by Bernardo Trejos, Hybrid Pedagogy
The recent rise of online education presents challenges in terms of cross-cultural understanding…. There is, however, an additional complication in dealing with multilateral instead of a bilateral cultural differences. Technology without cultural awareness is a double-edged sword, so being aware of these dimensions is necessary to develop learning environments that harness the potential of contemporary digital tools.
Share on FacebookBy Simon Schuster, MSU State News
Imagine a class that doesn’t cost anything. Anyone can join, and there’s no penalty for not completing the course — but usually, most don’t. A course without credit, where students never meet their professor. Some experts argue such a model could revolutionize education, while others argue it’s not a sustainable program. Either way, MSU has four of them. The courses are changing the way students and professors approach class activities, as MSU evaluates its overall online presence, including regular online courses. MSU’s four pilot Massively Open Online Courses, or MOOCs, have provided education to people all over the U.S. and the world. In a partnership between MSUglobal and MSU IT Service’s Learning Design and Technology, or LearnDAT, the pilot program has collaborated with faculty in different colleges to produce the courses on a number of different online platforms, utilizing WordPress, Moodle, Desire2Learn and social media.
http://statenews.com/article/2013/10/portal-to-higher-education
Share on FacebookBY TIM JOHNSON, Kansas City Star
Lost in the debate about online learning, however, is its impact in far-flung regions of the globe, places like the electrical engineering department at the University of El Salvador and the modest walk-up apartment of the Palacios family, above the medical clinic of Dr. Roberto Palacios Navarro, Roosemberth’s father. “At school, he hardly studies. He just shows up and takes the exams,” Palacios said of his son. But it isn’t for lack of ambition. “He wants to learn,” he said. Added the son: “I don’t like simple things.” The 16 year old aced a difficult engineering course offered online by a professor from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Palacios lives with his family in Armenia, El Salvador.
http://www.kansascity.com/2013/10/02/4524625/latin-america-becoming-fertile.html
Share on Facebookby CAT ZAKRZEWSKI, Daily Northwestern
Medill Prof. Owen Youngman always receives a lot of emails just before and after an assignment is due. Because his massive open online course, Understanding Media by Understanding Google, has thousands of students in around the globe, it has resulted in an inundation of emails around the clock. He and his staff of nine former students have handled 12,000 discussion posts in the course’s first two weeks. Such new challenges are par for the course for professors teaching Northwestern’s first three MOOCs and one for-credit Semester Online course. Two more NU for-credit courses will be offered Winter Quarter, continuing the University’s attempt to incorporate a variety of departments in this new form of education.
http://dailynorthwestern.com/2013/10/02/campus/northwestern-begins-online-education-attempts/
Share on Facebookby Massey University, Australia
Massey will offer expertise in three of its core disciplines of Agriculture, Emergency Management and Indigenous Studies when its first open online courses go live this week. The University has teamed up with the free online learning platform Open2Study, led by Open Universities Australia (OUA), to offer a suite of online courses. The director of Massey’s National Centre for Teaching and Learning, Professor Mark Brown, says the University’s adoption of Massive Open Online Courses, known as MOOCs, is a “logical extension” of its distance learning programmes and evidence of Massey’s commitment to innovation in teaching and learning.
Share on Facebookby Joshua Kim , Inside Higher Ed
Editor’s Note: Thanks to Josh Kim (who presented an inspiring plenary at the Teaching Professor Technology conference this past weekend in Atlanta) for writing about the Power Point-Less approach I use in presentations – I encourage us all to give it a try! -Ray
… What I find intriguing about Ray’s talk is his decision to forgo PowerPoint. Ray actually worked the method into the substance of his talk, making the argument that a Web presentation is superior to a PowerPoint based presentation if your goal is to create a conversation. If you look at the link for Ray’s talk – https://sites.google.com/site/vortexoftech/ – you will see that it starts with a short pre-amble: “A word about Power Pointless! My colleagues and I at the University of Illinois Springfield Center for Online Learning, Research and Service present many national and regional workshops encouraging attendees to freely share presentation materials online using web-native tools that encourage collaboration and updating.”
http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/technology-and-learning/presenting-without-powerpoint
Share on Facebookby Daniel DiPiazza, Huffington Post
It takes more than information to learn a new skill or grasp a difficult concept. It takes deliberate practice. What is deliberate practice? In a nutshell, it’s the dedicated, incremental improvement of a skill over a period of many years — or from Malcolm Gladwell’s perspective in his book Outliers — 10,000 hours. Psychology Today points out that deliberate practice of specific skill sets over an extended period is one of the most effective ways to become an expert. So where does this leave the traditional route of information consumption and regurgitation as a method for learning? In the dust. Over the past 3 years, a new wave of online education start-ups and MOOCs has grown in large part due to a specific focus on integrated, deliberate practice as a core part of the curriculum.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/daniel-dipiazza/the-value-of-deliberate-p_b_4021194.html
Share on FacebookBy Jake New, eCampus News
With college costs at a record high, many prospective students are forced to choose between price and prestige – and women facing that decision are overwhelmingly choosing the former by turning to online courses. Women “see online degrees as more achievable than traditional on-ground program” by a margin of three-to-one, according to a survey released in September by Western International University. Nearly 80 percent of the survey’s respondents, who were all women between the ages 22 and 50, said they believed online universities offered specialized degree programs and that they could advance their careers.
http://www.ecampusnews.com/research/women-degrees-online-162/
Share on Facebookby Jan Murphy, Penn Live
Legislation that seeks to transform the way education is delivered to sixth- through 12th-graders emerged out of the House Education Committee on Tuesday. The state House Education Committee passed legislation on Tuesday that seeks to transform the way education is delivered in all Pennsylvania public schools. The bill’s sponsor Rep. Ryan Aument, R-Lancaster, would mandate public schools to offer online learning opportunities to students in secondary schools. He said he sees this mandate as necessary to spur innovation in the way education is delivered in all schools, not just the ones that have already made this leap to offering online courses.
http://www.pennlive.com/midstate/index.ssf/2013/10/bill_requiring_public_schools.html
Share on FacebookBy Denny Carter,eCampus News
An algorithm designed to spot struggling students and offer guidance and assistance even in the first couple weeks of their college career proved highly effective at Purdue University over the past six years. Signals was first used at Purdue University in 2007. The program, known as Signals, is one of the first advanced analytics programs to identify at-risk students by delving into reams of data that offer a clear picture into how a student in adjusting to her college education. Signals examines numbers gathered from more than 20 data points stemming from learning management systems used at Purdue.
http://www.ecampusnews.com/technologies/purdue-online-retention-164/
Share on FacebookBy Matt Rocheleau, Boston Globe
“This is all about expanding access,” said Debbie Cavalier, vice president of online learning and continuing education for Berklee Online. “This is a way to provide access to people across the world who want to learn from Berklee faculty, but aren’t able to study here on our campus in Boston.” Online tuition will be $16,500 per year, and while this is a steep price tag, that is small potatoes compared to the normal on campus cost of $36,514 in annual tuition.
Share on Facebookby juliette levy, Hastac
The fact is that while the online class is new for many university instructors at Research 1 institutions, most of us have been using technology in class for quite some time. Perhaps it started with email, then a laser beam to point at slides in an overhead projector and then a PowerPoint, online syllabi, online grade-books, PDFs of articles, links to news items and images of historical artifacts, FAQ boards followed by discussion boards and SafeAssign, which both organized assignment submissions and made finding plagiarists a cinch. The fact is that most of us have been teaching with the support of online technology for quite some time.
Share on Facebookby Molly Schulson, Brown Daily Herald
While 193,577 students registered for Brown’s three courses, only 101,639 were active students — students who logged in at least once and performed an action such as watching a video, submitting a quiz or completing an assignment, Melson said. “We had kids from 8 years old to 80 doing it and people from all continents. That diversity and richness — you can’t do that in a classroom,” Alcock said. The active students were from about 150 countries, with a majority of them from the United States, Brazil, India and Russia, Melson said. The largest age category represented was 25 to 35 years old, he said. Coursera gave statements of accomplishment, reports signed by the instructors indicating successful completion, to 6,662 students total, about 3 to 13 percent of the active students, depending on the course, Melson said.
http://www.browndailyherald.com/2013/09/30/faculty-members-reflect-coursera/
Share on Facebookby David Cillay, WCET Frontiers
So many exciting things are happening in higher education these days, it could make a guy’s hair fall out (see my photo at the bottom of this post). Most of the headlines have been about “massive” education and the stories may have left some people confused, or even a little worried. Let’s look past the hype—and the hyperbole—and focus on the central question we should ask about any educational innovation: Are MOOCs about a better educational experience for students? Or are they about efficiency and cost savings? Taken independently either is good and achieving both is better. But if the former is sacrificed for the latter, then I see long term systemic problems for higher education.
http://wcetblog.wordpress.com/2013/09/26/redirect-mooc-conversation/
Share on FacebookBy Joshua Kim, Inside Higher Ed
This past week the new crop of MacArthur Foundation Fellowships (the “Genius Awards”) were announced. Imagine how happy I was to find that one of the faculty in the online / blended program in which I work was named as one of the recipients. Jeffrey Brenner is a guest instructor in the online portion of Ethan Berke’s Population Health and Preventive Care course in Dartmouth’s Master of Health Care Delivery Science (MHCDS) program. We often hear about the advantages that online learning provides for students in terms of flexibility and work/life/school balance. What we talk about less is the ability of online programs to integrate different types of faculty into the teaching experience.
http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/technology-and-learning/when-macarthur-geniuses-teach-online
Share on FacebookBy Brendan Cournoyer, Business2Community
You don’t need a crystal ball to know that technology has forced the world of eLearning into a constant state of evolution. Last year, mobile learning was among the hottest trends for corporate training and higher education organizations alike. So what does the future hold for the rest of 2013 and beyond? Here are five expert predictions from around the web on what to expect from eLearning and online training going forward.
http://www.business2community.com/online-marketing/5-expert-predictions-future-elearning-0617051
Share on FacebookBy Sean Coughlan, BBC
Keep up, keep up. If you’ve only just caught on to the concept of online university courses called Moocs, then you’re in danger of falling behind again. Harvard, one of the world’s most influential universities, is moving on to Spocs – which stands for small private online courses. Nothing to do with Star Trek and sombre Vulcans, but plenty to do with ambitions “to boldly go”. And could these be the real deal? The academic chairing Harvard’s online experiments says we are already “post-Mooc”.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-24166247
Share on Facebookby Mehrose Baig, Huffington Post
There’s much to be said about the education system, not just in the United States but also across the world. When Sir Ken Robinson spoke at The Commonwealth Club, he talked about the education system being styled like an industrial era assembly line, one that stunts creativity and forces students to fit a schedule and predefined form of learning instead of opening up creative avenues to explore their potential. Similarly, last week at another Commonwealth Club program, Sal Khan, founder of Khan Academy, talked about the mass of homework that teenagers receive these days, in addition to the barrage of extracurricular activities they are involved in. It’s a race to keep up, because ultimately that race determines what happens after high school. Khan said that the system doesn’t provide space for students to explore their creativity, to learn in different ways or take their time in mastering a subject. “The assembly line is moving on,” he said.
Share on Facebookby ASHLEY PAHOLSKI, Fairfield Mirror
As students prepare to register for classes for the upcoming semester, selections are often made based on the name of the course, core requirements, professors and the allotted class times. However, this semester students had the opportunity to sign up for a new type of course at Fairfield: Post-Lecture Classrooms, also known as “flipped classrooms.” Besides the very intriguing name, these classes present students with a new objective to learning. Students engage in short lectures and videos on their own time, and discuss homework in the classroom, such as in Dr. Richard Regan’s Shakespeare I flipped classroom. According to the syllabus, the class meets about every other week “to discuss the learning that will take place online and through [students] own reading.”
http://fairfieldmirror.com/2013/09/28/professors-try-out-new-teaching-method/
Share on FacebookBy Faculty Focus
The Sloan Consortium (Sloan-C) has announced it will present its 2013 Sloan-C Awards at the 19th Annual Sloan Consortium International Conference on Online Learning, at the Walt Disney World Swan and Dolphin Resort, Lake Buena Vista, Florida, Thursday, Nov. 21, 2013.
“The Sloan-C Awards recognize the tremendous advances in online learning that result from the ideas and initiatives of individuals and colleges and universities globally,” said Meg Benke, president of Sloan-C’s board of directors. “On behalf of Sloan-C and our entire community, I congratulate this year’s honorees.”
“This year’s field of nominees implemented an impressive array of innovative approaches, creating a highly competitive selection process,” added Burks Oakley II, chair of the Awards Selection Committee. “The 2013 recipients have demonstrated exceptional leadership and real success in advancing online education.”
The recipients of the 2013 Sloan-C Awards are:
Frank Mayadas Leadership Award: Jack M. Wilson, University of Massachusetts
Ralph E. Gomory Award for Quality Online Education: Washington State University Global Campus
John R. Bourne Outstanding Achievement in Online Education: Kaye Shelton, Lamar University
Excellence in Institution-Wide Online Education: Lone Star College System
Excellence in Faculty Development for Online Teaching: Office of Distance Education, University of Louisiana at Lafayette
Outstanding Online Program: Master of Science in Biotechnology, University of Maryland University College
Excellence in Online Teaching (2 awards): Susan Manning, University of Wisconsin – Stout and Betty A. Rambur, University of Vermont
Special Recognition for Pedagogical Innovation (from the Awards Selection Committee): Certificate in Food Security, Ryerson University’s G. Raymond Chang School of Continuing Education
Board of Directors Award: Jeff Seaman and I. Elaine Allen, Babson Survey Research Group, Babson University
Share on FacebookBy Ken Kaye, Sun Sentinel
All you need now to attend the University of Florida is a computer. Applications are being accepted for UF Online, one of the nation’s first fully online bachelor’s degree programs, open to any first-time college student who qualifies for admission, State University System officials announced Friday. Courses will be offered in business administration, criminology and law, environmental management, healtheducation and sport management. In June, biology and psychology will be added.
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