Online Learning Update

By Tanya Roscorla, Center for Digital Education

Blended learning and competency-based education make a good couple in New Hampshire. A look at 13 schools in New Hampshire reveals ways that blended- and competency-based learning can complement each other. In the second of two reports on New Hampshire schools, the Clayton Christensen Institute highlighted four ways that the combination of in-person and online learning can work together with competency-based learning, which emphasizes student mastery of a concept or skill.

http://www.centerdigitaled.com/news/4-Ways-Blended-Learning-Can-Support-Competency-Based-Education-.html

By John Pulley, Campus Technology

Peering at the world through Google Glass, Robert Hernandez glimpsed the future of journalism. Soon after becoming one of the first people in the world to get Glass (the most recognizable device in the fast-emerging field of wearable technology), the professor of journalism at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism began organizing meetups and “nerding out” with like-minded digital explorers. They were intrigued by the device’s potential to change the creation, delivery and consumption of news. Hernandez’s interactive noodling led to the creation of “Journalism 499: Glass Journalism.” In the fall, he will lead a diverse group of students (Android developers, budding journalists, students in the cinematic arts and other disciplines) in what essentially will be a 15-week hackathon. “We’re not just going to talk about something; we’re going to build something,” he said.

http://campustechnology.com/articles/2014/05/28/exploring-new-frontiers-with-google-glass.aspx

By Ramsey Cox, the Hill

Lawmakers are singing the praises of new online courses that are reducing costs and freeing students from the constraints of the classroom. The increase in online courses has been particularly pronounced at colleges and universities, which are using new technology to attract non-traditional students who need the ability to juggle other responsibilities. “Online coursework provides another flexible alternative to the traditional college classroom setting, something that is particularly beneficial to non-traditional students who have family or career obligations,” said House Education and Workforce Chairman Ron Kline (R-Minn.). “Instead of forcing students to deal with limited enrollment and high tuition, Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs, provide students the opportunity to take the courses they want, when they want — all from the comfort of home.”

http://thehill.com/policy/technology/technology/207785-online-classrooms-resetting-education

by Indiana University

The Indiana University School of Public Health-Bloomington has announced the launch of the “Public Health & You” initiative, a new program aimed at enhancing the knowledge and skills of Indiana’s front-line public health workers. Designed specifically for professionals and practitioners whose work impacts the health of the public, the initiative offers free online courses that were developed in conjunction with the Indiana State Department of Health, IU Health Bloomington Hospital and the Indiana Public Health Association.

http://news.indiana.edu/releases/iu/2014/06/free-courses-launched-by-public-health-school.shtml

by JUSTIN JOHNSEN, Duke Center for Instructional Technology

In several Coursera classes, including two from Duke University, course instructors and staff have attempted to motivate students to interact in the forums through a participation component to the final grade. In every instance I have observed, this choice resulted in a vocal backlash from some students against the idea. The response at times has been so heated that the course staff have completed removed the participation requirement, while in other courses the weight of the participation grade has been reduced. I’d like to present in this post some of the common objections to graded forums presented by MOOC students, as well as some data from forum participation in Duke courses.

http://cit.duke.edu/blog/2014/06/coursera-forums-students-dont-like-graded-discussions/

By Liam Tung, ZDNet

Google will spend north of $1bn to launch a fleet of 180 satellites to blanket unwired parts of earth with internet access, according to the Wall Street Journal. The Google project is said to be being led by Greg Wyler, the founder of satellite startup O3b Networks; Google participated in a $1.2bn funding round in the company back in 2010. O3b derives its name from the term “other 3 billion people” who lack broadband access either due to geography, political instability, or economics. With four satellites currently in orbit and four more set to launch in July, O3b currently provides backhaul to last-mile mobile network providers. According to the report, Google’s satellite plan could cost anywhere between $1bn and $3bn, with the project being led by Wyler with the support of up to 20 people, including O3b’s chief technology officer Brian Holz, who reportedly joined Google this week.

http://www.zdnet.com/google-to-launch-180-satellites-in-1bn-plan-to-cover-the-unwired-7000030095/

by Lawrence Biemiller, Chronicle of Higher Ed

“De-identified” records of more than a million people who took part in the first year of massive open online courses offered by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have been released to researchers, the two institutions said on Friday. The institutions said the records had been “subjected to a careful process of de-identification: removing personally identifiable information, using best practices including aggregation, anonymization via random identifiers, and blurring to reduce individuality of sensitive data fields, among other techniques.”

http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/quickwire-harvard-and-mit-release-scrubbed-mooc-data/52977

by Donald Clark, the Guardian

Students have just one chance to hear a lecture – and mostly it’s just someone reading their notes aloud. I would say that very intelligent academics and researchers leave their brains behind when defending what has become a lazy and damaging pedagogy – the face-to-face lecture. Imagine if a movie were shown only once. Or your local newspaper was read out just once a day in the local square. Or novelists read their books out once to an invited audience. That’s face-to-face lectures for you: it’s that stupid. What’s even worse is that, at many conferences I attend, someone reads out an entire lecture verbatim from their notes. Is there anything more pointless? It’s a throwback to a non-literate age. I can read. In fact, I can read faster than they can speak. The whole thing is an insult to the audience. Here are 10 reasons why face-to-face lectures just don’t work:

http://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/blog/2014/may/15/ten-reasons-we-should-ditch-university-lectures?CMP=twt_gu

by Deutsche Welle

Under the title “Opening frontiers to the future,” an international E-learning conference has been held in the Ugandan capital, Kampala. This technology is already bringing noticeable benefits to Africa. More than 1,000 participants from 68 countries met in Uganda’s capital Kampala to discuss the opportunities and challenges of using electronic media together with information and communication technologies (ICT) – known for short as E-learning. Africa profits immensely from E-learning. That, in a nutshell, was the message from Harold Elletson, a British expert who presented the latest E-learning report at the Kampala conference, for which more than 1,400 specialists in Africa were consulted.

http://www.dw.de/e-learning-speeds-up-progress-in-africa/a-17673432

by Holly Morris, Next Generation Learning Challenges

If you want to approach CBE at your institution, start by engaging faculty in the planning process immediately as Empire State did. Including professors on the Incubator team and bringing their perspective in at the beginning was the first step. Hosting the two-day colloquium was an excellent next step. Empire State effectively started the conversation about CBE in three smart ways that others could follow:

http://nextgenlearning.org/blog/innovators-next-door-empire-state-college-suny-ventures-competency-based-education

By Denny Carter, eCampus News

Bolstering engagement with students could hinge on how colleges and universities use real-time analytics. Insight into how, when, and even why students interact with campus technologies has become a linchpin in maximizing efficiency, saving money, and optimizing the student experience in higher education. Could these insights — analytics — be the key to bolstering student engagement on college campuses too? Campus Quad, creators of a real-time mobile communication platform designed specifically for colleges and universities, has answered this question with a definitive “yes,” and their higher-ed customers, so far, agree.

http://www.ecampusnews.com/top-news/analytics-engagement-637/

By Meris Stansbury, Managing Editor, eSchool News

It’s not just the high cost of textbooks that have libraries scrambling to provide open education (OER) resources. As professors look at alternative options to retain copyright on printed works, and campuses look to expand community partnerships while decreasing budget, going open has never looked so good. According to a new report, “Open Education Resources: The New Paradigm in Academic Libraries,” by Carmen Mitchell and Melanie Chu of California State University San Marcos (CSUSM) [published in the Journal of Library Innovation, Vol. 5, Issue 1, 2014], a combination of factors have converged to make the use of open resources integral to campuses across the country.

http://www.ecampusnews.com/top-news/pros-cons-open-813/

By Jake New, Editor, eCampus News

College students love social media, but can also find it to be a distraction in the classroom. It can be used for recruitment, attracting students to a specific campus through Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Youtube. It can be used for safety, serving as network of warnings and alerts during emergencies. It can be used simply to better communicate with the student body. But for all of social media’s benefits, some professors are still wary of the medium. According to the results of a survey of 8,000 faculty members conducted by Babson Survey Research Group and Pearson, more than half of faculty use social media in a professional context, a ten percent jump from last year’s 45 percent. Slightly more than 70 percent use social media for personal purposes.

http://www.ecampusnews.com/top-news/infographic-impact-social-media-education/

By Robert McGuire, SkilledUp

Dr. Frank Mayadas was one of the pioneers of online learning in his role as founding President of Sloan Consortium, also known Sloan-C. The Sloan Consortium started as a Sloan Foundation project called the Anytime, Anyplace Learning Program, which hoped to leverage the emerging potential of networked computers. That was in 1992, just before the World Wide Web became accessible at home for most people, and the digital education resources that did exist could usually be accessed only at terminals on university campuses. In the years that followed, as early networks gave way to the World Wide Web, Sloan-C led the movement to promote funding, infrastructure and research so American universities could develop online programs that could be accessed remotely. Now over 7,000,000 students each year are taking online classes from institutions of higher ed, largely on the foundations of that infrastructure. For leading this work at Sloan-C, Dr. Mayadas is sometimes referred to as the “father of elearning.”

http://www.skilledup.com/blog/sloan-frank-mayadas-early-history-of-online-ed/

by Bob Moore

Are you concerned about student privacy? CoSN’s new toolkit addresses this crucial issue. It would be hard to argue that the issue of privacy of student data is not the hottest topic in ed-tech today. Unfortunately, there is not nearly enough rational dialogue on the issue. Some treat the issue with hand-wringing or alarmist fear. Some naively don’t understand it is a real issue or assume that schools and online service providers have it taken care of. That’s where the latest CoSN (Consortium for School Networking) toolkit comes in handy. While many organizations are talking about privacy, COSN is the first organization to release a practical guide for how school technology leaders can address FERPA (Family Education Rights & Privacy Act) and COPPA (Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act) related issues.

http://www.k12blueprint.com/content/blog-addressing-privacy-issues-around-student-data

By Kara Guzman, Santa Cruez Sentinel

Most classes have some online component, said Herbie Lee, UCSC’s vice provost for academic affairs. One type is a “flipped class,” in which students watch taped lectures online and attend class for discussion, he said. Online courses don’t cut costs for campus, said Lee, since they require professors to invest time into filming, editing and production. “If you want to do a good job and take advantage of the online format, it requires more investment and it’s expensive,” Lee said.

http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/santacruz/ci_25853591/ucsc-pioneers-virtual-uc-classroom

by Traci Peterson, Phys.org

The participants in Mintz-Binder’s study – 38 students in the online courses and 21 in the on campus courses – took an online survey focused mainly on stress levels and their sense of belonging or feeling connected. Some of the findings she observed already:

• Both groups experienced what Mintz-Binder saw as a satisfactory level of feeling that they belonged to a community or were connected, scoring an average of about 60 on a test with an 80-point scale. Online students scored slightly higher on the measure.
• All but five of the online students made contact with academic coaches who supplement instruction in the online classes. For those students, more contact with the online coach translated into a stronger sense of belonging.
• Both groups indicated similar levels of stress. For the online students, Mintz-Binder observed a stronger relationship between their grade in the course and their stress. Not surprisingly, lower grades were linked to more stress.

http://phys.org/news/2014-05-online-students-stress.html

by Saj-Nicole Joni, Forbes

With billions of people connected to the Internet, massive, inclusive collaborations are now possible for the first time in history. MacArthur fellow and Duolingo chief executive Luis von Ahn is making such collaborations a reality, and in the process he’s uncovering some unexpected lessons about how to solve challenges at that kind of scale. Duolingo is a language-learning and crowdsourced text-translation platform. Its online language classes are designed so that as part of learning a new language, students are invited to translate content and vote on the accuracy of other student translations. The content comes from organizations such as CNN and BuzzFeed, which pay Duolingo to translate articles for their companies’ international sites. This model allows Duolingo to make its language courses free for all students with access to the Internet.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesleadershipforum/2014/05/28/help-yourself-and-help-the-world-an-interview-with-duolingo-ceo-luis-von-ahn/

By Lindsay Tucker, Boston Magazine

Starting this summer, what once was a WGBH studio will become a virtual classroom that may revolutionize the way we think about online education. Dubbed HBX Live, the new Harvard Business School collaboration will use the space in the same manner as a traditional lecture hall—with a professor at the front presiding over a semicircle of 60 screens, each one a stand-in for an off-site student. The initiative will debut as part of the business school’s new online learning platform, HBX, which launches this month. The unique configuration of the room will allow virtual participants to view up to 59 others via an interactive Web page, encouraging communication and virtual hand-raising.

http://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/article/2014/05/28/harvard-hbx-live-online-classroom/

by Jo Cook, Training Journal

Colin Steed, chief executive of the Learning Performance Institute, independently hosts two online conferences a year. Steed says, “I think people will say you can’t be online all day long. Conventional wisdom tells you a whole day of live online learning is too much, so I always resisted doing a whole conference for that reason. But I had second thoughts in 2013 for, through experience, I found that if you are absorbed in learning things that are valuable to you then you can concentrate for that long – providing there are sufficient breaks of a reasonable length. The key is having 30 minute breaks between the sessions. The feedback for the first and second Virtual Learning Show amazed me. People said that they were ‘absorbed for the whole day’ and that showed me that if you pick the right content and speakers who know how to deliver live online learning properly then a whole day online, with breaks, can work.”

https://www.trainingjournal.com/articles/interview/behind-scenes-virtual-learning-show-ld-online-conference

by Katie Ryalen, Digital Journal

In the 2013 report “Grade Change: Tracking Online Education in the United States,” it was reported that the number of students taking online courses in 2012 grew at the slowest rate in a decade. The report, based on a survey conducted by the Babson Survey Research Group, Pearson and the Sloan Consortium, also found school leaders had a slightly more negative perception of MOOCs (massive open online courses) in 2013. The implementation of MOOCs as a widely available option for students has even been called “McDonaldization” by The Chronicle of Higher Education. But is this backlash fair and objective? Ray Schroeder, associate vice chancellor for online learning at the University of Illinois-Springfield, considers such criticism unwarranted. “People don’t realize that MOOCs are changing,” he says, as reported by US News. “If there is an important message to be shared it’s that MOOCs are different today than they were two years ago and they are going to be more advanced. They are going to evolve. There will be kinds of MOOCs that will do that very well.”

http://www.digitaljournal.com/internet/online-education-still-popular-despite-decline-in-growth/article/384905