The White House and the National Science Foundation has announced a new technology effort to increase broadband coverage and develop apps for education, health care, public safety, energy, and manufacturing. The effort, called U.S. Ignite, is designed to help various government departments connect with start-ups, businesses, and universities developing wireless technologies. Founding sponsors include Mozilla, Verizon, AT&T, and Cisco. At an event at the White House to announce the project, Tom Kalil, deputy director for policy at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, said one goal is to spur student engagement in technology. “One part that is particularly important is the role of students in fostering innovation,” Mr. Kalil said. “There’s a really critical role in empowering students to develop the next generation of applications by bringing gigabit speeds and next-gen networks to the dorm room.”
Jane Good, 46, is one of 11 full-time teachers in Colorado’s three-year-old 21st Century Virtual Academy, an online school of about 750 students that is part of the state’s largest school district, the JeffCo Public Schools. She teaches a mix of full-time and part-time students in seventh- and eighth-grade science, ninth-grade Earth science and 10th-grade biology — all from the comfort of her home office, which has stunning views of the Rockies. Good makes around $63,000 a year, the same amount she’d earn in a brick-and-mortar school in her district.
Stanford computer science professor Andrew Ng put his machine learning class online last year, and to his surprise, more than 100,000 students showed up. To reach that many students in traditional settings, he said, I would have to teach my normal Stanford class for 250 years. This is different from online universities and the lectures that many colleges have put online for free for years. This class was interactive, with quizzes, questions and answers, a grade and a certificate of completion. Now, Andrew Ng’s new company, Coursera, which he founded with his colleague Daphne Koller, offers anyone unprecedented access to classes from top universities in more than three dozen subjects, all for free.
With college tuition rates skyrocketing in recent years, students looking for a free alternative to gain some extra knowledge might be in luck. Massively open online courses, or MOOCs, which have been gaining popularity nationally and worldwide, are online courses taught by professors at universities such as Indiana University, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Virginia and George Washington University. Most of the courses are free, or have a small fee to take the final exam, and have been targeted at students and those seeking professional development from an educator’s position. Inside Higher Ed reported at least 1.5 million people have registered for MOOCs so far, using online course offering sites such as Coursera, Udacity, Blackboard and edX.
This is the third in a series of articles that investigates hybridity as it relates to our positions as teachers and scholars, but also as learners, composers, and community members. We also consider the impetus for the naming of this journal and propose various directions the conversations here might take us. Teaching is a practice. Good teaching is an engaged, reflective, and generous practice. Pedagogy is not just talking and thinking about teaching. Pedagogy is the place where philosophy and practice meet (aka “praxis”). It’s vibrant and embodied, meditative and productive. Good pedagogy takes both teaching and learning as its subjects.
The ‘model’ for higher education not only has to change, but will change, it’s inevitable. And, online learning won’t be the catalyst, but competency based learning will be – how learning is assessed and degrees are granted will be the impetus for change. When speaking of ‘model’ in this context, it’s similar to a business model, where the education model is the framework for how higher-ed operates – which is, 1) how institution leaders organize people [faculty, administrators] 2) curriculum is developed and packaged 3) a place is provided [facilities, classrooms, libraries, lecture halls] to deliver education 4) and degrees are granted [based upon credit hours, (or seat-time) and assessment], all of which keeps the institution viable.
Four members of a University of Saskatchewan team spoke at Harvard University about the success of using “Matterhorn,” which allows classroom lectures to be recorded and made available to students online. This open-source technology was jointly developed by the U of S and has been used by 13 different North American and European partner institutions. “With more flexible access to lectures, thousands of our students in dozens of courses can review course material whenever they wish or catch up on what they may have missed on a particular day,” says Jim Greer, University Learning Centre director.
Open-access online learning courses could help to add variety to the manner in which education is provided to students. This is according to Dickinson College president William Durden, who pointed out in an article for Inside Higher Ed that the learning process is “never finished”. E-learning tools can enable people to participate in academia at any time of the day, at every location from all over the world, he argued, describing this as “everywhere, anywhere, anytime”. While learning can take place in the school or through traditional settings, it also occurs through an individual’s own pursuits and their personal initiatives, at home, while working and at places of worship, the specialist declared.
The important question to ask regarding e-learning is: What does an online space make possible by way of teaching that my class couldn’t do face-to-face? One effective answer to this is that online spaces allow students to role play and inhabit characters in a way that would be a rather embarrassing drama workshop if tried in the classroom. So in a discussion forum my entire class of 30 students can all ‘be’ one of the characters from Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, and, in character, debate the motion ‘This house believes the law is an ass’. To do this with flair they have to get under the skin of their character. In other words, they have to read the novel carefully and well, which is exactly what I want them to do. This kind of ludic, playful and creative activity is also something I have come to regard as very much having a place within the more critical discipline of English studies.
“The college campus experience has always been exclusionary to a large percentage of the population,” Smith said. “Almeda University began its mission in 1997 as an inclusive process whereby access to education was open to everyone. We believe that education should not simply be a small limited club — but should be open to all who are interested.” Supporters of online education argue that students do no need to physically be on campus to get in a college education. One professor can reach thousands, if not millions, of students online at a more affordable price. Some people think online education equals only lectures, but Almeda University students gain so much more. They are exposed to an array of teaching tools and can work at their own pace.
$450,000 to the League for Innovation in the Community College to develop and pilot a national consortium of leading online two- and four-year colleges that will help increase seat capacity in the community college system and support more low-income young adults in attaining a postsecondary credential. The consortium will initially include Coastline Community College (CA), the University of Massachusetts Online, Pennsylvania State World Campus and the University of Illinois-Springfield.
Increasing at more than double the national average, Penn State’s online learning enrollments are the result of the strong partnership between the World Campus and the University’s academic colleges and campuses. The number of students learning online through Penn State’s World Campus grew 22 percent, from 9,380 to 11,420, from academic year 2010-11 to 2011-12. Enrollments in online courses also increased 19 percent, from 39,219 to 46,693. “Penn State’s enrollment growth in online programs is more than double the national average of 10 percent reported in the latest Sloan Consortium survey,” said Wayne Smutz, executive director of Penn State World Campus and associate vice president for Academic Outreach. “Credit for this success is shared with Penn State’s academic colleges and campus partners. They collaborate with the World Campus to deliver their programs online.”
by Heeyoung Han and Scott D. Johnson, Educational Technology and Society
The purpose of the study was to investigate the relationship between students’ emotional intelligence, social bond, and their interactions in an online learning environment. The research setting in this study was a 100% online master’s degree program within a university located in the Midwest of the United States. Eighty-four students participated in the study. Using canonical correlation analysis, statistically significant relationships were found between students’ emotional intelligence, social bond, and the interactions that occurred naturally in the educational setting. The results showed that students’ ability to perceive emotion by facial expression was negatively related to the number of text and audio messages sent during synchronous interaction. Additionally, the ability of students to perceive emotion was positively related to peer bonding. Lastly, students’ bond to their online program was associated with management type interaction during synchronous discussion sessions. Several implications for online learning practitioners and researchers are discussed.
Excerpted on 5/16/2012 from Kemp, S.J. (2012). “Social Presence in Online Learning,” chapter in Mark A. Maddix, James R. Estep, and Mary E. Lowe (Eds). Best Practices of Online Education: A Guide for Christian Education. Charlotte, NC: Information Age.
This excerpt follows sections on the distance education context and learning theory related to the social presence of online learning. In this section, I will address best practices related to social presence in online learning based on my experience. I will also provide a few suggestions of what I consider to be next best practices, by which I mean best practices that may not yet be in use even by the better online learning programs.
Sebastian Thrun has kicked off an effort to “break the student record for the largest online class ever taught” with his new class, Introduction to Statistics: Making Decisions Based on Data. The course is entirely free and open to students everywhere. Students will receive dynamic feedback along the way, and diligent students will get a certificate of completion at the end. So what’s stopping you? Certainly not money or geography.
The New York Times Company is closing down the Knowledge Network, its five-year-old venture into online learning, a company spokeswoman said on Friday. The Times announced the venture with much fanfare in 2007, believing that the esteem with which it is held in higher education and especially the depth of its content would give it a leg up in the increasingly crowded distance education market (and, like many newspaper companies, hoping to generate new lines of revenue as its traditional businesses sagged). The company established partnerships with a relatively small number of colleges and other organizations to offer courses jointly as well as offering its own, but the business apparently did not take off.
So far the only revenue stream that the major new MOOC providers have said they will pursue is charging a fee for a certificate. Coursera, the largest of the big three with over 1 million registrations, says it may charge between $30 and $80 per certificate, depending on the course, to students who pass muster. MIT and Harvard say they will likely charge a “modest fee” for the opportunity to earn an edX certificate. One of the more provocative potential business models for MOOCs is to bypass credentialing altogether. Udacity has suggested that it might double as a headhunter for companies that might like to hire some of its more impressive students. Instead of simply selling those students credentials that they can list on their resumes while looking around for jobs, Udacity would offer to match students with companies that have enlisted Udacity as a talent scout. (The company has already hired a full-time jobs counselor to lay groundwork with potential employers.) Udacity would take a commission for each successful match, same as a headhunter.
Examining learning and assessment modes from explicit learning through applied learning to tacit learning. This brief video describes characteristics and differences.
Online learning has been around long enough now for educators to understand its benefits and challenges in relation to traditional course delivery. For several years there has been a growing academic discourse and professional culture around online learning as educators have become more aware of that form of instruction. Currently, however, there seems to be a change in how students perceive these delivery options and, by default, how instructors are developing as general practitioners, or teachers who can teach in any mode of delivery. That is, there is a fading of the lines between face-to-face and online as technology becomes more ubiquitous and the true effect of mobility is observed and experienced. Students’ world of interaction, communication, and exploration is increasingly mobile and as that begins to pervade education, so the expectations of students are changing regarding their learning.
Sal Khan, founder of Khan Academy, told MIT graduates Friday that even though they are graduating from a leading science and engineering institution, they still face a world filled with cynicism and pessimism, and challenged them to resist those attitudes. “That cynicism will eat at your energy and potential, and to fight it, you should smile with every atom in your body,” Khan said. Khan, who spoke to just under 2,500 graduates gathered near the Charles on Killian Court, is a 1998 MIT alumnus whose non-profit academy provides free online video tutorials on such subjects as calculus and history. He started the company after working for six years with a hedge fund, and commended MIT for partnering with Harvard recently to offer free online courses through edX.
When she wasn’t working long shifts at an Afghanistan airfield, Spc. Andrea Muresan was studying and taking online courses in a war zone. Muresan, a member of the Fort Knox-based sustainment command, recently donned a cap and gown with 30 other soldiers to receive distance learning degrees under a camouflage canopy at a Kandahar military post. “If we can do it here in Afghanistan . then anyone can do it,” she said. An increase in online course offerings and continued deployments to Afghanistan and Iraq over the last decade has led to a remarkable increase in the number of soldiers pursuing coursework in war zones, The Courier-Journal reported. It’s gone from almost none to 35,000 in 2011.