Online Learning Update

by Elearning!

Best of Elearning! Awards 2014 invites executives who drive learning, talent and HR development initiatives through employee, customer or channel partners, to nominate their solution providers in this year’s Best of Elearning! Awards. Elearning! and Government Elearning! magazines, the industry voices of the enterprise learning and workforce technology market, announced that the Best of Elearning! Awards 2014 voting has hit a record number of nominations. Voting will continue until May 1, 2014. Celebrating its 10th year, The Best of Elearning! Awards recognizes best-in-class solutions across 27 product and services categories.

http://www.prweb.com/releases/2014/03/prweb11704211.htm

By Erin Carson, Tech Republic

By marrying online tech classes with local volunteer mentors, a new program in Louisville, Kentucky is reshaping the way professionals can get retrained for the next tech jobs. Rider Rodriguez Jr. knows it’s a cliche, but he’ll say it anyway: In the 21st century, if you want to thrive, software development is the skillset that you really need to have. As both the job market and the IT industry rapidly shift, making the match between employers and employees with the latest development skills can prove difficult. To start to solve this problem, Rodriguez and members of the local tech community are taking a grassroots educational approach through a program called Code Louisville in Louisville, Kentucky. Code Louisville is a free 12-week course in which students can learn development skills with the aid of volunteer industry mentors, and an online learning system called Treehouse, available through the local library system.

http://www.techrepublic.com/article/new-experiment-in-tech-retraining-blends-online-learning-with-in-person-mentors/

By CHRIS PARR, Times Higher Education

Richard Levin, who was president of Yale University between 1993 and 2013, will become chief executive of Coursera in the middle of next month. “I will say a word about a concern that I’ve heard from a number of partners already…that we could do a better job of communicating with you and listening to you,” Professor Levin told the 2014 Coursera partner conference, attended by delegates from institutions that offer courses on the platform and taking place in London this week. He pledged that steps would be taken to improve the situation. “We want to hear your ideas,” he said, adding that the first priority was to increase the scale of Coursera’s operation, and “attract the revenues to support the mission”.

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/news/new-coursera-chief-pledges-better-communication-with-partners/2012350.article

By Devon Haynie, US News

Academia isn’t known for its rapid embrace of change. Yet when it comes to online learning, the field is constantly evolving. Hardly a day goes by without a university announcing a new online program or a company revealing a new tool to help online learners. Massive Open Online Courses are giving students all over the world access to courses taught by some of the best professors — for free. At some online schools, students can cobble together degrees using credit by exam, testing out of courses at their own pace. To help online students keep up with the latest trends, U.S. News has compiled a glossary of important terms specifically about online education. While this list is not exhaustive, it can help you make sense of new terminology and maybe even find the best online program for you.

http://news.yahoo.com/online-learning-glossary-140136584.html

by Douglas A. Hicks and Patrick D. Reynolds, Huffington Post

MOOC users, at least so far, are readily described as intellectually curious. This early finding about the broad-ranging inquisitiveness of edX students suggests that the residential liberal arts model that our institutions and many other liberal arts colleges have embodied for two centuries has something to contribute to the open online platform: promoting a wide exploration of knowledge and the reciprocal illumination of seemingly disparate disciplines through critical thinking, discourse and writing. For the traditional college-age students on our campuses, the liberal arts approach is preparation not for one career, but for multiple careers; education for meaningful work and a fulfilling life course in an evolving world. We are excited by the prospect of extending this education to the diverse student population engaging with open online platforms.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/douglas-a-hicks/the-liberal-arts-contribu_b_5065593.html

By Jeff Schweers, Gainesville Sun

The University of Florida will pay Pearson Embanet an estimated $186 million over the life of its 11-year contract — a combination of direct payments and a share of tuition revenue — to help launch and manage the state’s first fully online, four-year degree program. How UF evaluates how well Pearson does its job is unknown — the standards by which the contractor is measured are still being withheld from the public, such as minimum enrollment figures and total tuition levels. UF officials maintained that those criteria are “trade secrets” exempt from state public records law.

http://www.gainesville.com/article/20140327/articles/140329618

By Katie Lepi, Edudemic

Classrooms going digital bring both the good and the bad. Smaller mounds of paperwork and easy document storage (no more ‘dog ate my homework!’ or equally ridiculous excuses) fall on the good side of things. The necessity of teaching things like digital citizenship, the plethora of distractions online or the expense of digital devices might fall on the other side of things. But all of this is moot if your students don’t have access to the digital devices you’d like to employ in your classroom. The handy infographic below takes a look at the current state of access, and some examples of different options to improve access.

http://www.edudemic.com/access-digital-learning-devices-infographic/

By Travis Thurston, Edudemic

Do you need to provide access to all course syllabi for accreditation? Do you want to empower department heads, and market courses to potential or current students? Do your instructional designers need a one-stop access point to courses? Look no further than a syllabus tracker dashboard. Kenneth Larsen and the team in the Center for Innovative Design and Instruction (CIDI) at Utah State University created this powerful open educational resource tool (basically a course syllabus dashboard and more) that provides filtered results and visual analytics by harnessing the power of the Canvas API. There are four main reasons why you need to have this tool.

http://www.edudemic.com/course-syllabus-dashboard/

By Dan Kemp, Edudemic

The Book Creator for iPad support team answers questions about sharing ebooks every day. We will often default to suggesting Dropbox when we direct people to using cloud storage, but Dropbox is by no means the only option within the cloud storage world. This article looks at some of the main players in this field, giving you the information to help you make your choice.

http://www.edudemic.com/cloud-storage-options/

By Robert Quigley, PBS

Students at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Utah are currently engaged in a collaborative online class, Social Media Journalism, which combines the convenience of a MOOC with the engagement of a medium-sized lecture — and the completion rate is more than 95 percent. The engagement scales, too: students at both schools, 1,300 miles apart, are taking the class together, interacting with each other, viewing the same lesson modules and building a news aggregation service on various social media platforms. The difference is they get a personal instructor and smaller groups of familiar classmates. Our next step is to add more campuses and make this a new kind of MOOC — a network of schools working together with the same material but with individual instructors.

http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2014/03/turning-a-mooc-into-a-network-of-schools-collaborating/

by JOHN ROSS, the Australian

Massachusetts Institute of Technology chancellor Eric Grimson said it was impossible to prevent governments from capitalising on online courses to cut costs, even to the extent of closing down local universities. He said the “tension” was already apparent in the US, as authorities sought ways to reduce the higher education costs. “There will be pressure to use online tools to help reduce that cost,” he told the HES during a visit to the University of Adelaide last week. “But I’m hoping (cost) won’t be the sole factor. It would be a race to the bottom to figure out who can do it cheapest. It’s also about how you make learning more effective.”

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/higher-education/mooc-tension-hits-us/story-e6frgcjx-1226867952774

by Jennifer Hernandez, Daily Emerald

The University of Oregon has been slower than other universities in expanding its online education market. About 4,000 UO students took an online course between 2012-2013 in about 60 titles, according to Kassia Dellabough a Senior Program Manager from the UO’s Office of Academic Extension. This spring, the University will be launching its first Massive Open Online Course designed to help educators more effectively teach English as a foreign language through its American English Institute. The UO also offers one other fully online degree, a masters in Applied Information Management. According to officials, the university is looking to ensure quality above quantity in the courses it offers online. Associate professor of anthropology Josh Snodgrass is the chair of undergraduate council, a body that reports and reviews on the quality of general education at UO. It is currently developing guidelines for support and oversight of online courses.

http://dailyemerald.com/2014/03/30/academic-leaders-work-to-ensure-quality-in-online-education/

By Paul Beaudoin, Campus Technology

For over a decade, enrollments in online classes have steadily increased. According to a recent Sloan Consortium report, 7.1 million college students are currently enrolled in an online course — and those numbers are expected to rise. To meet the demand, more and more faculty are being asked to teach blended or online courses — even MOOCs. While most institutions have an online preparedness rubric for students, few have such a rubric for faculty who teach online. It doesn’t take long to discover that teaching in the blended or online learning environment is not a direct transfer of the traditional face-to-face class. The challenges of online learning often require a different set of skills that may not come easily to brick-and-mortar instructors. Here are six tried-and-tested strategies for becoming a better online teacher.

http://campustechnology.com/articles/2014/03/26/6-ways-to-be-a-better-online-teacher.aspx

by Sentinel News Services

Florida Memorial University, Lumen Learning, Oakwood University and Wiley College recently announced their collaboration in support of  The Center for Excellence in Distance Learning at Wiley College, with the goal of improving online education at HBCUs through the effective use of open educational resources. The Universities are forging a new path by tapping into the wealth of high quality open education resources (OER) available today. The Center for Excellence in Distance Learning is working with OER services provider Lumen Learning to tailor online courses to the unique needs of HBCUs and the students they serve.

http://www.lasentinel.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=12840:florida-memorial-university-among-select-hbcus-chosen-for-distance-learning-collaboration&catid=81:national&Itemid=171

by Raul Herrera, FIUSM

Florida law is now requiring universities to accredit massively open online courses, which are currently free and not for credit. Their purpose, according to the University, is to provide an “open learning experience” along with what FIU Online Dean Joyce Elam calls “a taste of some of the leading academic programs at FIU.” The University is now weighing options on how to make for-credit MOOCs. “If FIU doesn’t come up with a process to award course credit for learning done through MOOCs or in other ways, someone else will come up with it, and we’ll just be told to implement it,” said Laurie Shrage, a professor of philosophy who proposed a method for MOOCs accreditation to the Faculty Senate. Florida law wants to stimulate the state’s K-12 and higher education system’s interest in MOOCs.

http://fiusm.com/2014/03/23/florida-bill-calls-for-mooc-accreditation-fiu-weighs-options/

by HMH

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has launched Learning with Big Data: The Future of Education, an e-short by Viktor Mayer-Schonberger and Kenneth Cukier, authors of the New York Times bestselling book Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think. The short e-book vividly illustrates the transformative effect big data is having on the learning process and sheds new light on visionary individuals and companies that have marshaled big data to enhance the way we learn. Learning with Big Data highlights key examples of how teachers are using data to measure student progress and optimize lessons to individual learning styles. For example, Stanford computer science professor Andrew Ng can now log every mouse-click his students make and track the patterns by which students watch video lectures — where they pressed pause or rewound. Through this data collection, educators can alter and optimize their course materials or delivery methods according to how their students learn best. Learning with Big Data is available for $2.99 at hmhco.com.

http://online.wsj.com/article/PR-CO-20140324-905854.html

By ALEXANDER H. PATEL, Harvard Crimson

Courses offered under the platform will model the participation-centered discussion central to the case method style used in classrooms in the Business School. “Moreover, HBX will provide a powerful channel for communicating ideas to and engaging with new and wider audiences, complementing the work we do through Harvard Business Publishing,” Business School Dean Nitin Nohria said in a statement. The platform will also bring a new revenue-generating branch to the Business School at a time when it is facing growing constraints in revenue derived from its executive education and publishing programs.

http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2014/3/24/hbs-announces-hbx-launch/

The Tech Trends Most Likely to Transform How Latin Americans Learnby Jorge Camil Starr, Huffington PostNew technologies can play a critical role in dramatically improving education quality in Latin America and in turn help catalyze economic growth. Knowledge democratization is the single most important movement sweeping across the globe. The capacity of the edtech market to make a real impact on society in Latin America is irrefutable and a series of startups are capitalizing on the potential of technology applied to learning. The rise of social media in Latin America has been applied to a wide range of industries and sectors, including improving access to and interest in, quality education.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jorge-camil-starr/the-tech-trends-most-likely-to-transform-how-latin-american-learn_b_4408923.html

by Erica Cervini, the Age

Just because academics may be brilliant in the lecture theatre, doesn’t mean they make great talent in cyberspace. There also seems to be assumptions that lecturers can magically cope with the online learning technology, including iPads, Turnitin (plagiarism detection program) and learning platforms such as Blackboard. Professor Adelman had a team to grapple with the technology side of his MOOC and teaching assistants to monitor the discussion board. Despite the help, the professor hasn’t offered the subject again. Yet in the millions of words written about online learning, there appears to be little attention paid to how academics cope with online subjects.

http://www.theage.com.au/national/education/lessons-in-online-learning-20140321-357ed.html