wisdom for those aspiring to the roleThis feature is the second in a series focused exclusively on issues impacting higher ed IT administrators, running through the beginning of the annual Educause conference, Oct. 25-28. There are any number of things most people wish they had known their first day on a job. In our research for this series, we asked 6 higher ed CIOs to share their thoughts. This is what they had to say.

http://www.educationdive.com/news/what-6-higher-ed-cios-wish-they-knew-their-first-day-on-the-job/425624/

By Dian Schaffhauser, THE Journal

Achieving personalized learning in schools takes good technology programs, suggested a new report from Digital Promise. But it also takes something else: “learner positioning systems.” These “LPSs” are akin to a GPS, except instead of telling people where they are geographically, they’d be used to help students and their teachers get a grounding in where the students are in their learning journey. That information might cover “a map of learning topics and progressions [and] a bank of programs and resources tied to the learning map.” The use of the LPS, stated “Making Learning Personal for All: The Growing Diversity in Today’s Classroom,” would help the student “self-identify” his or her strengths, preferences and challenges, set learning goals and find the appropriate resources to help meet those goals.

https://thejournal.com/articles/2016/09/13/new-report-on-personalized-learning-recommends-use-of-learner-positioning-systems.aspx

By Dian Schaffhauser, THE Journal

Virtual reality (VR) is on the rise. Less than a quarter of educators (23 percent) have tried out VR in their schools so far, and most of that effort has been in science (52 percent) vs. history (29 percent), engineering (20 percent) or any other subject. However, the majority of educators (55 percent) surveyed said they do expect to use VR in the future, because they believe it could excite “students to learn” (68 percent), encourage “creativity” (39 percent), make “difficult concepts easier” (32 percent) and reduce the cost for “field trips” (23 percent). Those are a few of the results that came out of a survey about VR recently sponsored by Extreme Networks, which sells networking hardware, software and services. According to the company, people from 349 schools participated.

https://thejournal.com/articles/2016/09/07/report-most-educators-want-to-try-vr-in-classroom.aspx

By Sri Ravipati, Campus Technology

Two facilities at Indiana University (IU) have integrated comprehensive media platforms that enable collaboration and provide cutting-edge 3D and virtual reality studio technologies. Both The Media School and the soon-to-open Mark Cuban Center for Sports Media and Technology have adopted the Avid MediaCentral Platform and other tools from Avid Technologies to help prepare IU students for real-world media industry workflows. The MediaCentral Platform will enable students at The Media School to collaborate remotely and access projects and media from anywhere. In addition, the school will be one of the first to use Avid NEXIS, a software-storage platform that is designed to accelerate production. These tools will be used in conjunction with Avid Media Composer and Avid Pro Tools, which The Media School has used for more than 15 years.

https://campustechnology.com/articles/2016/09/12/indiana-u-introduces-students-to-hightech-media-production-tools.aspx

By David Raths, Campus Technology

The CISO role in higher education is evolving, putting more emphasis on enterprise risk management and policy development. As data breaches and cybercrime gain a higher profile in higher education, the role of the chief information security officer is changing — and broadening beyond IT. The increasing sense of urgency is bringing people from different backgrounds to the CISO post, and is raising questions about budgets and reporting structures as well. “Higher education is starting to recognize that cyber risk is the same as other types of business risk,” said Brian Kelly, CISO at Quinnipiac University (CT). “It is the same type of consideration as someone falling down a staircase. We are closer to those cabinet-level conversations around risk. It has gone beyond being an IT problem.”

https://campustechnology.com/articles/2016/09/08/chief-information-security-officers-moving-away-from-it.aspx

By Michael Hart, Campus Technology

A Pennsylvania State University research project is exploring the use of 3D printing and interactive technology to teach middle school students about the human brain. Researchers in the Brain3M project, funded by the Penn State Social Science Research Institute, have come up with a tailored online learning platform that allows students to go through a series of virtual 3D structure models and descriptions of the brain along with photos and diagrams that illustrate the complex concepts concerning how the human brain works.

https://campustechnology.com/articles/2016/09/13/3d-printing-online-learning-used-to-teach-students-about-the-brain.aspx

By Dian Schaffhauser, Campus Technology

IT people are sounding sick from the announcement that the University of California San Francisco intends to outsource many of its technology functions to an India-based service provider. Reporting by Computerworld found that layoffs for some 17 percent of the institution’s 565-employee IT staff will hit next February — after those same workers have trained Indian replacements employed by HCL Technologies. The university is focused entirely on health areas, with four schools: dentistry, nursing, medicine and pharmacy. According to UCSF’s website, there are currently 3,114 students enrolled in degree programs, 1,479 residents and 1,127 post-doctoral scholars. However, that small student body belies the size of the overall institution, which is currently the second largest employer in the city. UCSF’s paid workforce comprises 22,000 staff and nearly 2,800 faculty.

https://campustechnology.com/articles/2016/09/09/uc-san-francisco-outsourcing-it-ops-to-india.aspx

by Sera Royal, GW Hatchet

Students this semester have noticed a new section on their syllabi: the minimum number of hours they are expected to spend on coursework in and out of class. As the University begins its reaccreditation process, officials have been working on adhering to the requirements set by the Middle States Commission on Higher Education, the agency that accredits GW. One of the requirements is proving that a course adheres to the U.S. Department of Education’s definition of a course hour, which includes the specific number of hours students are expected to spend in and out of class. “They are also a reminder to faculty about how much work they should expect of their students.” Csellar said what constitutes a course hour has changed as new types of courses, like online courses, increase in popularity. Accrediting bodies are more likely to request documentation of the ways in which a university’s courses follow the course hour definition, she said.

http://www.gwhatchet.com/2016/09/12/faculty-recommend-new-syllabi-section-on-course-hours/

By Stacy Collett, Computerworld

When CPL Online opened for business in 2010, it offered 20,000 interactive online courses on food safety, health and safety, fire awareness and call centers. That number grew to 35,000 courses in 2011 and exploded to 160,000 by 2012. When its SQL platform couldn’t keep up anymore, CPL seized the opportunity to transform its business and deployed the HPCC Systems platform, a high-performance big data analytics system from LexisNexis Risk Solutions. CPL’s HPCC deployment uses data to track user trends, spot suspicious activity (to help root out cheaters) and identify the best-performing employees. Heat mapping shows how users work their way through every mouse-click of a course and helps CPL Online improve engagement and content.

http://www.computerworld.com/article/3117255/data-analytics/cpl-online.html

By Pineandlakes Echo Journal

The Underground Papers, a student-run newspaper registered with the National Scholastic Press Association (offering scholarship opportunities to writers), is a unique online newspaper for youth that also can be enjoyed all ages. The course is formatted for online learning/homeschool families, but can be used by anyone. The course is set up in modules, six lessons at a time. Join anytime; lessons can be adjusted to fit schedules. Students can participate in one, a couple or all of the modules.

http://www.pineandlakes.com/news/4112924-underground-papers-courses-offered