Online Learning Update

By MICHAEL V. ROTHBERG, Harvard Crimson

Due to federal regulations, edX plans to block students in Cuba, Iran, and Sudan from taking an upcoming online course on aerodynamics and modern aircraft design, according to a blog post written by edX president Anant Agarwal on Monday. “We are deeply sorry to have to block any student anywhere from taking an edX course,” Agarwal wrote in the post. “This is completely antithetical to the vision and foundational values of edX and all [massive open online courses]. We will continue to work diligently with the U.S. government until every student, from any country in the world, can take any course they choose on edX.” The course, entitled “Flight Vehicle Aerodynamics” and taught by MIT faculty, covers advanced physics and aircraft design. It is scheduled to begin classes on March 5.

http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2014/3/3/edX-blocks-cuba-sudan-iran/

by Virtual College (UK)

When trainers and educators debate the merits of e-learning in relation to traditional classrooms and lecture halls, the argument often becomes one of polarised opinions, in which the two are seen as mutually exclusive. Both have strong arguments for and against, but in taking such a stance and seeing the two methods as fundamentally incompatible, educators will by definition be stuck with the flaws of their chosen approach while losing out on the benefits of the other. While classroom learning environments can provide much more immediacy and direct communication between students and teachers, they are also limited by time and location, and can be too expensive to repeat for those unable to attend.

http://www.virtual-college.co.uk/news/Elearning-and-classrooms-not-mutually-exclusive-newsitems-801699725.aspx

By CAROLINE PORTER and MELISSA KORN CONNECT, Wall Street Journal

New Service Aims to Help Navigate Sea of Web Classes With Links to Explicit Employment Opportunities. As rapid developments in online learning shake up higher education, students face a dizzying array of course, degree and certification options with little sense of which path will lead to a job. Now, efforts are under way to fill that void and offer some structure to an otherwise difficult-to-navigate and fast-growing market. Apollo Education Group Inc., best known for its University of Phoenix for-profit college, is expected to launch an “online marketplace” dubbed Balloon on Tuesday. It will start with a catalogue of nearly 15,000 technology classes from big-name course providers including Microsoft Corp., Adobe Systems Inc., Coursera and Udacity, and explicitly link them to job opportunities.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304585004579417411487177766?mg=reno64-wsj&url=http%3A%2F%2Fonline.wsj.com%2Farticle%2FSB10001424052702304585004579417411487177766.html

By Steve Kolowich, Chronicle of Higher Ed

The student experience is paramount to how people think about college. Many alumni still conjure lecture halls and well-landscaped lawns. But for those who have grown up in the online era, the student experience increasingly resides on a different quad: the glowing 13-inch screens of their laptops. To the companies selling online learning tools to colleges, that quad is a battleground. Colleges have long enlisted the help of outside companies to build their digital classrooms. Now those companies are jockeying among themselves for greater control of the learning experience.

http://chronicle.com/article/Textbook-Publishers-Push-to/145055/

by the American News

Taking a college course online used to be a quaint notion. Much of academia resisted the trend, preferring to deliver the traditional classroom experience because it’s inherently interactive. That’s not the case anymore. Online courses and degrees offer immense potential for increasing access to college education, decreasing the cost of education, and providing expanded options for personal and career enhancement. “I love going to class and interacting with my classmates,” said Mary Clare Coghlan of Annapolis, Maryland. “But to pursue my master’s degree while working, I couldn’t go the traditional route, so I found an online program.”

http://americannewsreport.com/going-to-college-online-8820466

By David Raths, Campus Technology

With $57 million in funding over several years proposed by Gov. Jerry Brown and approved by the state legislature, California is about to launch a bold experiment in creating a statewide Online Education Initiative. The mission: to dramatically increase the number of students who obtain associate degrees and transfer to four-year colleges. California’s community colleges have been offering courses online for more than 20 years. Last academic year they taught 41,000 online sections to 620,000 students. Yet over the years there has been little coordination between the state’s 72 districts in terms of technology platforms or student and faculty support. And retention rates in online courses remains stubbornly low, as they do nationwide.

http://campustechnology.com/articles/2014/02/26/california-community-colleges-joining-forces-for-online-success.aspx

By David Nagel, Campus Technology

The era of double-digit growth in smart phone adoption is coming to a close as devices approach the saturation point, which in turn will lead to drops in prices, according to new research. In North America alone, some 200 million smart phones are already in active use — one for about every 2.75 people residing on the continent and about one-seventh of the world’s total active devices. According to International Data Corp., in mature markets like the United States and Europe, smart phone growth will drop to the single digits in 2014, while, worldwide, growth will drop in half to about 19.3 percent for the year. (That follows growth of 39.2 percent in 2013 on 1 billion unit shipments. Shipments in 2014 are currently forecast at about 1.2 billion units.)

http://campustechnology.com/articles/2014/02/27/200-million-smart-phones-in-active-use-in-north-america-alone.aspx

by Sean Corcorran, Huffington Post

In my travels, I have the opportunity to speak with education leaders around the world. When I ask these presidents, provosts, deans, faculty, and chief technology officers what keeps them up at night, increasingly their answers all center on two areas; 1) Cost (of instruction delivery tuition), and 2) the explosion in online instruction models. In the evolving education landscape, these factors are front and center in shaping the future of learning. But often over-looked, or less well understood, is the critical role that the physical learning space has in complimenting a new instructional model.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sean-corcorran/classroom-design-principl_b_4862038.html

by Apostolos Koutropoulos, et al; i-JET

In this research paper, the authors analyze the collected Twitter data output during MobiMOOC 2011. This six-week data stream includes all tweets that contain the MOOC’s hashtag (#mobiMOOC) and it has been analyzed using qualitative methodology. The analysis sought to examine the emotive vocabulary used, to determine if there was content-sharing via tweets, and to analyze the folksonomic trends of the tweets. In Addition sought a deeper understanding of what, and how, MOOC participants share what they share on the MOOC’s Twitter channel. The aim of this study is to provide a little more insight into MOOC learner behaviors on Twitter so that future MOOC designers and facilitators can better engage with their learners.

http://online-journals.org/index.php/i-jet/article/view/3316

by Michail Giannakos, Letizia Jaccheri, John Krogstie, i-JET

Video learning is becoming an increasingly important part of contemporary education. In the decade there has been an increase of many and diverse forms of research efforts on video learning. This paper focuses on the video learning research of the last years based on 166 peer-reviewed published academic papers. A categorization is then derived from these papers, delineating some basic characteristics of video learning. The taxonomy attempts to look at MOOCs rapid growth through the lens of video-based learning research. We also provide some directions for future research related to the use of video learning.

http://online-journals.org/index.php/i-jet/article/view/3349

by Susan Grajek, EDUCAUSE

Our definition of a strategic technology is based on the time, active attention, and priority a technology has at a given time. Mature, fully deployed technologies (such as financial information systems or networks) may be among the most mission-critical technologies, but they are more likely to be receiving operational than strategic attention. “Strategic technologies” are relatively new technologies institutions will be spending the most time implementing, planning, and tracking in 2014. The top-ten strategic technologies were selected from the analysis of a vetted set of 78 technologies presented to EDUCAUSE members in a survey in fall 2013. The value of the EDUCAUSE list is that it is based on data about members’ actual plans and thus sheds light not on what people are talking about but what institutions are doing.

http://www.educause.edu/library/resources/higher-educations-top-ten-strategic-technologies-2014

By jaybarrett, Edudemic

Instead of being required to use state money for state-adopted materials like textbooks, Texas school districts can now choose which instructional materials to purchase. Having this option, Amarillo Independent School District chose to shelve textbooks at its Amarillo Area Center for Advanced Learning and invest in a 1:1 iPad initiative, venturing into the ever-growing world of Open Educational Resources (OER). OER are teaching and learning materials that are freely available online. Our goals with OER are to find the best possible course materials to engage our students, improve academic achievement, and save the district money.

http://www.edudemic.com/open-educational-resources-2/

By Katie Lepi, Edudemic

Instantaneous is the speed that most of us expect, and mind-numbing amounts of data are crunched, sent, and received. But just how much stuff is happening on the internet in just one minute? The handy infographic linked below takes a look at a minute in the existence of the internet. Some of the statistics are mind boggling, but moreover, I can’t wait to see what these numbers look like and what additions have been made in five or ten years!

http://www.edudemic.com/internet-minute-infographic/

By Mark Guydish, Times-Leader

As demand for medical services booms, odds are increasing that your next visit to the doctor will mean meeting a specialized nurse — one who may have earned his or her advanced degree online through courses similar to more offerings at local colleges. “With the Affordable Care Act there could be an additional 32 million to 38 million covered with health insurance,” Misericordia University professor and director of graduate nursing Brenda Hage said. “We need to have more advanced practice nurses to care for those people.”

http://timesleader.com/news/local-news-news/1226535/Online-degrees-rising-in-health-care-industry

By Laura Pappano, Christian Science Monitor

The online learning movement, spreading more by the week, will change how tomorrow’s students go to school, who teaches them, and what they learn. Some people, like Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen, predict that in as little as 15 years half of the colleges in the United States will be in bankruptcy, upended by online learning and the move to hybrid models in which only select classes are taught in person on campus. Others see more incremental shifts, with virtual learning remaining a tool rather than a transformative technology in higher education. Yet few doubt that college is ripe for change. Under the current system, students face serious problems getting into and through school, universities struggle to make money, and everyone grapples with fairness issues – why did she get accepted and I didn’t? This is to say nothing of the rising cost of a degree that may, or may not, prepare students for a job. Mix in the advent of new technologies such as cloud computing, which makes information, videos, and course work accessible at any time from anywhere, and old-style bricks-and-mortar colleges look ready for reinvention.

http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Society/2013/0602/How-online-learning-is-reinventing-college

By Yiyun Zhu, Duke Chronicle

The Arts and Sciences Council is considering allowing students to fulfill their graduation course requirements with credits from online courses. If passed, the proposal would increase the number of Duke courses required for graduation from 17 to 24 out of 34 total credits. It would also allow students to take up to one online course per semester. “The proposal gives 10 degrees of freedom they can mix and match from,” said William Seaman, a member of the executive committee of the Arts and Sciences Council and professor of visual studies. “Our students are rate busters and generally do much more than 34 courses, and thus we asked what is the minimum. The restriction is about articulating what a strong Duke education will be.”

http://www.dukechronicle.com/articles/2014/02/28/arts-and-sciences-council-debates-new-course-credit-proposal

By Adam Ring, Quartz

In a 2010 talk, TED curator Chris Anderson describes the concept of “crowd-accelerated innovation”—a self-fueling cycle of learning which has accelerated through the ubiquity of web-based video. In Anderson’s view, this mechanism of iteration and immediate feedback has made the Ted Talk and many other iterative processes evolve in dramatic ways. Anderson explains that part of the reason TED evolved so quickly is that you had some of the best and most creative individuals in the world prepare extensively for their talk by watching their predecessors. Through this iterative process, the presentations consistently improve—if only out of fear of disappointing their audience. This phenomenon can also be felt in many areas of society from dance to politics but also underpins the innovation going on in the rapidly evolving landscape for Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs).

http://qz.com/179490/the-quick-fix-for-online-education-make-instructors-binge-on-ted-talks/

By David Nagel, Campus Technology

$43,477 is the average cost for an online bachelor’s degree in the United States, according to data released by Hanover Research. An online master’s degree cost about half as much. Hanover’s research examined data from 699 predominantly non-profit academic institutions from Peterson’s Distance Learning Database. It found that the 699 institutions offered a total of nearly 9,000 online certificate and degree programs, including 3,839 associate and baccalaureate programs. The average tuition for a bachelor’s program was $43,477, which represents the total average cost to complete a program without respect to financial aid. $21,959 was the average total for a master’s program.

http://campustechnology.com/articles/2014/02/26/average-tuition-for-an-online-bachelors-program-43477.aspx?admgarea=news

by Greg Beato, Reason.com

To truly live up to their potential, MOOCs can’t just exist as a way for colleges and universities to replace the sage on the stage with a sage on the screen, and thus reduce their costs a bit. Instead, they should be used to liberate learning from campuses altogether. They should be used to eliminate multi-year tuitions, four-year degrees, and all the other centuries-old artifacts that higher education’s traditional providers currently rely on to keep their services exclusive and their rates high. The really good news is that MOOCs are just getting started. In the same way that HTML eventually went way beyond the blink tag and user-generated content evolved from bookmark lists to Wikipedia, digital courseware will continue to improve at a remarkably rapid rate.

http://reason.com/archives/2014/02/24/online-higher-education-retool