Online Learning Update

BY JUDITH BOWMAN, Oxford University Press Blog

We can create the human touch by establishing an online presence – a sense of really being there and being together for the course. To be perceived as real in the online classroom we need to project ourselves socially and emotionally, and find ways to let our individual personality shine through whatever communications media we’re using. We can look to our own face-to-face teaching style for ways to humanize an online course. What do we do in a face-to-face classroom to make ourselves more approachable? We talk with students as they arrive for class, spice up lectures with touches of humor and relevant personal stories, treat discussions as conversations, and sometimes depart from what we planned so we can follow more promising asides.

http://blog.oup.com/2014/10/music-education-online-in-person/

By Denny Carter, eCampus News

Thanks to MIT, modularization could soon be an oft-repeated phrase in online education. Members of the MIT task force, who were asked to examine ways a college education could become more accessible, more affordable, and more effective, pointed to the concept of “modularization” as a key to improving the traditional web-based class model and the nontraditional massive open online course (MOOC). The task force suggested breaking courses into modules — or learning units meant to be studied in sequence but separately. This approach would mimic a person’s ability to purchase bits and pieces of an artist’s music from Apple iTunes, they said.

http://www.ecampusnews.com/top-news/online-courses-itunes/

By Scott Kirsner, Boston Globe

While schools like Harvard, MIT, and Stanford have attracted lots of attention for putting courses online, SNHU has already reached and passed two tipping points. It serves far more students over the Internet (about 35,000 this year) than it does on its campus along the Merrimack River (3,800), and generates more revenues online that it does from running a “traditional” college. Many other schools, such as Berklee College of Music, are just getting started; Berklee will offer its first online bachelor’s degrees this fall. LeBlanc uses the word “disruption” often, but he doesn’t see the demise of the traditional college experience that follows high school. That’s an immersive learning experience and rite of passage for many teens entering adulthood. But adults in the workforce who see the benefit in getting a degree — or earning an advanced degree — represent a huge opportunity.

http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2014/05/03/southern-new-hampshire-university-leading-edge-online-education/ZMnPm22ePz98Adks5Y6ogM/story.html

by the Davis Clipper

Learning from the faculty and students at Juilliard may have seemed an impossibility to most, but courses designed by the school are now being offered to Utah students at no cost, through Utah Connections Academy. Connections Academy, the parent company of UCA, is partnering with Juilliard eLearning to offer music courses for students from kindergarten through 12th grade, whether or not they are enrolled in the academy, according to a press release from UCA.

http://www.davisclipper.com/view/full_story/24164375/article-Online-course-offers-Juilliard-expertise?instance=home_news_1st_left

by George Leef, Forbes

Technological change has made online coursework very competitive with the traditional means of teaching. Will it lead to dramatic change in college, or have only a minor impact? Consider the analogy to music. From the dawn of time until the early 20th century, when people wanted to hear music, they either had to play it themselves or go to a performance where someone else played. All music was live. Then the technology for recording and reproducing music developed. Primitive at first, the technology rapidly improved (remember that old commercial, “Is it live, or is it Memorex?”) and today humans spend far more time listening to recorded music than to live performances. Live music hasn’t disappeared and performances can be more exciting or moving than even the greatest recordings, but recordings give us fantastic variety, high quality, and complete freedom of choice at low cost.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/georgeleef/2013/10/29/will-online-education-render-traditional-college-obsolete/

By Kevin Maney, Newsweek

The growing U.S. income gap has little to do with policy or politics and everything to do with technology. A few decades ago, before the Internet, it was hard to get an out-of-town daily paper, so you read the local one. It was the best you could get. But once the best news organizations became available online, readers and advertisers gravitated to them. While journalists can only dream of getting paid on a par with NBA players, the Internet is dividing that business just as neatly: The leading publications get most of the money and the rest next to nothing.Curious.com (or something like it) will do the same to music teachers. Online courses will do it to colleges. Radio, MTV, all the other networks and iTunes have in turn done it to pop musicians. More and better networks mean fewer dogs and a whole lot of tails.

http://mag.newsweek.com/2013/10/04/the-internet-is-killing-the-middle-class.html

By Matt Rocheleau, Boston Globe

“This is all about expanding access,” said Debbie Cavalier, vice president of online learning and continuing education for Berklee Online. “This is a way to provide access to people across the world who want to learn from Berklee faculty, but aren’t able to study here on our campus in Boston.” Online tuition will be $16,500 per year, and while this is a steep price tag, that is small potatoes compared to the normal on campus cost of $36,514 in annual tuition.

http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2013/10/02/berklee-college-music-offer-degrees-online-half-cost-campus-study/fzs3paziqgxTHmqSE0h13I/story.html

by THEODORE R. JOHNSON, the Atlantic

About two years ago, my classmates and I gathered in Harvard Yard to receive our graduate degrees alongside more than 7,000 of the university’s newest alumni. As the procession made its way to our designated seating area, an onlooker eyed our banner with a puzzled look and asked the guy in front of me, “What in the world is the Extension School?” My classmate’s reply: “It’s the back door into Harvard.” Ouch. I often felt the same way – that I’d snuck into one of the world’s premier institutions for higher learning. There is little chance that my slightly-above-average undergraduate GPA and an extra-curricular résumé that only consisted of a part-time job at a music store would’ve secured a spot for me in one of Harvard’s ultra-competitive graduate schools. Yet, with no admission letter in hand and exactly zero hours spent preparing for graduate admissions tests, I became a Harvard student.

http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/09/did-i-really-go-to-harvard-if-i-got-my-degree-taking-online-classes/279644/

BY:SEAN GALLAGHER AND GEOFFREY GARRETT, the Australian

Perhaps the best way to understand this massive open online course revolution is to think of MOOC platforms as the iTunes of higher education. Apple’s iTunes didn’t change the way music was made; it leveraged iPod technology and revolutionised how people consumed music. MP3 files are lower quality than high-fidelity stereo, but they are so much more convenient. And live music continues to thrive. Just ask the Rolling Stones. Similarly, we do not expect MOOCs to make the campus experience any less desirable. In fact, MOOCs may even encourage students to experience campus life and to pay more for the privilege

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/higher-education/opinion/moocs-the-itunes-of-academe/story-e6frgcko-1226688285382

by Phys.org

For the faculty members of a new free online course, creativity and innovation aren’t just the purview of artists, musicians or designers. Instead, they say, it’s about the process. It’s a unique and trend-bucking view of creativity, and it’s unusual for an engineering topic,” explained Kathryn Jablokow, associate professor of mechanical engineering and engineering design at Penn State Great Valley and one of the course’s three instructors. “But at its core, it’s about delivery of process, not just content.”

http://phys.org/news/2013-07-creativity-taught-free-online.html

by Jim Randle, Voice of America

U.S. colleges face a “perfect storm” of problems as tuition costs soar, opportunities for graduates sag, and employers complain they cannot find enough workers with key technical skills. One solution may be found in the growing number and quality of online classes. The digital revolution might transform universities the way the Internet has already changed music, publishing, journalism, retail, and other businesses. “This is pretty amazing,” said the University of Virginia’s David Evans, teaching an online introduction to Computer Science. Online classes are now taught by many top universities and offer everything from computer programing to the science of cooking. Many classes are either free or inexpensive, and are updated more quickly than regular college curricula.

http://www.voanews.com/content/online-classes-may-force-changes-at-universities/1671400.html

By TheStreet Staff, MSB

Expect the $475 billion market for higher ed to be cut in half by the rise of no-cost online college courses. What’s remarkable about learning intricate and complex topics, such as MapReduce and SQLite, with nothing more than a PC is not that automated grading tools work. Or that online social schooling really does substitute for much of what a traditional teacher does. Or that the same gut-wrenching collapse felt by giants including Warner Music Group, the New York Stock Exchange or Hewlett-Packard(HPQ -3.33%) await the giants of higher education. What’s stunning is how ordered, well understood and — let’s be honest — mundane the process of digital devaluation will be. Absolutely positively free online higher education is on the by-now classic explosive Web trajectory of dazzling growth. Geez, Coursera has meetups in 1,646 cities; content from 62 universities, including Yale, and investors such as Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Heck, its teachers will have bigger followings than rock stars.

http://money.msn.com/technology-investment/post.aspx?post=89a8e6d5-0a50-4b71-8c5a-e14df0791ddb

By Rik Myslewski, the Register

Ethernet inventor Robert Metcalfe was asked what surprises were on the horizon due to the ever more pervasive advance of the internet. “The most exciting surprise, I think, is going to be MOOCs,” said Metcalfe on Wednesday, referring to online education – Massively Open Online Courses. “Education is about to be disrupted, like iTunes did to music.” Some educators have called MOOCs a bad idea, raising the objection that online education destroys the one-to-one relationships between teachers and students. Metcalfe disagrees. “Here’s how I handle those [objections],” he said. “It goes back to the invention of another ‘bad idea’ – the BOOC, which is spelled today B, O, O, K. It was obviously a very bad idea, because before BOOCs, we would sit around the campfire and we would hear the story directly from the storyteller, but now we have these damn BOOC things. “You’ve read The Great Gatsby but you’ve never met F. Scott Fitzgerald,” he said. “That’s a problem – so the BOOC is really a bad idea.”

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/05/22/metcalfe_on_moocs/

Bruce Judson, Business Insider

The next phase of digital disruption is now here, and I suspect higher education officials are, with few exceptions, not ready. As I look at what is happening, I suspect there is one thing I bring to analyzing this landscape that the majority of higher education officials do not: The perspective of someone who has intimately lived the digital disruption of two separate industries, magazines and book publishing. In addition, I have been studying the patterns of how digital disruption happens since my initial involvement in Web innovations over 15 years ago. From this viewpoint, I strongly suggest that higher education officials must develop an immediate sense of urgency. Here’s why: First, there is a clear pattern to the digital disruption of industries: Change happens slowly and then quickly. Our society has been here before. The pain in the retail, music, newspaper, magazine and book industries is ongoing. And our nation is far poorer for the many former employees of these industries who have never regained their former ability to provide for their families or contribute to our nation’s prosperity.

http://www.businessinsider.com/imminent-chaos-2013-5

By Carole Bass, Yale Alumni

Early to the online-education party with the free video lectures known as Open Yale Courses, Yale has sat out the more recent phenomenon called MOOCs, or Massive Open Online Courses. Until now. Starting in January, four of the university’s most popular lecture courses will be offered on the web via Coursera, Yale announced last week. Like Open Yale Courses, the MOOCs will be free and not for credit. Yale also appointed music professor Craig Wright to the new, part-time position of academic director of online education, where he’s charged with “creating a ‘community of practice’ for faculty interested in experimenting with online teaching methods,” Provost Ben Polak says in a press release. Wright will also chair a new standing committee, comprising faculty from the professional schools as well as Arts and Sciences, that will advise Polak on online education.

http://www.yalealumnimagazine.com/blog_posts/1464

by Katherine Landergan, Boston.com

One year after Harvard University and MIT launched edX, a $60 million initiative in which colleges offer online classes at no charge, the not-for-profit company announced today that it is doubling the number of participating universities, including the Berklee College of Music and Boston University.  edX said in a statement that 15 higher education institutions are joining the initiative, bringing the total number of schools to 27. Based in Cambridge, edX has more than 900,000 people using its platform.

http://www.boston.com/yourcampus/news/boston_university/2013/05/edx_adds_berklee_boston_university_and_a_dozen_more_to_online_class_initiative.html

by Jamie Beckett, Stanford Engineering

“MOOCs could be to higher education what Napster was to the music industry,” said Girod, referring to the music-sharing system that created a seismic shift in how music is purchased and consumed. ”Online technologies have repeatedly enabled an unbundling, which disrupted the respective industries and their traditional business models. Mitchell Stevens, an Associate Professor of Education at Stanford, said the move to online education is driven not by technology but by factors like contracting state budgets, which put pressure on many colleges to reduce costs at the same time they are facing growing scrutiny around performance. “The digital revolution is a match igniting a large terrain of dry ground,’’ he said. One implication of digital educational delivery mechanisms, he said, is that they provide college educators the ability to measure and improve performance.

http://engineering.stanford.edu/news/online-learning-will-technology-transform-higher-education

by Julie McWilliams, UPenn News

As students at the University of Pennsylvania, they exercised their love of learning, and now, as Penn alumni, thanks to online courses, they can add to their knowledge base or explore subject matter they either couldn’t or didn’t when on campus. Penn partnered with an open-learning platform last year to offer free, non-credit online courses to anyone with a computer and an interest in learning about subjects such as calculus, world music and bioethics.

http://www.upenn.edu/pennnews/news/online-courses-enable-penn-alumni-continue-learning

by the Next Big What

While looking at a recently published report on trends in eCommerce by Cisco triggered a valuable question, can digital education ever be as big as eCommerce? Global eCommerce is growing at 13.5% CAGR. It is estimated to reach $1.34T by 2015. While e-commerce spending may be growing, the pace at which commerce is moving online is less rapid than music and advertising. A 2011 study by Sloan Consortium found that 6 million students in the US are taking at least one online course, nearly one third of all those enrolled in higher education. In fact, enrollments in online courses are outpacing those of higher education as whole; with 10% increase in online students between 2010 and 2011 compared to a just 2% rise overall. With this backdrop of trends and Professor Christenson’s prediction, the estimated size of 2022 global online/digital education market will stand at a $4.38 Trillion (50% of $ 4.45T growing at moderate 7% CAGR) based on market prediction by GSV Advisors.

http://www.nextbigwhat.com/digital-education-is-the-new-ecommerce-297/

by the Next Web

While it seems like some brick-and-mortar institutions (such as the aforementioned Stanford) are listening to the way that technology is shifting the way we both teach and learn, there are far more that aren’t moving into the e-learning realm efficiently and effectively. And if that trend continues, then there will be far fewer brick-and-mortar institutions out there in the future – and that’s not necessarily the best news for education either. Educational instituions need only look at the music, print, and film industry to know that if they don’t move to keep pace with what technology will allow, then technology – and ultimately, society – will them behind.

http://thenextweb.com/insider/2012/12/15/an-education-in-e-learning/

BY JANE DARBY MENTON AND JULIA ZORTHIAN, Yale Daily

In a report released Tuesday, the ad hoc Yale College Committee on Online Education recommended the University offer online for-credit courses to undergraduates and the public during the academic year. The final report issued to Yale College Dean Mary Miller details the committee’s findings and recommendations for the University’s development of an online education program. The committee, led by psychology professor Paul Bloom and music professor Craig Wright, convened in September to assess and consider ways to expand Yale’s online educational presence so that non-Yale students can benefit from Yale resources and teaching. The recommendations from this report will be discussed at Thursday’s Yale College faculty meeting. “Yale has this mission — the creation, preservation and dissemination of knowledge. This is dissemination,” Bloom said. “We’re extremely excited for the use of digital initiatives to disseminate knowledge and we plan to move forward building upon the strengths we’ve already established.”

http://yaledailynews.com/blog/2012/12/05/committee-proposes-online-courses/