Online Learning Update

By Holly Clark, Edudemic

There is a new digital divide on the horizon. It is not based around who has devices and who does not, but instead the new digital divide will be based around students who know how to effectively find and curate information and those who do not. Helene Blowers has come up with seven ideas about the new digital divide – four of them, the ones I felt related to searching, are listed below. In an age of information abundance learning to effectively search is one of the most important skills most teachers are NOT teaching. They assume students know how to conduct a search, and set them free on the internet to find information. They assume that students have the skills to critically think their way through the searching and the web. Sadly, this is not the case and everyday we are losing the information literacy battle because we often forget to teach these crucial searching skills in our schools.

http://www.edudemic.com/student-search-skills/

By Katie Lepi, Edudemic

Basically, all of our young digital natives are being taught by “digital immigrants”, or, folks who didn’t grow up with the internet. Pretty obvious, but think of it this way: Let’s say you go to school and have to take English classes (and English is your native language). Your teacher’s native language is not English (and let’s say hypothetically their English is not great), and even though he/she may be very knowledgeable about literature and much of the other stuff to go along with it, there’s a language barrier getting in the way. In some cases (and obviously not all), this is what we’re doing to our students. We are….older. Many teachers who are not ‘fluent’ in technology choose a pretty logical route – don’t teach with technology you’re not fluent with. But teaching only with a bit of technology that you feel super comfortable with is like teaching a foreign language class when you have a more limited vocabulary than the students. The handy infographic below came from a quick Google Search of “digital natives vs. digital immigrants”.

http://www.edudemic.com/digital-natives-digital-immigrants/

by Peta Lee, University World News

Developing countries worldwide are to benefit from an agreement signed last Tuesday by the World Bank Group and Coursera, a leading provider of MOOCs – massive open online courses. The collaboration aims to help meet the demand for solutions-oriented learning on pressing issues in targeted countries. The courses will be offered as part of a new Open Learning Campus being built by the World Bank, “where practitioners, development partners and the general public can more systematically access real-time, relevant and world-class learning”, according to a press release.

http://www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=20131017131951244

By Steffani Nolte, WXOW

Students needing some help preparing for college math classes can take advantage of UW-La Crosse’s Massive Open Online Course, or MOOC for short. It’s a free course open to anyone in the world. “You can take it for a variety of reasons,” Bob Hoar, Associate Vice Chancellor of Academic Affairs said. “Some are high school students preparing for college. Some are in college but haven’t taken a math class yet, others are home school kids.” You can work on the class whenever you feel like it. “There are really two paths through the course,” Hoar said. “They can stay with the instructor and move at the pace the instructor is moving or they can drop back and move at their own pace.”

http://www.wxow.com/story/23723066/2013/10/17/mooc-helps-uw-students-skip-remedial-courses

by Julian Hooks, Business Administration Information

Without much fanfare, the Harvard Business School has started to develop a new online initiative, the first step into online learning for one of the nation’s most prestigious business schools. The move puts Harvard into the area of MOOCs, or massive open online courses. The move may “shake up” the online education market, according to Bloomberg BusinessWeek. It’s also a bold move for Harvard Business School, which is one of the best-known brands in all of education. “This is a lot bigger than meets the eye,” John Fernandes , the chief executive of the business school accreditation group Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business , told BusinessWeek. “They’re going to get high visibility with students all over the world. I don’t want to say it’s going to displace face-to-face education, but it’s going to be a big piece of the pie.” Fernandes called the decision by Harvard Business School a “watershed” moment for the school and for online education as a whole.

http://www.businessadministrationinformation.com/news/harvard-business-school-launches-first-online-learning-project

By KRISTINA D. LORCH, Harvard Crimson

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s MOOC Research Initiative has granted HarvardX $21,450 to study how massive open online courses might be made more personalized for individuals in online courses everywhere, HarvardX announced Tuesday. Led by Sergiy Nesterko, a HarvardX research fellow, and Svetlana I. Dotsenko ’10, founder of startup Project Lever, the study will take self-reported data from those enrolled in HarvardX classes, including country of origin, education level, gender, age, and usage of the course materials. The study will also look at individuals’ learning outcomes and goals.

http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2013/10/17/edx-to-examine-personalized-mooc-experience/

By Lawrence Biemiller, Chronicle of Higher Ed

MOOCs may also cost colleges money, the paper says, citing an agreement between Udacity and the Georgia Institute of Technology to offer an online master’s degree in computer science. “Udacity gets the intellectual content for a master’s program of 20 courses at an upfront cost of $400,000,” the paper says. “It borrows Georgia Tech’s reputation as its own, at a huge discount (no training of graduate students, no support for labs, no decades of accumulated know-how through which Georgia Tech earned its reputation). It acquires these courses for a proprietary platform: Georgia Tech cannot offer these OMS CS courses, created by its own faculty, to a competing distributor.”

http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/report-by-faculty-organization-questions-savings-from-moocs/47399

by Harvard Magazine

The evolution and adoption of online learning technologies, and other efforts to enhance teaching, continued briskly as the fall semester began. Some highlights:

• President emeritus Derek Bok, a champion of improved pedagogy, publicly embraced the potential for education technology to enhance the classroom in a September address marking the six-hundredth anniversary of the University of St Andrews. The collaborative nature of preparing an online course, he said, makes it “less intuitive and more a product of conscious deliberation” in deciding how best to present each concept and in what order.

http://harvardmagazine.com/2013/11/teaching-tech

By Alexandria Zamecnik, Royal Purple News

The UW System opened its doors to the world in January, helping more than 2,000 people in 40 different countries, with a brand new online program aimed at creating readiness for college level math courses. UW System’s Math MOOC, or Massive Open Online Course, is an entirely online and free remedial math course created by the UW-La Crosse. MOOC takes enrolled students through a six week program full of live lectures, online tutoring sessions and 14 algebraic modules aligned with the Common Core State Standards of Wisconsin and ACT. Robert Hoard

http://royalpurplenews.com/?p=11720

by the Wall Street Journal

Advocates of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) claim they have the potential to transform higher education by expanding academic access on an unprecedented scale. But in the technology’s early days, it remains to be seen whether this promise can be realized. So we asked The Experts: What are the opportunities—and risks—in the MOOC business model?

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304561004579135363266072976.html

By Whitney Williams, WGEM

John Wood Community College introduced a new online course that encourages people to get social. John Wood has partnered with ed2go to offer a class called “Using Social Media in Business.” Participants in this course will learn how to use the five most popular social media platforms: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Google Plus. Officials say the course is great for businesses or those going into business because it covers how to grow and promote a business.

http://www.wgem.com/story/23688691/2013/10/14/john-wood-community-college-offers-new-course-on

By Karen Farkas, The Plain Dealer

A Case Western Reserve University professor will use a $69,000 grant to help develop a free online course on how communities can support and grow new companies – with a focus on Northeast Ohio. The non-credit course, likely to be taken by tens of thousands across the world, will explore how an area going through an economic transition launched an array of government and donor-supported initiatives to support the growth of entrepreneurs. “This is for entrepreneurs around the world and not a class about how you build a company but how do you understand communities and how resources are allocated,” said Michael Goldberg, an assistant professor at the Weatherhead School of Management.

http://www.cleveland.com/metro/index.ssf/2013/10/case_western_reserve_universit_15.html

By Editorial Board, Duke Chronicle

Despite encountering opposition from some faculty and students, Duke’s administration continues to explore opportunities to promote online learning. In July, Duke appointed Lynne O’Brien to serve as the University’s first associate vice provost for digital and online education initiatives—a position created to oversee Duke’s experiments with online education. O’Brien’s appointment suggests that Duke plans to proceed more carefully and deliberately as it develops its approach to online education. Earlier attempts to integrate online courses into Duke’s curriculum were met with significant resistance.

http://www.dukechronicle.com/articles/2013/10/08/faculty-key-online-education

By Dominic Basulto, Washington Post

Last school year, the term MOOC (massive open online course) skyrocketed into popularity as an important new experiment in higher education. This year may be the school year that the MOOC truly goes mainstream. This will mark the first year, for example, that it will be possible to receive a “super-cheap” master’s degree via MOOCs. Now that Silicon Valley companies like Google are showing signs of jumping aboard the MOOC bandwagon, it could forever change the way we think about the college experience. Instead of graduating with a degree from a traditional four-year university, you may one day graduate with a degree from the University of Google.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/innovations/wp/2013/10/08/moocs-going-mainstream-this-may-be-the-year/

By IVAN B. K. LEVINGSTON, Harvard Crimson

Representatives of the Chinese Ministry of Education and more than 10 of China’s top universities met Oct. 10 at Tsinghua University in Beijing to announce XuetangX, China’s newest online education portal. XuetangX is powered by Harvard’s edX’s open-source platform, but the initiative is a distinct, independent organization and China’s largest online collaboration of leading universities. It will begin to launch courses on Oct. 17. Chinese government and university representatives revealed the initiative just two days after another provider of massive open online courses, Coursera, announced the launch of its own Chinese-language portal.

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/10/15/american-adults-see-online-courses-least-equivalent-most-ways

Michael Mannina, LaVoz Weekly

As with any program at De Anza, the Distance Learning program has been hit with budget cuts. However, they are average when compared to other departments, says Qian.

“One of the main issues facing the program is a shortage of staff,” she said. For fall quarter, Qian said there were 4,000 students enrolled in Distance Learning classes at De Anza. Some reasons might be busy schedules, a conflict in needed classes, or even just being more of an independent learner, among others, for why people decide to take distance learning classes.

http://www.lavozdeanza.com/uncategorized/2009/11/02/distance-learning-center-short-on-staff-not-on-classes/

by Bob Mercer, Rapid City Journal

About two out of every three students enrolled in South Dakota’s public universities last school year took at least one online course, according to report on distance education delivered this week to the state Board of Regents. Nearly 22,000 students enrolled in distance education courses through South Dakota’s public universities during the 2012-2013 school year, up 8.5 percent from the previous year and 65 percent over the past five years. The campuses are catering to the demand, according to David Palmer, director of institutional research for the university system. “(They) are aware this is a hot market right now,” Palmer said.

http://rapidcityjournal.com/news/more-students-taking-courses-online/article_cf3ecbf1-8bb4-550a-a763-8ce1dbce7463.html

by Chris Galvin, the Tartan

Semester Online, which debuted at Carnegie Mellon this semester, offers students an opportunity to gain credit from online courses at other universities. Semester Online describes itself as a “first-of-its-kind program offering rigorous, for-credit online courses from prestigious colleges and universities to top undergraduate students worldwide.” The program began with over 100 students in 10 courses across the consortium, and has expanded to 19 courses for the coming spring semester.

http://thetartan.org/2013/10/14/news/online

by Dror Ben-Naim, Financial Review

Just as Google and Facebook let advertisers tailor their messages based on our online behaviour, the same type of technology is now promising to radically restructure education by making learning personal. In the future, every student will have their own digitised, lifelong learning profile that will record their skills, knowledge and credentials. It will travel with them through school, university, and onto their professional development during their career. Such profiles will be continuously constructed from early childhood as students go through online learning experiences at school or at home – while learning, doing assignments or taking exams. These profiles will make it possible for education providers to deliver personalised and adaptive instruction to each learner, throughout their lifetime – a bit like having your own digital private tutor. On the flip side, they will also help employers align with job-seekers as digital profiles of skills, certifications and qualifications are easy to aggregate, search, and match.

http://www.afr.com/p/national/education/tailored_online_learning_is_the_GV1xd9haoYVacpWNsMyHvN

by ERIC SPIEGEL, Wall Street Journal

There are two major advantages to the online education business model. The first is access. Online education allows students around the world to learn from recognized leaders in higher education, regardless of where they live. Online courses, like MOOCs, are challenging the foundations of traditional education institutions. The second advantage is adaptability. The very nature of online education allows it to quickly adjust to the ever changing needs of industry.

http://blogs.wsj.com/experts/2013/10/12/moocs-will-change-the-university-business-model/

by the Economist

A recent study of faculty attitudes to technology by the online publication Inside Higher Ed found much skepticism about MOOCs, but also that staff who have actually taught on them are far more positive about their quality. Nishikant Sonwalkar, the editor of MOOCs Forum, says professors do not want to teach on courses they did not create. At the same time they are concerned about “academic marginalisation”. Popular MOOCs are creating star professors, such as Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller at Stanford University. Mr Sonwalkar observes that many of the academics he has approached to appear in MOOCs decline because they feel uncomfortable on camera. Academics are over-reacting, argues Jack Wilson, the president emeritus of the University of Massachusetts. Professors will eventually get used to them. But first, says Mr Wilson, they must “get over the fear factor”.

http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21587820-many-professors-are-hostile-online-education-learned-luddites