Online Learning Update

By Emi Kolawole, Washington Post

The iPad app gives users the opportunity to download videos for offline viewing and jump through videos by navigating subtitles. Users can also log into a Khan Academy account to track their individual progress and receive credits for watching videos — making the learning experience like a game. The app is, as of the writing of this post, the sixth most popular free app in the iTunes store and the top app in the education section, with roughly 17,500 downloads since it was made available Sunday morning, according to a Khan Academy spokesperson. Exercises, while not included in this version of the app, will be “coming soon,” according to the description on the Apple Web site. As Fast Company’s Greg Ferenstein observed Sunday, the Khan Academy iPad app is potentially significant in that it could cut into the cost associated with textbook purchases.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/innovations/post/khan-academy-launches-on-ipad-is-this-educations-future/2012/03/12/gIQA8ORm7R_blog.html

by Kyle Johnson, Wired Cloudline

Another pair of Stanford faculty said this week they were starting a company around Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs). According to Inside Higher Ed, engineering professors Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller have started Coursera, which includes content from Stanford, the University of Michigan and the University of California, Berkeley. Joshua Kim argues that not every institution of higher education needs to offer MOOCs. I tend to agree, but for different reasons. The cloud services model works because a few large entities (think on the scale of Amazon or Google) provide an infrastructure service with the reliability and cost structure smaller companies can’t match. When you frame MOOCs as educational cloud services, you see that incubators like MIT and Stanford can provide course content at a scale very few institutions can match.

http://www.wired.com/cloudline/2012/03/coursera/

By Lisa Plummer, THE Journal

The Alliance for Excellent Education estimates 1.3 million American students fail to graduate from high school each year. That’s why a growing number of districts are going virtual in their search for effective ways to help at-risk students make up academic credits. Enter online credit recovery, a 21st century technology-based approach that gives kids get a second chance–and a diploma. Credit recovery isn’t new (think summer school, weekend, or after-school classes), but the online versions of these programs are more flexible alternatives that can allow students to make their own schedules, work at their own pace, complete courses in shorter periods of time, benefit from a more customized educational experience, and learn independent study skills. And while online credit recovery is typically used for ninth- to 12th-grade students, many districts tend to target 11th- and 12th-graders most at risk for not graduating, including those who have dropped out and returned to school.

http://thejournal.com/articles/2012/03/08/online-credit-recovery.aspx

By Thomas K. Lindsay, Phi Beta Cons – National Review

Online education also is making its presence increasingly felt at the K–12 level, leading education analysts Clayton Christensen and Michael Horn to predict that by 2019, 50 percent of all courses for grades 9–12 will be taken online — “the vast majority of them in blended-learning school environments with teachers, which will fundamentally move learning beyond the four walls and traditional arrangement of today’s all-too-familiar classroom.” If their forecast proves even half-right, it is reasonable to expect that, in very short order, waves of online-educated, college-bound students will be comfortable with, will expect, and perhaps — given both its lower cost and instructional efficacy — will demand a similar mix of face-to-face and online education.

http://www.nationalreview.com/phi-beta-cons/292783/defending-online-learning-part-two-thomas-k-lindsay

by Jeff Dunn, Edudemic

The big announcement from Apple has got more than just the tech bloggers and iPad holdouts excited. It’s making waves in the education world too. This is because education seems to be finally starting to keep up with technology trends and becoming much better at adopting and implementing new tech into the classroom. It’s a good thing. So how did Apple just make online learning easier, you ask? Great question! The new iPad has a few killer features that may not immediately jump to mind when thinking about how it affects online learning.

http://edudemic.com/2012/03/online-learning-apple/

By Texas Insider

The Texas Public Policy Foundation would like to see Texas follow Florida’s lead in increasing access to virtual schools. A report from the Texas Public Policy Foundation suggests that virtual education and blended learning both present the opportunity for cost savings and academic gain in Texas. “At the K-12 level, the potential of virtual education is enormous,” said the report’s author, James Golsan. “Through the use of technology, students in rural districts would have access to the same educational resources as students in more populated areas. Familiarization with technology could prepare students for the work force more quickly.”

http://www.texasinsider.org/?p=59580

BY GREGORY FERENSTEIN, Fast Company

Khan Academy, the wildly popular YouTube lecture series, is slated to launch its iPad app any minute now in Apple’s store. The enhanced version of Khan Academy will include time-syncing between devices–no Internet connection required–an interactive transcript of the lectures for easy searching, and a handy scrubber for moving between parts of the lectures. Perhaps more importantly, now that more schools have begun adopting Khan’s lectures for their own classrooms, the free iPad app could possibly replace or supplement textbooks, saving cash-strapped schools and students a lot of money.

http://www.fastcompany.com/1823819/khan-academy-ipad

By Patrick Mitchell, Daily Gamecock Univ. of South Carolina

USC recently announced a plan to move courses, especially freshman-level classes, to the online sphere. Approximately 165 classes were offered online at the start of Spring 2012, and this number is expected to increase in coming years. I applaud this initiative, and I think this move provides a unique opportunity to reevaluate the way education is conducted, employing what we actually know about how people learn — instead of attempting to bludgeon students with an outdated system. Educational psychologists have long understood the complex nature of discourse and discussion in shaping our views of reality. Jean Piaget’s view of learners gaining knowledge through their peers, with stages keenly placed by the teacher, paved the way for the current models of developmental psychology, which place immense value on the peer as a source of learning.  One possible effect of this push toward online classes could be the increased use of social media in education.

http://www.dailygamecock.com/viewpoints/item/3667-online-courses-favor-todays-resources

By Caroline Chen, Stanford Daily

Stanford will offer five more free online courses this month through a new partnership with Coursera, an online education start-up founded by computer science professors Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller, the University announced today. The partnership is the latest in a series of steps the University is taking to explore online education both on and off campus. President John Hennessy recently indicated that Stanford is deliberately pursuing ways to develop technology in and out of the classroom, comparing online education to a tsunami. “We want to get ahead of this wave,” he told the Faculty Senate at a January meeting. “I want to be surfing the wave, not drowning in it.”

http://www.stanforddaily.com/2012/03/06/stanford-partners-with-coursera-to-offer-more-online-courses/

By Andrea Belz, Tech News World

One wave of the future may be schools like Udacity, Sebastian Thrun’s new university, described as a reaction to the discovery that more than 160,000 people enrolled in an online class Thrun taught at Stanford. This could enable elite universities to open their doors, suggests Felix Salmon. But the whole point of elite universities is that the door is closed — so look for independent efforts like Udacity to thrive independently of existing brick-and-mortar colleges. ( The model for independent educational institutions may be accelerated by the reluctance of faculty to accept online education. Chief academic officers report that only 30 percent of faculty members accept online learning as legitimate as of 2009, based on the Sloan Survey.

http://www.technewsworld.com/story/74580.html

by Lauren Landry, BostInno

When MIT first introduced MITx in December, we knew the courses would be popular. Not only are they free, but they allow anyone to receive an MIT-sanctioned certificate. With the first course launching today, however, we’re seeing just how popular the program is — 90,000 people popular. Coined “6.002x (Circuits and Electronics),” the class first opened in February, already garnering that immense amount of traffic.

http://bostinno.com/2012/03/05/first-mitx-course-attracts-90000-students-proving-the-popularity-of-online-education/

by Eliza Anyangwe, the Guardian

Our live chat panelists from universities including Cornell, Bath, MIT and Glasgow Caledonia suggest how to successfully extend the classroom into virtual environments. Companies want graduates who can source, filter and use existing knowledge to create new knowledge, and the university is key to equipping students with these skills. Yet we seldom see technology tools being used in radically new ways in HE. They are usually used to replicate lectures – think of websites or podcasts – rather than enabling students to learn in new ways. Massive Open Online Course is one example of transformational learning. The courses are semi structured, decentralised, and (crucially) open. People contribute via blogs, tweets and a variety of other web 2.0 tools. Students can source and bring together ideas, using hashtags, mashups and a range of technologies. The real power of a MOOC is that people learn together. But it requires a high level of self-regulation and it would seem that students going into universities today are less self-regulated than a decade ago.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/higher-education-network/blog/2012/mar/06/using-technology-in-university-teaching

by Jeff Young, Chronicle of Higher Ed

PowerPoint is boring. Student attention spans are short. Today many facts pop up with a simple Google search. And plenty of free lectures by the world’s greatest professors can be found on YouTube. Is it time for more widespread reform of college teaching? This series explores the state of the college lecture, and how technologies point to new models of undergraduate education. Last month, we began inviting students across the countries to fire up their Web cameras or camera-phones to send us video commentaries about whether lectures work for them. Below are highlights from the first batch of submissions, which are full of frustration with “PowerPoint abuse” – professors’ poor use of slide software that dumps too much information on students in a less-than-compelling fashion.

http://chronicle.com/article/Lecture-Fail-/130085/

By Thomas K. Lindsay, National Review

Kicking and screaming, I have been hauled into acceptance of online learning. More than acceptance, in fact. After more than a decade of railing against the inhumanity of it all, I can no longer ignore the plethora of studies testifying to its educational efficacy. I now see it as a powerful means to address the crisis in American higher education. That crisis consists of three elements: skyrocketing tuitions; crushing student-loan debt (approximately a trillion dollars, which is more than total credit-card debt); and declining learning outcomes, as measure by instruments such as the Collegiate Learning Assessment. These three factors are really two, because the rise in student indebtedness is the product of tuitions that, in the last 25 years, have risen four times faster than inflation.

http://www.nationalreview.com/phi-beta-cons/292033/defending-online-learning-part-one-thomas-k-lindsay

by Melissae Fellet, Today’s Professor

Several Stanford faculty members are working together to improve online education at the university by developing new software and testing it in the classroom. The collaboration unites three experimental online education efforts: ClassX, a video processing platform that facilitates lecture recording; CourseWare, an online course hosting site with social networking features; and Open Classroom, a web platform designed to share Stanford lectures freely with the world. “The researchers are combining the three programs into one. The unified system should be available to the Stanford community by the fall quarter, said computer science associate professor Andrew Ng, creator of Open Classroom. The software will eventually be available to other universities as well,” he said.

http://derekbruff.org/blogs/tomprof/2012/02/13/tp-msg-1152-stanford-faculty-collaborate-to-improve-online-education/

By Justin Marquis, Online University

The possibilities for educators to remix traditional content in new and exciting ways have never been greater. Recent releases of content creation/curation platforms like iBook Author and MentorMob, among others, have opened the door for desktop textbook publication and online teaching material creation in ways that were not even being imagined five years ago. There are many reasons to think about digitally remixing the curriculum in both K-12 and higher education, but there are also significant obstacles and considerations that need to be examined.

http://www.onlineuniversities.com/blog/2012/02/are-you-ready-to-remix-your-curriculum/

by Joe DiDonato, Elearning!

One of the upcoming panelists at our Enterprise Learning! Summit – Tom Archibald – pointed me to this great guide for mobile learning that Advanced Distance Learning published. It’s entitled the Mobile Learning Handbook. This is a free government publication that I’ll tell you how to get later, and it’s a great guide for getting started with mobile learning. Going through it, I decided to highlight some of the great uses mentioned. http://ADLNet.gov

http://blogs.2elearning.com/2012/02/top-20-uses-for-mobil-learning/

by Hastac

The SUNY COIL Center is a leader in the emerging field of Globally Networked Learning (GNL); a teaching and learning methodology which provides innovative cost-effective internationalization strategies. GNL programs foster faculty and student exchange with peers abroad through co-taught multicultural online and blended learning environments that emphasize experiential collaboration. COIL’s annual conference brings together faculty, international educators, instructional technologists, and university and college administrators from SUNY, across the U.S. and around the world to share their experiences developing globally networked learning courses, initiatives and best practices. This year’s conference will include sessions from invited speakers and from a CFP. When? June 7-8, 2012Where? SUNY Global Center, 116 E. 55th St., NYCHow to Register? http://www.cvent.com/d/jcqly4

http://hastac.org/events/4th-suny-center-collaborative-online-international-learning-coil-conference-moving-me-we-brea

by Sarah Cargill, Getting Smart

Innosight Institute announced today the release of “The engine behind WGU: Configuration of a competency-based information system,” a new case study by Senior Research Fellow Heath Staker about the Western Governors University (WSU) data system used to support competency-based learning. This higher ed spotlight gives insight to the ways competency-based learning can be developed and improved in the K-12 sector. The case study describes the inner working and key attributes of WGU’s data system, allowing students to effectively learn online and earn course credits based on competency of the course.

http://gettingsmart.com/news/innosight-institue-announces-new-case-study-on-data-systems-for-competency-based-learning/

by Canadian University Press

The Ontario government is in talks to move post-secondary courses online in an effort to save money. The information comes from a government discussion paper that has been leaked to the Canadian Press. The two other money-saving considerations in the paper, called “3×3,” are potentially cutting undergraduate degrees at certain participating schools to three years and adding undergraduate classes to the spring and summer semester, resulting in a year-round program. While the paper is not considered as a policy shift, it shows the government is considering some recommendations from the Drummond Report — the result of a year-long analysis into ways that Ontario can save money by the economist Don Drummond.

http://cupwire.ca/articles/51829

By Michael Horn, Heather Staker, THE Journal

Blended learning is increasingly dominating education conversations, and it’s no wonder why. Online learning’s growth remains rapid, with Ambient Insight predicting an annual increase of nearly 10 percent over the next five years, and much of that growth is in blended-learning environments, where students engage in online learning in supervised brick-and-mortar schools instead of from a distance. In the first installment in our new monthly column, blended learning experts Michael B. Horn and Heather Staker advise schools to skip the “best practices” and instead seek innovations that work in their unique circumstances.

http://thejournal.com/articles/2012/03/01/forget-about-blended-learning-best-practices.aspx