Online Learning Update

by RICHARD GARNER, the Independent

From nursery years onwards, education is to undergo a computer-driven revolution, technology expert tells ministers. Children in nurseries will soon be learning through Moocs (Massive Open Online Courses) as the internet revolution changes the face of learning, according to the man who first pioneered their use in higher education. Today’s two- and three-year-olds have been born with keyboards “pinned to their fingers”, Dr Anant Agarwal, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, insists. As a result, it makes sense to utilise the skills they had acquired and give them a basic start to literacy and numeracy through computer games in the kindergarten or nursery schools.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/online-learning-is-the-blackboard-of-the-future-9117075.html

By Cindy Krischer Goodman, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

For working professionals, going back to school used to mean dashing from office to classroom. Now, the explosion of online education opportunities has made it easier to juggle jobs and school. Colleges are pushing Web courses and online degrees for people who want to take their careers to the next level without stepping foot on campus. Today, 7 in 10 public and for-profit colleges are offering full online academic programs, as are nearly half of private nonprofit colleges. As schools boost their online offerings, there are new options for working adults who want to add a career skill.

http://www.post-gazette.com/business/dateline/2014/02/09/Professionals-turn-to-online-courses/stories/201402090042

By Kelly Pedro, The London Free Press

College enrolment is always high during a recession, but Canada’s last downturn ended almost five years ago and still the college numbers are growing. That’s what makes the latest trend different. That could be because of a shift in thinking, Franklin said. When Colleges Ontario polled parents and students seven years ago, they knew the benefits of college but were intent on going to university. Now, parents and students are much more worried about the economy and believe post-secondary education is for getting a good job. They don’t care whether it’s college or ­university, Franklin said. Online learning is the next wave of popularity, with a spike in the number of people who want to learn online. Fanshawe will soon offer five business courses as online courses. Students before had to travel to campus for class.

http://www.lfpress.com/2014/02/07/the-new-college-try

By Katie Lepi, Edudemic

Connected learning is a term I’ve been seeing a lot these days. As you all know, some trends take off, others stutter. Not everything ends up being the best of the best and works for everyone. I’m not sure how much of ‘connected learning’ is really a ‘thing’ versus the idea of leveraging certain concepts in your teaching style, but I have to say that I like a lot of what I read. The concepts are logical, relevant, and pretty basic – and you don’t have to make huge changes to your curriculum in order to put some of these ideas to use. The handy infographic linked below takes a more in depth look at connected learning.

http://www.edudemic.com/connected-learning/

by THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

A bill before the Kansas Legislature would allow the state’s universities to streamline efforts to offer online courses to out-of-state students, according to supporters. The bill would allow the Kansas Board of Regents to join a regional group of states that would establish standards for online courses and authorize the member states to provide online courses in each state. The group is called State Authorization Reciprocity Agreement, or SARA, The Lawrence Journal-World reported (http://bit.ly/1eEFsVH ). Current regulations require each school to get approval from each state where it enrolls online students.

http://www.therepublic.com/view/story/81cf857ee89a4d4f8615be4be614b41a/KS-XGR–Universities-Online-Courses

by Richard Garrett, University World News

Confirmation that online higher education has paid its dues and is here to stay, is the recent inclusion of distance learning data in the US federal government’s IPEDS – Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System – database. The fact that inclusion comes 15 years after the online higher education growth ride began, means such decisions are not made lightly. In the slow-and-steady business of official data collection, variables must have staying power, definitions must be commonplace and institutions must actually collect the numbers in reasonably reliable fashion. While the federal data is concerned with multiple ‘distance’ modalities, all the US supply and demand evidence I’ve ever seen suggests all but a small fraction represents online delivery.

http://www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=20140205162132677

By Amy S. Choi, Business Week

Business education at Harvard will go online with “Innovating in Health Care,” a course beginning March 31 on HarvardX, the university’s online learning platform. It will be the first HarvardX class taught by a dedicated business school instructor: Regina Herzlinger, a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School. The main goal of her online class is to spur collaboration, interaction, and networking, but that’s difficult when crowded classrooms are replaced with the solitary glow of a home computer monitor. To overcome the separation factor, she’ll employ a clever collaboration of her own: Project Lever, a “sort of EHarmony for building businesses” into the edX platform. Project Lever was designed as a way to match students with the best resources for their research projects. In Herzlinger’s course, students will use Project Lever to connect with classmates whose skills complement theirs.

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-02-06/harvard-offers-health-care-innovation-online-course

By Abigail Feldman, Tufts Daily

Members of the Tufts University Schools of Arts and Sciences and Engineering faculty voted in December to adopt a new policy on online courses. The policy outlines a two-tier system for approving online courses and expands the web-based courses that count toward graduation from two to five, which represents a semester’s worth of courses, according to the chair of the Education Policy Committee (EPC) David Hammer. “We wanted to make room for online courses in the schedule,” Hammer said. “We wanted to create an atmosphere that would allow experimentation and innovation.” The new policy replaces a temporary one that faculty adopted two years ago when they agreed to revisit the policy in the future, Hammer explained.

http://www.tuftsdaily.com/news/faculty-embraces-online-course-expansion-1.2854918

by Tracy Trowbridge, Edutopia

What will the classroom of 2020 look like? As I look ahead, many of the trends we’re seeing today will continue to expand learning beyond the classroom walls to connect educators, students and real-world experiences. These trends are being driven by pioneering teachers and their students, and are fueled by technology — especially the Internet and the cloud. With more than 40 states adopting Common Core and with increased focus on deeper learning and developing creativity, I see exciting movement to a more personalized and collaborative education. Together with the proliferation of devices such as smartphones and tablets, teachers and students will have unprecedented access to tools for creative expression, and will find it even easier to share, to co-create and to experiment with new ideas.

http://www.edutopia.org/blog/classroom-cloud-bright-forecast-2020-tacy-trowbridge

by Virtual College UK

Self-directed learning initiatives that employees can pursue in their own time are gaining impetus, thanks in part to the increasing demands of the business world and also because of the constant march forwards of technology. Many companies are struggling to keep up with the ever-quickening pace of their industries and rapid technology changes are one of the leading causes of this ever-accelerating development. Luckily, though, the very cause of the changing landscape also provides the means by which to master it, and newer, more advanced forms of online communication and collaboration can be leveraged to allow for self-directed learning.

http://www.virtual-college.co.uk/news/Technology-encouraging-take-up-of-selfdirected-learning-newsitems-801689441.aspx

by SANDHIYA KANNAN, the Statesman

Open SUNY will offer eight fully online degree programs targeted towards New York State students. The State University of New York announced a new online course initiative on Jan. 14 that will offer students a way to complete entire degree programs online, positioning the university to follow an increasingly important trend in online education. The program, called Open SUNY, was unveiled by SUNY Chancellor Nancy L. Zimpher during her State of the University Address and will offer eight fully online degree programs through a collaboration across SUNY campuses.

http://sbstatesman.com/2014/02/04/suny-unveils-new-online-course-initiative/

by Janet Murray, the Guardian

Professor Sugata Mitra’s suggestion that children should be allowed to use the internet in exams has sparked a new level of debate about online learning. Speaking at a British Council debate last year, the academic – whose debut novel inspired the Oscar-winning film Slumdog Millionaire – suggested that this would inspire teachers and encourage children to become more independent learners. So are schools currently using the internet to its full potential? Do current approaches to teaching and learning get the best out of children? Or are concerns about safety and security stifling their creativity? These were some of the questions raised at a recent debate hosted by the Guardian, in association with Zurich Municipal.

http://www.theguardian.com/teacher-network/2014/feb/04/future-online-learning-safety-challenges-opportunities

By Thomas Stocks, Business2Community

Video is rapidly emerging as a way for people to promote, inform, engage and educate and it is the latter that seems to be taking the world by storm. The global E-Learning market has sky-rocketed a massive 900% since 2000 and statistics show that over 1 billion people worldwide are enrolled in some form of online training. Learning through video is not something new to us, but it is becoming much more accessible and with webinars and live event streaming being so accessible, more people and businesses are turning their development towards online video.

http://www.business2community.com/video-marketing/growth-learning-video-2014-0763454

By Scott Travis, Sun Sentinel

Florida’s colleges are seeing a boom in students who prefer keyboards to blackboards, apps to athletics, chat rooms to dorm rooms. And the schools are scrambling to respond. Broward College and the University of Florida are rapidly expanding their offerings, and others like Florida Atlantic University are planning to follow suit soon. A year after Broward College designated its online programs as a fourth campus, enrollment surged 35 percent in one year to 9,000 students. The school this year is spending $500,000 to create new health-care management and cyber-security certificate programs, with plans to later add associate’s and bachelor’s degree programs in the high-demand fields, Associate Provost David Shulman said.

http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/education/fl-broward-college-online-20140130,0,1635078.story

BY LINDLEY ESTES, the Free-Lance Star

The Learning by Giving Foundation is once again offering an online course in philanthropy that benefits the localities of its students around the United States. Locally, the Northern Neck Food Bank in Bowling Green received $3,000 from the program, which gave out more than $100,000 during last year’s course. The food bank provides assistance to 25 pantries and organizations in the area. Registration is now open for the second online Giving With Purpose course. The course is free and offered worldwide as an opportunity to make real grants to nonprofits using $100,000 of the foundation’s money.

http://news.fredericksburg.com/newsdesk/2014/02/01/online-philanthropy-course-opens-registration/

by Donald Clark, Training Zone

When you consider the rationale for corporate MOOCs, Udacity’s move in that direction doesn’t seem so surprising. They have forged a relationship with Google, Autodesk, and other tech companies and this is fine. EdX is being used by the steel manufacturer Tenaris in its Tenaris University to deliver learning to 27,000 employees. Udemy and others already serve this market. McAfee use MOOCs for sales training, essentially a flipped classroom model. MOOCs are no longer just an HE issue. Once an innovative digital genie escapes from the bottle, all sorts of people want to see what it can offer, and corporates are no slouches when it comes to innovation, especially when that innovation offers very low costs, quick access and global, online reach.

http://www.trainingzone.co.uk/feature/free-resources/10-big-reasons-rise-corporate-moocs/186425

by Nancy Atterberry, Storify

The move towards a new pedagogy is influenced by technology and the abundance of information available online. Our students are digital natives. They expect to use today’s technology in their learning. Students are able to access, apply, and demonstrate learning in various ways. They must develop the skills and knowledge to use technology to locate and apply information. These skills are essential to our students’ success. Educators are using technology to enhance their teaching. New teaching strategies and approaches have resulted from the use of technology. Specifically, technology has changed the role educators play in the classroom. Teacher centered classrooms are being replaced by student centered learning environments. Students take a more active role in their learning and the teacher is there to facilitate and guide. Learning objectives are flexible to provide options for students with diverse learning styles to help them successfully meet the learning objectives.

http://storify.com/NancyAtterberry/a-new-pedagogy-is-emerging

By Sarah Rontal, Brandeis Justice

Brandeis Profs. Marc Brettler (NEJS) and Ellen Wright (PSYC) embraced an online course format this semester, each teaching one class through Semester Online. This marked the University’s first venture into online course offerings, joining a consortium of nine other colleges who are also offer courses through Semester Online. The consortium offers a total of 21 courses. Though both Brandeis courses were intended to attract Brandeis students as well as students from consortium schools, Wright’s “Psychological and Socio-Cultural Perspectives on Health” online course enrolled only Brandeis students. In total, 29 Brandeis students are enrolled in online courses, 18 enrolled in Wright’s class and 11 enrolled in courses offered by consortium partners, according to Senior Vice President of Communications Ellen de Graffenreid.

http://www.thejustice.org/news/professors-reflect-on-online-courses-1.3133558

By Maggie Cassidy, Concord Monitor

Dartmouth College will join dozens of other institutions next fall in offering online courses to learners around the globe.College officials yesterday announced Dartmouth has become the 31st institution to join edX, an online learning platform that was founded by Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dartmouth’s partnership with edX means that a to-be-determined group of the college’s professors will moderate “massive open online courses” – known in academia as MOOCs – which will be accessible, generally for free, by anybody who signs up at the edX website.

http://www.concordmonitor.com/home/10355676-95/dartmouth-to-join-free-online-learning-platform

by Christina Farr, Venture Beat

Coursera has inked a partnership deal with the Carlos Slim Foundation to bring high-quality and affordable online courses to Latin America. The news was announced at a press conference in Mexico City by Carlos Slim, a Mexican business magnate and philanthropist, and Coursera cofounder Daphne Koller. The pair expressed their shared goal to improve access to high-quality content in Spanish. “Through online education, Coursera is making courses available to millions of people, instead of only to a small number of students. Job markets currently demand people that are highly trained and that engage in continuous education,” a spokesperson from the Carlos Slim Foundation wrote to me. The goal is to translate 50 English-language courses into Spanish by the end of the year. The foundation is currently partnered up with Mexico National University and Tecnológico de Monterrey to make more original Spanish-language courses available.

http://venturebeat.com/2014/01/30/how-coursera-is-bringing-online-education-to-latin-america/