Online Learning Update

by The Bowdoin Orient editorial board

The Curriculum and Education Policy Committee (CEP) recently proposed a revision to the College’s transfer credit policy that would allow departments to start awarding credit for online courses. The CEP’s proposal is progressive for a college that just introduced online course registration this year. Courses taken online are often viewed as antithetical to the small, interactive learning environment of a liberal arts school. Bowdoin values the close interaction between professor and student, and frequently boasts of its low student-to-faculty ratio. However, it is time to acknowledge that scholarly work can be accomplished through web-based classes.

http://bowdoinorient.com/article/9006

By NovoEd, Sacramento Bee

NovoEd, the collaborative online social learning platform, has announced agreements with 16 institutions that span the higher education, research, and technology sectors. Through these relationships, NovoEd will provide the platform, tools, and services that enable its partners to offer both massive online open courses (MOOCs) and smaller private courses in a social, collaborative and connected environment. With this new technology, the world is now a connected, social classroom. NovoEd’s extensive list of partners now includes Stanford, Princeton, University of Michigan, University of Virginia Darden School of Business, Babson Global, the Aresty Institute of Executive Education at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, among others.

http://www.sacbee.com/2014/02/13/6154861/leading-institutions-work-with.html

by Cromwell Schubarth, Silicon Valley Business Journal

Curious.com, which runs an online marketplace where hundreds of teachers offer video lessons, has raised $15 million in Series B funding. The Menlo Park company led by CEO Justin Kitch said the round was led by GSV Capital. Previous investors who participated include Redpoint Ventures, Bill Campbell, and Jesse Rogers. GSV Chairman and CEO Michael Moe is joining the Curious.com board. The company now offers more than 5,000 lessons from more than 700 teachers. With the new funding it is adding two new ways for teachers to make money.

http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2014/02/12/online-learning-startup-curiouscom.html

by Susan Snyder, Philly.com

Online learning is getting a boost at area colleges and universities this semester, as snow, ice and power outages continue to force closures at a rate not seen in recent memory. With some schools already having closed for as many as seven days, mostly since the start of the second semester, schools are asking professors to use more online lectures, journals, blogs, quizzes, database research and other methods that don’t require face-to-face meetings, officials said. “Because instructors meet semester outcomes through online, face-to-face, and/or out-of-class learning experiences, they are able to shift to the use of more technology to stay connected with their students when meeting face-to-face is not possible,” said Anne Skelder, provost and vice president of academic affairs for Cabrini College in Radnor, which has closed seven days this academic year due to weather and power outages.

http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/campus_inq/Universities-use-more-online-learning-to-deal-with-winter-woes.html

by GlobeNewswire

College has developed a new pathway that allows students to complete an Associate in Science in Business Administration degree by taking free, open, online courses from the Saylor Foundation that are aligned with the college’s prior learning assessment program. “In the past two years, there has been much debate about how open online courses benefit students,” said Marc Singer, vice provost of the college’s Center for the Assessment of Learning. “Our program enables students to take high-quality open courses at no cost and then apply what they learned in those open courses by taking our assessments. This process allows them to earn credit that can be applied to a degree program at Thomas Edison State College.”

http://www.itnewsonline.com/news/Earning-Credit-Through-Open-Courses-and-Prior-Learning-Assessment/31850/6/3

By Brian Zinchuk, Battleford News Optimist

For years we’ve heard how the Internet will shake up education with online learning. For a long time it was nothing but blah, blah blah, whatever. Instead of reading a textbook, you were reading it on your screen. But in the past couple years, that changed, and now the world will never be the same. The adoption of video in online tutorials, workshops and webinars has been absolutely remarkable in its impact for those who seek them out. It’s taken a while, but the Internet has finally matured to become an extremely powerful learning tool. It’s ironic that to do so, it had to start acting like a classroom in real life.

http://www.newsoptimist.ca/article/20140212/BATTLEFORD0304/302129998/-1/BATTLEFORD/online-learning-comes-of-age

By THE CRIMSON STAFF

When students leave Harvard for the world beyond its gates, they bid goodbye to Georgian brick, the glittering Charles, nights on Mount Auburn Street, Bartley’s Burgers, and more. Thanks to the Harvard Alumni Association, however, they do not bid farewell to social—and often business—bonds with their peers. And now, with the introduction of HarvardX courses restricted to alumni, they can hold on to intellectual connections as well. As we pack our bags after high school and move out of home for the first time, our parents often send us off with seemingly sage advice: “You’re only in college once.” HarvardX helps disprove that statement. We can take college—or some of it, at least—with us.

http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2014/2/13/harvard-harvardx-alumni-opinion/

By Jason Anderson, Edudemic

Gamification can enhance learning in college-level coursework. Using characteristic elements that play a significant role in gameplay can create a more dynamic learning environment where students more fully understand targeted concepts. To examine this, I have been researching Twitter as a vehicle that would resonate with the course objectives in a course that I teach on Open Source Intelligence, particularly for a module regarding social media intelligence. In From Game Design Elements to Gamefulness: Defining ‘Gamification’ Sebastian Deterding defines gamification as the use of game design elements in non-game contexts. To understand gamification in academic terms, the task is to determine how to situate gamified applications in relation to existing course context and what elements belong.

http://www.edudemic.com/dynamic-learning-environments-using-gamification/

by R.A. London, the Economist

Students will soon find that for very low prices they can get a much broader array of course choices, most of which offer superior instruction with much more flexibility: you can view the lectures when you want, as many times as you want, wherever you want. It will not be long before completion of particular MOOCs earn students enough credit at “real” universities to enable students to get a “real” degree. The stigma associated with MOOC learning should quickly flip to status signalling, since anyone who can do an entire degree online is probably disciplined and self-motivated. It is very easy to see how elite universities survive this, as they provide a fundamentally different experience. It is equally easy to see how large segments of the world of higher education are rendered unnecessary: where, within a decade or two, all that will remain of hundreds or thousands of less-selective universities will be the buildings—and a skilled teacher or two who built courses that prospered in online markets.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2014/02/online-education

by Jay Halfond, Huffington Post

Distance learning is likely to impact the health of some of America’s academic institutions. Most higher education is local, and likely to remain so. Many schools have enjoyed geographic exclusivity. But the age of regional monopolies is rapidly closing. We are all in each other’s territory now. As the public becomes more savvy consumers of ecommerce, the expectations for distance education will rise. Not every school will have the ability to vie for fully online degree students or to defend their local turf from those carpetbagger schools able to deliver high quality distance learning. Colleges that cannot compete could face death by a thousand cuts.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jay-halfond/distractions-disruptions-_b_4769358.html

By Carl Straumsheim, Inside Higher Ed

Cornell University and the University of Texas at Austin may have trumpeted their partnerships with — and pledged millions to — the massive open online course provider edX, but to no avail: Their students don’t seem to understand why. “The university hasn’t laid out long-term goals for the MOOCs, and the numbers don’t bode particularly well for the courses’ overall success,” the editorial reads. “We’re confused as to why an unproven and unused educational experiment that isn’t even aimed at UT students is something the system feels they should continue funding.”

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/02/12/ut-austin-and-cornell-u-students-question-their-institutions-investments-moocs

By Tom Simonite, Technology Review

Would you let a startup track your social media accounts and credit-card transactions in exchange for cash? Data about our likes and habits is captured in abundance, but we reap only a small portion of the resulting value. A startup called Datacoup is far from the only tech company hoping to get rich by selling insights mined from your personal data. But it may be the only one offering to give you money for that information. atacoup is running a beta trial in which people get $8 a month in return for access to a combination of their social media accounts, such as Facebook and Twitter, and the feed of transactions from a credit or debit card. The New York City-based startup plans to make money by charging companies for access to trends found in that information, after it has been removed of personally identifying details.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/524621/sell-your-personal-data-for-8-a-month/

By Laura Iancu, Edudemic

The education sector is rapidly changing and adapting to new technologies. Modern days have made educators go above and beyond with their teaching skills and learn to use new tools to innovate their style and create a better learning environment for students. Starting with correspondence courses and ending up with the apparition of MOOCs, education tried to bring closer students from all around the world. This has rapidly grown the number of enrolled students but the completion rate was really low.

http://www.edudemic.com/4-ways-teachers-can-encourage-online-interaction/

by Suzanne Cassidy, Lancster Online

Those for-profit colleges may charge a premium for the convenience of learning in your pajamas. But when it comes to virtual learning, they’re not your only option. Local colleges, too, offer an array of online courses and even degree programs. And HACC also offers free, not-for-credit classes through iTunes U —Apple’s answer to MOOCs: massive open online courses. Among colleges with campuses in Lancaster County, only Franklin & Marshall College offers no online courses at all.

http://lancasteronline.com/lifestyle/virtual-learning-students-opting-for-online-classes-from-colleges/article_337ebe68-9264-11e3-b1c9-001a4bcf6878.html

By Amy Burkman, Edudemic

technology-integration2Most of today’s classroom teachers are digital immigrants, who need to not only learn the latest technologies but also help students learn skills for workplaces that don’t yet exist. This imperative, compounded by the advanced skills of their digital native students, creates a daunting task for the best of teachers. Most teachers work very hard to keep up with today’s technology and related jargon, with mixed success

http://www.edudemic.com/next-gen-skills/

by Daniel Doherty, Town Hall

On Monday, in a speech entitled “Making Higher Education Affordable Again” at Miami Dade College, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) argued that many innovative online programs could offer students a different and more flexible path to a four-year degree. “Free online learning is already a reality, we just need the established system to catch up,” he said. “Here’s how it could work. After completing a free online course, a student could pay a relatively small fee to take a standardized test that, if passed, would allow them to count the class toward a degree or job certification.” He continued, “To make this a reality, Congress could establish a new independent accrediting board to ensure the quality of these free courses and make the credits transferable into the traditional system.”

http://townhall.com/tipsheet/danieldoherty/2014/02/10/marco-rubio-speech-on-education-n1792621

By Nick Clunn, Tech Page One

A three-year, $13,000 bachelor’s degree announced this week by Texas education officials relies heavily on a statewide online course as a means of delivering the program at such a low cost. The Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board announced the start of the Texas Affordable Baccalaureate Degree Program on Wednesday, a week after a soft launch at South Texas College and Texas A&M University-Commerce. The colleges collaborated with the board over the past several years to develop the program.

http://techpageone.dell.com/industries2/education/online-courses-seen-pillar-13k-degree/

You don’t need to be a Harvard University student to take a massive open online course from Harvard—throwing open the gates to all comers is the idea, after all. But being a Harvard graduate still has its perks, even within the democratized landscape of MOOCs. The university plans to make some MOOC materials available exclusively to alumni, in an effort to help Harvard graduates reconnect with the university and one another. The program, called HarvardX for Alumni and first reported in The Harvard Crimson, might also include opportunities to interact directly with professors, a rare privilege in an open online course.

http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/harvard-u-will-offer-exclusive-moocs-to-alumni/50265

by Joshua Kopstein, Daily Beast

Coursera, which offers free online courses so that “anyone around the world can learn without limits,” said last week that they were compelled to begin blocking IP addresses associated with the countries, after finding that their site was in violation of U.S. export laws. “Coursera is working very closely with the U.S. Department of State and Office of Foreign Assets Control to secure permissions to reinstate site access for students in sanctioned countries,” the company reassured on its blog. A few hours later, the site stopped blocking Syria after discovering that the country’s sanctions contain an exemption for non-government organizations focused on “extending access to education.” But around 2,000 students in Iran, Cuba, and Sudan remain cut off. The site now greets them with the following message:

“Our system indicates that you are trying to access the Coursera site from an IP address associated with a country currently subjected to US economic and trade sanctions. In order for Coursera to comply with US export controls, we cannot allow you to access to the site.”

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/02/09/how-american-economic-sanctions-are-hurting-innocent-students-in-iran-cuba-sudan.html