Online Learning Update

By Alisha Azevedo, Chronicle of Higher Ed

The University of Texas system will join Harvard, MIT, and Berkeley to offer massive open online courses through edX, university officials announced on Monday. The system’s Board of Regents voted unanimously on Monday morning to put $5-million into the nonprofit partnership, which was formed by Harvard and MIT in May to provide free online college courses, known as MOOC’s, on a global scale. The University of Texas system will offer at least four edX courses by next fall, beginning with general-education courses in the spring. The addition of the University of Texas system, which includes nine university campuses and six health institutions, will expand edX considerably. Meanwhile, the for-profit online course provider Coursera continues to race ahead, striking deals with 33 universities so far.

http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/u-of-texas-system-is-latest-to-sign-up-with-edx-for-online-courses/40440

By Emma Cheng, Columbia Daily Spectator

A University Senate task force is wading into one of the hottest topics in higher ed: the question of online education. The task force will explore Columbia’s current online offerings and examine its options going forward. Columbia is offering its first two massive open online courses next semester. The task force, which was established by the senate last year, will explore Columbia’s current online offerings and examine its options going forward. The committee met for the first time the day before the University opened registration for its first two massive open online courses.

http://www.columbiaspectator.com/2012/10/04/university-senate-task-force-exploring-online-education

by the Purdue Exponent

At the stated Board of Trustees meeting Friday, the trustees approved items such as new department heads, the 2013 faculty health plans and the construction of a new softball facility. After the approval of such items, acting president Tim Sands gave a report about topics ranging from the need for online courses in Purdue’s future to the current environment of higher education. Sands spoke about the benefits of Mass Open Online Courses being incorporated into the Purdue education, and the need to “put stakes in the ground.” Sands was asked by Board of Trustees chairman Keith Krach, whether there was a date or strategic plan set for such courses yet.  “No, not yet,” Sands responded. “Right now, what we’re doing is a lot of experiments, but we’re going to be pushing on all fronts.”

http://www.purdueexponent.org/campus/article_bddb5baa-14a4-11e2-ab5c-001a4bcf6878.html

by Catherine Armitage, Sydney Morning Herald

The era of the ”rock star professor” has arrived with the explosion in popularity of Massive Online Open Courses offered free on the internet by the world’s best universities. The development has left Australian higher education agape – and nervous. A senior lecturer at RMIT University, Mark Gregory, pondered on The Conversation website this week whether the advent of the courses was the start of ”a perfect storm where technology will provide a means to centralise courseware and provide for automated assessment for undergraduate courses”. Richard Buckland, who has more than 1.5 million views of his University of NSW computer science courses, likens it to a tsunami: we have felt the earthquake but the wave is yet to come. But he disagrees with the ”rock star professor” vision because it puts teachers, not students, centre stage.

http://www.smh.com.au/national/tertiary-education/unis-to-face-high-degree-of-change-in-mobile-era-20121012-27iae.html

by Myfreecoursesonline.co

From the subway’s of New York City to the underground of London there is a noticeable trend and behavioural change amongst the masses yet to be fully accepted by those catching up with global culture and that is almost everyone seems fully engaged albeit not with fellow commuters but with electronic devices such as iPhones, Galaxy Tab’s and as far as Asia is concerned, a range of other popular devices that has hit the market. The days when the world’s elite Universities were able to downplay the value of an online degree for the sake of persuading learners to physically attend mainstream universities in person seems a distant memory when we take into account just how many Universities are now offering free online courses. There is a wealth of information now flowing from MIT opencoursesware, Yale, Harvard, Berkeley and Stanford Universities, also across the atlantic, universities in London are piling up to match what their US counterparts are offering the world.

http://www.sitetrail.com/2012/10/07/trend-masses-are-embracing-online-learning-faster-by-myfreecoursesonline.com

By Karen Farkas, The Plain Dealer

Ohio State University, in the past reluctant to offer online courses, is now part of the massive open online course movement – known as MOOC. OSU announced last month it would join Coursera, which offers free non-credit online classes. Coursera added 17 new university partners for a total of 33. Some of the top institutions in the country, including Princeton University, Stanford University, Duke University and Johns Hopkins University, will offer classes through Coursera. “You’re known by your partners, and this is the College of Cardinals,” OSU President E. Gordon Gee told the New York Times. “It’s some of the best universities in the country.”

http://www.cleveland.com/metro/index.ssf/2012/10/ohio_state_university_joins_ma.html

By Brock Parker, Boston.com

America’s oldest college will make a leap into cyberspace Monday as Harvard University will begin offering its first free online courses through a joint venture called edX that the school established with MIT in the spring. According to the university a total of about 100,000 students have already signed up for the first two Harvard courses, an introduction to computer science and another online course adapted from materials from the Harvard School of Public Health’s courses in epidemiology and biostatics. Harvard University Provost Alan Garber said Friday that the courses are being offered for free in effort to teach the world by making education materials and Harvard courses available online, as well as improving education on its own campus and researching how people learn and how the university teaches.

http://www.boston.com/yourtown/news/cambridge/2012/10/harvard_ready_to_launch_its_fi.html

by Virtual College (UK)

The development of online learning in Australia faces obstruction from traditional educational practices, according to one vice-chancellor. Jim Barber from the University of New England (UNE) in Australia has challenged the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (TEQSA), criticising its implementation of a “uniform and now outdated model of education”, the Australian reports. At a broadband and higher education conference in Melbourne, he said the country may be at risk of surrendering its domestic market to international online providers if quality and teaching is not “urgently modernised”. Smartphones and other devices have contributed to widening student access to open-source, high-quality content and encourage a shift away from traditional exchanges between teachers and pupils. At the conference, Professor Barber called for an investigation into the role of broadband in the future of higher education. He noted certain “risk indicators” that would counter the emerging trends in online learning and enforce a backwards-looking view of higher education.

http://www.virtual-college.co.uk/news/Traditional-university-teaching-a-risk-to-online-learning-article-newsitems-801462445.aspx

By Francis Mulgrew, Campus Technology

The truth, however, is that online higher education is not undergoing a revolution–it’s undergoing an evolution that has been well under way for a number of years. The evolution we are seeing today has been–and continues to be–led by smaller, less well-known institutions, for-profit universities, and community colleges. At these institutions in particular, online learning has been on a hyper-accelerated pace of change and improvement. Those who have been involved in these changes know it. Students in quality online degree programs know it. Technology departments know it. And while faculty and administrators at elite universities sense it, they have not had much to do with it. To best understand these changes, we need to pay less attention to the elite institutions that are bringing up the rear of the movement and pay more attention to what the leaders in online education are doing.

http://campustechnology.com/articles/2012/10/04/in-online-learning-vive-levolution.aspx

by Robert Patterson’s Weblog

The old man behind the curtain is now seen clearly by many who have paid all that money for an expensive degree and have joined the great unemployed + debt. Here is how James Carmine sees it. The costs of getting a post secondary education are going to drop way below what a bricks and mortar university can offer. I think that online Ed will do to the university what Craigslist did to papers. “Professor Racks are coming: “GeekProfs” whose proprietary classes are stored and launched into the cloud from places like Web Hosting Geeks. The GeekProfs will be independent credentialed professors who use web sites designed for them by professional web designers. That is what the new much cheaper university classes and majors will look like.

http://smartpei.typepad.com/robert_patersons_weblog/2012/10/the-education-bubble-is-about-to-pop-craiglist-comes-to-campus.html

by Charles Day, Physics Today

Wall Street Journal: In an op-ed, L. Rafael Reif, an electrical engineer and president of MIT, ranks the technological “upheaval” posed by online education with the one that the printing press caused. Citing edX, Coursera, Udacity, and “other online-learning platforms” that “offer the teaching of great universities” inexpensively, he predicts that “we haven’t seen anything yet” and observes that this is happening just when “residential education’s long-simmering financial problem is reaching a crisis point.” In the soon-to-arrive future that Reif envisions, information technology, thanks to its possible scale, can make “residential education better and less expensive even as it promises to offer education to many millions more people.” He summarizes: “The positive development in online learning and the negative trend in residential-education costs came about independently, but it’s now impossible to consider the future of higher education without thinking of both.”

http://blogs.physicstoday.org/newspicks/2012/10/online-teaching-can-educate-millions-improve-on-campus-learning/

by Darcy Fonner, Edudemic via Gilfuse Education Group

Students pay a lot of money to go to college, and the amount that each student pays for tuition keeps increasing. To add insult to injury, the prices of textbooks are also increasing drastically. Some textbooks can cost upwards of three hundred dollars, and that is just for one class! Many times, buying a physical hard-copy book for an online class is required. However, there are several places that this textbook can be bought for much cheaper than the retail price. In fact, some offer free books. Like the University of Pennsylvania’s Online Books Page. The site features about 30,000 English language books that can be formatted for the device of your choosing. Another place where cheap or free books for online classes can be found is at Bookyards.com.

http://www.gilfuseducationgroup.com/4-little-known-places-to-get-books-for-online-courses

by John Adsit, Education Technology and Change

The teacher whose first view of a student project is its final draft has assumed the role of an evaluator and forgotten that there should be an instructional role as well. The purpose of such an assessment is to teach the all important process of working in whatever field of study is being assessed. Since assessment and instruction should be aligned, the purpose of instruction should be to teach that process. A well-designed project includes a number of milestones along the way, opportunities for the teacher to evaluate the progress being made and intervene instructionally as necessary. For many teachers, the final draft of a project is the minor last step in a well-monitored process, a step that only gets a small percentage of the overall grade. Under such a system, cheating is close to impossible. The final step in eliminating cheating would be to adopt a complete standards-based grading system, but that’s another issue for another time.

http://etcjournal.com/2012/10/05/remote-proctoring-services-may-not-be-necessary/

by Brian Tobin, Stanford University

Andrew Patterson, MD, associate professor of anesthesia, is convinced that the only way forward in medical education is what he calls a revolutionary path. No more of the old way — professors lecture, students listen. Instead, the time for online learning for medical students has arrived, said Patterson, and a core group of Stanford medical professors, education technology specialists and collaborators from the Khan Academy who are working toward that future.

http://med.stanford.edu/ism/2012/october/online-1008.html

by Rosie Redfield, RRTeaching

For a university education to be perceived as worth the tuition, it won’t be enough to supplement the free Coursera material with scheduled classroom peer-teaching experiences and a tutorial taught by a graduate student. The university needs to develop integrated programs with hands-on and face-to-face experiences that are seen as worth the cost. Ironically, the best way to prepare for this MOOC-opalypse may be to become part of the problem by teaching a MOOC. In principle, one advantage a university gains by offering Coursera courses or other MOOCs is that the enormous numbers of students and the online record-keeping make it possible to collect unprecedented amounts of data about student learning. But in practice most of the data will be worthless unless we carefully design our courses as learning experiments. That sentence makes it sound like designing a course to be a learning experiment is something I know how to do. It’s not. And I’m not likely to have the time to do this even if I had the expertise.

http://rrteaching.blogspot.com/2012/10/preparing-for-mooc-ocalypse.html

by Emily Aronson, Princeton

Historian Jeremy Adelman is spending this fall teaching “A History of the World since 1300” to more than 50 students at Princeton University — and 80,000 students across the globe. Adelman is among seven professors debuting classes on the educational website Coursera as the University explores online technology to enhance learning at Princeton and extend its educational resources beyond campus. “We can learn a lot from experiments in online learning, not just about the potential and limits of the online medium itself, but also about the practice of teaching more generally,” Provost Christopher Eisgruber said following the launch of Princeton’s first massive open online course (MOOC) this summer.

http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S34/91/85O26/index.xml

by John A. Byrne, Poets and Quants

Darden Professor Edward Hess: “This is like going to Mars!” In a typical year, Professor Edward Hess figures he teaches no more than 300 students in his courses on managing smaller enterprises and the challenges of business growth. About 120 of them are MBAs, while the remaining 180 are executive education students at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business. When Hess walks into the classroom this January to teach Smart Growth for Private Businesses, however, as many as 50,000 people are expected to have signed up for it– more students than Darden has graduated since its founding nearly 60 years ago and in all probability the largest single audience ever assembled for a business course. The professor will be the first to deliver a so-called MOOC (a massively open online course) for the school to anyone with a computer and an Internet connection.

http://poetsandquants.com/2012/10/05/a-staggering-50000-students-are-expected-to-sign-up-for-this-business-school-course/

by Katherine DeClerq — Canadian University Press

Post-secondary education has taken a new technological twist with the introduction of Coursera, a U.S. company that offers Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) — basically free and interactive online classes. Established in July of 2012, Coursera already has 650,000 students enrolled from 190 countries around the world. The University of Toronto was one of the first three international institutions to partner with Coursera, providing three MOOCs within the Faculty of Arts and Science, specifically through the Department of Computer Sciences. Coursera is also being used as part of a pilot project to create inverted learning — a form of teaching that combines online elements into lecture-style classrooms.

http://cupwire.ca/articles/53242

By DELPHINE RODRIK and KEVIN SUN, Harvard Crimson

In the spring, MIT took on 155,000 more students. In two weeks, Harvard could do the same. The edX initiative stands to join the ranks of major MOOCs like Coursera and Udacity. Like its competitors, edX intends to make knowledge available to more people. But unlike these, edX is a not-for-profit, designed with the hopes of acquiring and employing data and research about effective teaching and learning methods. Students of edX will split their class time between watching short lecture modules (around 10 minutes or so in length), performing interactive activities, and asking questions to each other and TFs in online forums.

http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2012/10/4/edx-scrutiny-online-learning/

By Sam Somani, Technique

I decided to try out a MOOC—partially to try and understand any and all hype behind these massive online courses—but primarily because Coursera is free to use, and to a college student on a budget, the word free is alluring. “Introduction to Mathematical Thinking” was the course, taught by a professor from Stanford who would send lengthy yet enlightening emails to the 60,000 plus students enlisted in the class in addition to posting forty-five minute lectures of class instruction two to three times per week. What I learned most from watching one lesson was not anything pertaining to the content of the video, but the quality of instruction in the subject matter to his viewers. The engaging behavior in which he was able to communicate to the audience was remarkable. Perhaps some professors are better in front of a video camera than a lecture hall of a few hundred students in all sorts of moods ranging from actively critical to comatose. Even though it was simply a one way lecture, his communication skills effectively managed to keep my attention after a full day of classes.

http://nique.net/opinions/2012/10/05/online-courses-add-quality-to-education/

by Diane Rehm, Diane Rehm Show

Salman Khan is the founder of Khan Academy – a nonprofit that offers free online educational videos. In 2004, Khan was working at a hedge fund in Boston when he began tutoring his cousin Nadia in math. When other relatives and friends sought his help, he started recording videos and putting them on YouTube. Soon his growing popularity prompted him to quit his job and dedicate his time to the Academy. Today, the website offers more than 3,000 videos and practice exercises on everything from algebra to physics. Khan believes this technology can help empower teachers and allow students to learn at their own pace. Diane talks with Salman Khan on the current state of education and the power of online learning.

http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2012-10-03/salman-khan-one-world-schoolhouse-education-reimagined