Online Learning Update

by Designer Daily

While a degree may be useful to learn design, only practice can make you great a designer. With the recent explosion in online learning, you can learn everything a designer needs to know online, and with less time and money invested. Perhaps, with the curriculum below you can become the next Jony Ive. While you don’t have to go to college to become a designer, taking a few Massive Open College Courses (MOOCs) can help you establish a strong design foundation. Free.

[ed. note – one of the first such industry-designed MOOC sequence degree alternative programs —- will this become a trend?]

http://www.designer-daily.com/11-online-courses-alternatives-design-degree-2-38670

by CHRIS PARR, London Times

The acronym Mooc has made the Oxford Dictionaries Online – a web-based lexicon of current English by the publishers of the Oxford English Dictionary. Defined as “a course of study made available over the Internet without charge to a very large number of people”, the word Mooc has become commonplace in academia over the last 18 months, after many higher education institutions began offering such courses. Mooc is not the only education-related word to be making its debut in the online dictionary. BYOD, an abbreviation of “bring your own device” has also been added. It refers to the practice of people using their own computers, smartphones, or other devices for work purposes, and is increasingly being used in universities, with lecturers encouraging students to use their own gadgets during class.

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/news/mooc-makes-oxford-online-dictionary/2006838.article

By Katie Grunewald, Iowa State Daily

Iowa State marked its seventh year of growth in enrollment numbers, and with that growth of students comes a need for more ways to learn. The number of online classes offered at Iowa State has been increasing the last few years, this fall nearly 300 classes are offered for students to take in the luxury of their own home. Thomas Brumm, associate professor of agricultural and biosystems engineering in charge of online learning for the College of Engineering and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, sees demand growing. “Part of the reason there are so many online classes is because of the demand there is,” Brumm said. “Students like on online classes, and sometimes they prefer to take them over a face-to-face course.”

http://www.iowastatedaily.com/news/article_9023e0ce-15a2-11e3-b182-001a4bcf887a.html

by Phil Hill, e-literate

The more I read on SJSU’s announcement on the pilot program, the more troubled I am with the lack of clear description of student population change (I wrote briefly about the change in student populations yesterday). In a nutshell, the spring 2013 pilot was completely different in the major demographic variables than the summer 2013 pilot. That’s good, right, showing that SJSU and Udacity are learning their lessons? It would be good if SJSU clearly described the student differences and avoided any implications that the numbers could be compared. Further, it would be good to avoid misleading comparisons to face-to-face courses at SJSU.

http://mfeldstein.com/sjsu-plus-udacity-pilots-lack-of-transparency/

by Cindy Krischer Goodman, Miami Herald

As schools boost their online offerings, there are new options for working adults who want to add a career skill. The 2012 Survey of Online Learning reveals that the number of students taking at least one online course has now surpassed 6.7 million; 60 percent of those online degree seekers are employed full time. But getting a degree online is not as easy as you might think. The rate of those who fail or give up is significant — as much as 30 percent higher than among on-campus students, in some cases. “Students want the flexibility but some of them don’t realize how rigorous the courses can be,” says Joyce Elam, Dean of University College, home of Florida International University’s online learning.

http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/09/03/3603824/online-courses-help-workers-juggle.html

 by Tricia Bishop, The Baltimore Sun

The University of Maryland University College expects to be among the first wave of schools this academic year awarding transfer credit to those who have taken — and can prove they learned from — certain “massive open online courses,” known as MOOCs. The school, which targets working adults with its own online classes, and six others nationwide have agreed to track student progress as part of a research study gauging how well the MOOCs, which are relatively new to the education world, prepared the transfers for a more traditional learning experience. It’s all part of a broader effort to get beyond the hype surrounding MOOCs to determine whether the classes have the potential, as some have said, to transform higher education in the same way the Internet revolutionized publishing, retailing and journalism.

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-md-mooc-20130815,0,3456893.story

by Carl Straumsheim, Inside Higher Ed

Despite the talk about how massive open online courses, or MOOCs, will dramatically alter the landscape of higher education, the courses have in some ways taken academe back — to the days of huge gender gaps, when senior scholars overwhelmingly were men. An unofficial count by Inside Higher Ed shows 8 of the 63 courses listed on edX’s website are taught by women, and an additional 8 are taught by mixed-gender groups. Of Coursera’s 432 courses, 121 feature at least one female instructor and 71 taught exclusively by them. Udacity lists 29 courses on its website, and while only two are taught by women, many of them were created by female course developers.

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/09/03/more-female-professors-experiment-moocs-men-still-dominate

by Library Intelligencer

The Hyperlinked Library is an open, participatory institution that welcomes user input and creativity. It is built on human connections and conversations. The organizational chart is flatter and team-based. The collections grow and thrive via user involvement. Librarians are tapped in to user spaces and places online to interact, have presence, and point the way. The hyperlinked library is human. Communication, externally and internally, is in a human voice. The librarians speak to users via open, transparent conversation.

http://mooc.hyperlib.sjsu.edu/

http://blogs.unimelb.edu.au/libraryintelligencer/2013/09/02/the-hyperlinked-library-a-massive-open-online-course-for-lis-professionals/

by VENKATA SUSMITA BISWAS, the Hindu

It helps schools offer blended courses on campus or purely online options It all began with a simple idea. This led to a single course, offered by a professor from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), drawing 1,55,000 students from 162 countries in 2011 when first launched. But now it has become a favoured massive online open course (MOOC) destination for students from India. edX, a not-for-profit MOOC platform founded by MIT and Harvard University, gets a large fraction of traffic from India, says Anant Agarwal, president, edX. “The response from India has been overwhelming. India consistently represents the second highest enrolments in edX courses (behind the U.S.),” he says.

http://www.thehindu.com/features/education/careers/india-second-largest-in-edx-enrolments/article5079680.ece

By Zach C. Cohen, Media/Shift

How will we teach the next generation of the journalists? Such is the question raised in PBS MediaShift’s “Back to J-School” special, and we want you to help us find out. Will J-schools flip the curriculum, focusing more on digital skills than journalism basics? Will they flip the classroom, moving most learning online and turning class time into lab time? Or will they embrace MOOCs and other forms of online class offerings as a component of the future of journalism education? After last week’s podcast on journalism education, Mediatwits regular Andrew Lih of American University was curious which schools had embraced online learning and MOOCs and which had banned them (so far).

http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2013/08/list-where-do-journalism-schools-stand-on-moocs-online-classes

by Christine Des Garennes, News-Gazette

The Urbana campus announced in mid-July of last year it was one of 12 universities at the time to sign agreements with Coursera. Since then, more universities have partnered with the company. The private for-profit company was founded in fall 2011 by two Stanford University professors and has since received tens of millions of dollars in funding from venture capitalists. In this new online world, administrators faced questions such as, if a faculty member teaches a MOOC through Coursera, is it considered part of his or her normal teaching load? A campus committee, dubbed the MOOC Strategic Advisory Committee, was established and its members have been discussing the myriad directions they can take.    MOOCs, as people know them today, have only been around for about two years, said online education expert Ray Schroeder from the UI’s Springfield campus. “People tend to look at MOOCs as they are today. They don’t realize it’s a moving target,” he said.

http://www.news-gazette.com/news/local/2013-09-01/ui-undecided-about-its-online-course-strategy.html

By DOUGLAS BELKIN, Wall Street Journal

Two University of Texas at Austin professors this week launched their introductory psychology class from a makeshift studio, with a goal of eventually enrolling 10,000 students at $550 a pop and bringing home millions for the school. The professors have dubbed the class a SMOC—Synchronous Massive Online Class—and their effort falls somewhere between a MOOC, or Massive Open Online Course, a late-night television show and a real-time research experiment. The professors lecture into a camera and students watch on their computers or mobile devices, in real time. The class, which made its debut Thursday night, is emblematic of just how quickly the once-static business model of higher education is shifting as technology gives students more options and forces schools and professors to compete for their attention.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324324404579045381967754304.html

by Hailey Higgins, KELO

US Representative Kristi Noem met with administration and students in South Dakota Universities to talk about online learning.Noem used e-learning while obtaining her degree in 2011. As co-founder of the bipartisan Congressional E-Learning Caucus, she now wants input for future higher education legislation that’s coming before congress. “What I was surprised about when I got to congress, there is not a caucus that specifically talks about e-learning. A lot of members of congress haven’t gone to school in a long time so they don’t recognize how the modern way of learning is happening,” Noem said. Noem is hoping to take the lessons she’s learning here to make things easier for educators both in South Dakota and across the country.

http://www.keloland.com/newsdetail.cfm/rep-noem-hosts-e-learning-roundtable/

By Glenn Drexhage, University of British Columbia

A pioneering offering from the Faculty of Education and UBC Library is enabling UBC students, staff and faculty to hone their digital literacy skills. The two units have introduced the University’s first LOOC, or local open online course, as part of UBC’s Master of Educational Technology program. This course, called M101, helps users “acquire, maintain, refine and promote” digital literacy skills. These are grouped into topics including Mining (research), Meshing (idea creation) and Mobilizing (generating value from information and knowledge). The LOOC is open to all members of the UBC community who have a campus wide login (CWL). M101 is self-paced, and users can build their skills in any area, and in any order, that they wish.

http://about.library.ubc.ca/2013/08/30/loocing-into-the-future-of-digital-learning/

by eCampus News Staff

A simple search for massive open online courses (MOOCs) on Twitter will deliver a torrent of information, from headlines to insight to strong opinions on MOOCs, one of the most divisive issues in higher education. Perusing Twitter in search of MOOC news is a bit like drinking from a waterfall: overwhelming. That’s why eCampus News staffers have assembled a list of educators, technologists, policy experts and campus officials on Twitter who provide the latest news and insight into MOOCs and how these courses are evolving and changing the higher-ed landscape.

Sebastian Thrun: CEO Udacity, Research professor at Stanford, Google Fellow, member of National Academy of Engineering, serial entrepreneur. https://twitter.com/SebastianThrun

Ray Schroeder ^[3]: University of Illinois Springfield Associate Vice Chancellor for Online Learning, Director Center for Online Learning Research and Service.

https://twitter.com/educationaltechnology

https://twitter.com/rayschroeder

See the complete list and suggest more names at the URL below:

http://www.ecampusnews.com/top-news/top-mooc-experts-to-follow-on-twitter/print/

by Jonathan Kantrowitz, Education Research Report

A new report issued by SRI International, Supporting K-12 Students in Online Learning: A Review of Online Algebra I Courses, informs both designers and purchasers of online courseware about the characteristics of online Algebra I courses available in the market.

Among the findings:

* Importance of on-site support: Courseware providers are increasingly emphasizing the importance of—and providing guidance for—on-site support for students, such as mentors to encourage successful completion of coursework.

* Assessment and feedback: Research shows that feedback is critical to student success. All courses reviewed provided formative and summative assessments; however the data is primarily focused on correctness of answers and not students’ thinking process. Researchers recommend more feedback on student reasoning.

http://educationresearchreport.blogspot.com/2013/08/a-review-of-online-algebra-i-courses.html

By Carla Rivera, Los Angeles Times

Students who took online classes in a summer program at San Jose State University performed better than those who took the same online classes in the spring, a result that is likely to provide a boost to a highly touted but problem-plagued collaboration between the campus and an online provider. In new results released Wednesday, 83% of summer students in elementary statistics earned a C or better compared with 50.5% of those in the spring; and 72.6% of summer college algebra students made the grade compared with 25.4% of those in the spring. The pass rates for remedial math improved somewhat, reaching nearly 30% for summer students compared with 24% for those in the spring.

http://www.latimes.com/local/la-me-college-online-20130829,0,1238170.story

by Muhammed Nadeem, Education News

Millions worldwide have signed up for free online courses through massive open online course (MOOC) providers including edX, ‎Udacity and ‎Coursera. But despite their popularity, companies and employers are slow to recognize these courses’ value. To address this problem, San Francisco-based startup Degreed was launched in January 2013 to acknowledge free online courses’ value by giving a score to university degrees and online courses alike, according to Iris Mansour of CNN Money.

http://www.educationnews.org/online-schools/degreed-aims-to-assign-value-to-traditional-and-online-coursework/

by Online Learning Insights

This post features a collection of carefully selected resources specific to teaching online; geared to educators seeking skill development for creating meaningful online discussions, communicating effectively with students, and providing constructive feedback. iStock_000018547848XSmallThis is the second article in a series featuring select instructional resources—I’m in the process of building a bank of resources accessible from this blog geared to educators seeking skill development in facilitating and designing online courses. Over time I’ll be adding to the Resources section with the goal of sharing high-quality, relevant and helpful resources. The resources section and post below, includes links grouped by topic with a brief description of each, and an icon indicating its type. For the list of previously featured resources and/or for the icon legend please refer to the resources tab of this site.

http://onlinelearninginsights.wordpress.com/2013/08/26/essential-and-helpful-resources-for-online-instructors/

by KCCI News

Iowa State University is seeing a surge in students taking online classes. The university said more students are choosing to take a combination of both online and on campus classes. Enrollment in a combo of online and on campus increased by nearly 40 percent in fiscal year 2012 and enrollment in online only classes jumped by more than 25 percent, the university reported. Iowa State has now increased online courses for undergraduates by nearly 30 percent.

http://www.kcci.com/news/central-iowa/big-surge-in-isu-students-taking-classes-online/-/9357080/21654696/-/142jur9/-/index.html

by Carl Straumsheim, Inside Higher Ed

Two University of Texas at Austin psychology professors will Thursday night take the stage for the fall semester’s first session of Introduction to Psychology. Their audience will consist of a production crew and their equipment. In their years of working together, the professors’ research has shown their students benefit from computer-based learning to the point where they don’t even need to be physically present in the classroom.

Just don’t call it a MOOC. The university styles the class as the world’s first synchronous massive online course, or SMOC (pronounced “smock”), where the professors broadcast their lectures live to the about 1,500 students enrolled.

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/08/27/ut-austin-psychology-professors-prepare-worlds-first-synchronous-massive-online