Educational Technology

By REENA SINGH, Watertown Times

Area high school students soon may have the opportunity to take online courses through private colleges for credit. Jefferson-Lewis Board of Cooperative Educational Services officials are discussing with upstate and Central New York colleges the possibility of offering high schoolers blended and online courses — which could start as early as this summer. “What we’re trying to figure out is how a student can walk away with the college’s transcript,” said Dawn D. Ludovici, Jefferson-Lewis BOCES assistant superintendent. “Technology is really the seed that started the conversion. The capability of providing coursework online reduces the proximity problem we have when working with colleges.” A blended course would incorporate online courses and classroom time, whether at the college or at the student’s high school, Mrs. Ludovici said.

http://www.watertowndailytimes.com/article/20130418/NEWS03/704189846

by Jeffrey Roth, Interactyx

Do we have an e-Learning revolution on our hands?  It may be a little heavy-handed to call the current trends to leverage online technology to enhance learning and training programs a ‘revolution’. But, there are strong indicators that we can evaluate today to see that e-Learning tactics are continuing to grow. That growth looks like it will continue. The real revolution is how it is effecting organizations and everyday people due to increased adoption and the reduction of the total costs of e-Learning systems, like learning management systems (LMSs), which allow for more solutions to be readily available. According to the folks over at Certifyme.net who put together the infographic below, the 2013 statistics on e-learning usage is quite impressive.

http://interactyx.com/social-learning-blog/2013-e-learning-revolution-infographic/

By Melissa Simon, Daily Sundial

Assemblyman Scott Wilk (R-Santa Clarita) proposed a new bill suggesting a fourth university system in California, which would be called the New University of California. The new system, as explained in AB 1306, would be an addition to the three systems already in place: University of California, California State University and California Community Colleges (CCC). The New University of California, according to the text of the bill, will not provide instruction “and the mission of the university shall be limited to issuing college credit and baccalaureate and associate degrees to any person capable of passing the examinations administered by the university.”

http://sundial.csun.edu/2013/04/proposed-fourth-university-would-give-degrees-without-classes/

by Joan Phaup, Questionmark

Online courses offer a flexible and increasingly popular way for people to learn. But what about the many distractions that can cause a student’s mind to wander off the subject at hand? According to a team of Harvard University researchers, administering short tests to students watching video lectures can decrease mind-wandering, increase note-taking and improve retention. Interpolated memory tests reduce mind wandering and improve learning of online lectures, a paper by Harvard Postdoctoral Fellow Karl K. Szpunar, Research Assistant Novall Y. Khan and Psychology Professor Daniel L. Schacter, was published this month in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) in the U.S. The team conducted two experiments in which they interspersed online lectures with memory tests and found that such tests can: help students pay more sustained attention to lecture content encourage task-relevant note-taking improve learning reduce students’ anxiety about final tests. “Here we provide evidence that points toward a solution for the difficulty that students frequently report in sustaining attention to online lectures over extended periods,” the researchers say.

http://blog.questionmark.com/how-tests-help-online-learners-stay-on-task

by Daniel Luzer, Washington Monthly

So much of the talk of higher education reformers lately concerns the coming of all online universities. Harder, Better, Faster, Cheaper, right? But colleges are about real people and real people often, well, don’t really want to spend college in front of a computer in their apartments. Students still want to go to real college. And that’s why Vance Fried, professor of entrepreneurship at Oklahoma State University, explains that college is going to get radically cheaper in coming years, but not because everyone’s taking courses online. They’ll still be living and dorms and going to frat parties.

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/college_guide/blog/the_real_future_of_college_che.php

by Jennifer Sans, Florida International University Student Media

Students and professors are showing apprehension toward rapidly expanding virtual education. The House of Representatives is pushing a proposal for one state university to be Florida’s “preeminent research institution” that will establish a “fully online arm,” according to The Miami Herald. The University has an online education branch that allows students to take courses and receive full degrees in select areas of study. Students and professors question, however, the expansion of academic programs such as FIU Online. “Students need to be really self motivated in order to succeed in online courses,” said Patricia Bishop, professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics.

http://fiusm.com/?p=25821

by  Pooja Thakkar, Technology-Digital

The point at which online higher education becomes mainstream is no longer in some fuzzy hypothetical future; It is here and envelops the physical classrooms already. In just 30 days, the largest school system in the U.S. started offering credit for online courses, a major university began awarding degrees without any class time required, and scores of public universities are moving their courses online. The Secretary of Education in the next president’s office will need an entire department dedicated to this phenomenon.

http://www.technology-digital.com/web20/-the-point-at

By Larry Wilson, SGV Tribune

I read with interest our newspapers’ story last week saying many of America’s university professors don’t consider online courses real college material. Here’s the lead to Staff Writer Beau Yarbrough’s story: “Professors teaching hundreds or thousands of students online has been all the buzz in academic circles, but the professors who teach those courses say they shouldn’t be worth college credit. That’s the big finding in a study published in the Chronicle of Higher Education. “The magazine surveyed 103 professors who teach what are known as Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs, in February. The courses are sometimes taken by thousands of students at one time, on subjects ranging from basic English literature courses to engineering.”

Read more: http://www.sgvtribune.com/opinions/ci_23028931/online-learnings-tough-try-online-teaching-opinion#ixzz2QvemjsEl

By J.D. BIERSDORFER, Gadgetwise

Q.
What is “extended support” for Microsoft Windows XP and do I need to worry when it’s supposed to stop next year?

A.
Microsoft has a defined period of time for things like help-line calls, warranty claims and security updates for the hardware and software it sells. This period of time is called the Support Lifecycle Policy and is supposed to give customers a firm idea of how long they can expect Microsoft to provide services for a product before the company considers it obsolete. Microsoft’s current policy states that its Windows operating systems will each receive a total of 10 years of support. The first five of those years are “mainstream,” in which that version of Windows still has all the telephone support options available (including some free help by phone along with paid technical-support calls), security updates and some development work for requested features and design improvements.

http://gadgetwise.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/19/qa-extending-and-ending-support-for-windows-xp/

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/