Online Learning Update

by Christy K. Turner, Edutopia

YouTube videos are a popular way for audiences to quickly search then learn how to use a product or information about a topic. It is a perfect place to store your clips for a flipped classroom. More than a billion internet users access YouTube on a daily basis (Luscombe, 2015). For anyone wanting a cheap effective way to get video information to a targeted audience, YouTube is simplest most cost effective mode of delivery. With flipped classrooms becoming more popular, teachers are wanting to create their own videos as well. The costliest part of videos is the equipment to film and edit them. However, by knowing a few tricks and where to get low cost tools, creative videos can be made on a miniscule budget.

http://www.edutopia.org/discussion/low-budget-high-quality-videos-flipped-classroom

By The San Diego Union-Tribune Editorial Board

The announcement that the University of Southern California will charge a staggering $51,442 for tuition in 2016-17 — bringing it to a rough tie with Vassar as America’s most expensive university — was presented by USC administrators as the inevitable result of their ambitious push to make USC the West Coast equivalent of an Ivy League school. As college costs — and student loan debt — keep ballooning, we wonder if Quick and other tuition-hiking university leaders realize that they are making it more likely that higher education faces the same sort of technology-driven cataclysm that destroyed travel agencies, hollowed out newspapers and buffeted so many industries. Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) — free or inexpensive classes that use YouTube lectures, podcasts, interactive learning and many other tools of the Internet age — are increasingly refined, accessible and attractive.

http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/2016/mar/12/soaring-college-tuition-mooc/

By Doug Lederman, Inside Higher Ed

“Faculty’s days are so jam-packed,” said Carolyn Stoll, senior instructional designer in the Center for Educational Technology and Instructional Support. “It’s hard for them to carve out time for a workshop unless they know it’s going to help them do something they need to do immediately.” So building off a concept Stoll heard about at a previous meeting of the online consortium, she and her colleagues decided to go digital, but with a twist: creating an online training program, but with the flair of an old-fashioned radio show, like those Stoll — who describes herself as a “pop culture nut” — loves to listen to. “We could have just created little videos and put them all on YouTube, but it was really about giving it a fun hook to hang it on and making it fun,” Stoll said of the show, “Design Time.” Keeping in mind the reality that professors are too busy to set aside hours for a training seminar, Stoll and her colleagues sought to keep the episodes short — no more than 30 minutes, including 15 minutes for Q&A.

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/12/21/one-universitys-approach-online-faculty-development-radio-show

By Mattan Griffel, The Times-Picayune

Online learning is revolutionizing the way people build our careers. Comprehensive programming and design courses enable us to hone and develop new skills, make massive career shifts, and earn more money. Seems like a win-win for employees and employers alike. But some hiring managers are still skeptical of online training and fall back on a college degree as the standard for a good hire. That reality is changing, but there’s still a high threshold for proving your worth through e-learning. So how do you persuade potential employers that you’ve done more than watch a few unvetted YouTube videos on how to code an app? Follow these three steps to win them over on both you and the value of your online learning.

http://www.nola.com/careeradvice/2015/12/3_ways_to_use_online_learning.html

by Audrey Penner, Evolllution

Postsecondary education (PSE) is experiencing a perfect storm and I call this confluence of events “21st-Century PSE: Normal 3.0.” This perfect storm includes advanced educational technology (simplistically referred to as Online Learning), declining demographics, a world-is-flat distribution model, an Internet of Things, and globally driven industry demands for highly skilled labor. Normal 3.0 means in-time, on-time delivery of education when the student wants/needs it, and where the student wants/needs it. Normal 3.0 means some aspect of online learning and self-study. Think YouTube versus textbook. Normal 3.0 means using technology to delivery and measure education.

http://evolllution.com/revenue-streams/distance_online_learning/normal-3-0-postsecondary-education-gazing-higher-eds-future/

By Sean Coughlan, BBC

It’s easy to take online learning for granted, whether it’s finding how to do something on YouTube or following a free online course from a university. But Cheril Demasuhid is working as a maid in Hong Kong so that she can send back money to her family in the Philippines. In her spare hours, she goes on to the internet to study subjects such as IT and business.  A course from the Commonwealth Education Trust, on the Coursera online learning platform, is being used in the Dadaab refugee camp, near the border of Kenya and Somalia. It is aimed at providing teacher training lessons for students without any formal teacher education. But the idea of online courses providing a way out isn’t only about geography or poverty. It’s also about people wanting a second chance.

http://www.bbc.com/news/business-33478931

By Mandy Morgan, Deseret News

Jaxson Goeckeritz was just 10 years old when he decided to be a computer programmer. Neither of his parents had much knowledge on the topic, so they enrolled him in a computer programming class at a nearby university, but it was too boring. Turns out, he had already learned all of the course material from YouTube. Jaxson’s parents had also let their son watch videos from The New Boston, teaching him different aspects and techniques in computer programming with everything from Java to iOS development. The Goeckeritz’s are representative of millions of people who don’t just turn to the Internet as a resource for answers to questions, but prefer video streaming sources like YouTube, Vimeo and others to see with their own eyes people sharing their knowledge and skills through demonstrations or just talking.

http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865631523/21st-century-learning-How-online-videos-enhance-education-at-home-and-in-the-classroom.html?pg=all

by Chunfang Zhou, Aparna Purushothaman, iJet

This paper provides a literature review aiming to discuss the need for fostering creativity and digital inclusion among women students in developing contexts by addressing the second order digital divide in online skills. As the literature review indicates, we are in the change towards creative society and creativity is the core competency of students to be mastered in the digital age. The digital technologies also provide conditions of developing creativity, for example, YouTube can be regarded as a creative platform. This paper also discusses the links between creativity, learning and knowledge, digital divide in developing contexts especially the second order digital divide as the main barrier to women students’ learning. This further implies how to teach creativity more effectively in the future.

http://online-journals.org/index.php/i-jet/article/view/4248

By Sandy Fitzgerald, Newsmax

Texas Land Commissioner George P. Bush, the oldest son of likely GOP presidential candidate Jeb Bush, is teaching an online class on the history of his state and how it relates to character. Bush considered by many to be the heir apparent to the Bush political dynasty, will stream the 30-minute lesson Friday on YouTube, reports Politico. The lesson focuses on the how the character of Texas’ first settlers reflects on lessons that apply in today’s world.

http://www.newsmax.com/US/Bush-Class-course-Online/2015/05/28/id/647291/

By Dennis Pierce, Campus Technology

Flipping the classroom isn’t easy, but many instructors have found it to be well worth the effort. Here’s some advice for making flipped learning work. Talbert teaches Calculus I and a full-year course on discrete mathematics for computer science majors. For calculus, he is using a free, open source textbook written by one of his colleagues with flipped learning in mind, and his department has created a YouTube channel with instructional videos that faculty have recorded using simple screencasting software. For his discrete mathematics course, Talbert is finding and curating online videos that students can watch before coming to class. In both courses, students are given a structured, pre-class activity that gets them familiar with the lesson’s basic concepts, so when they arrive in his class, “they’re ready to work at a higher level,” he said. That’s the essence of the flipped class model: Students learn the basics on their own, outside of class, so class time can be devoted to a deeper exploration of the content.

http://campustechnology.com/articles/2015/04/29/5-keys-to-flipped-learning-success.aspx

by Peter Bright, Ars Technica

Microsoft claims this will replace the computer screen – and they may well be right. HoloLens is an engaging and effective augmented reality system. With HoloLens I saw virtual objects—Minecraft castles, Skype windows, even the surface of Mars—presented over, and spatially integrated with, the real world. It looked for every bit like the holographic projection we saw depicted in Star Wars and Total Recall. Except that’s shortchanging Microsoft’s work, because these virtual objects were in fact far more convincing than the washed out, translucent message R2D2 projected, and much better than Sharon Stone’s virtual tennis coach. The images were bright, saturated, and reasonably opaque, giving the virtual objects a real feeling of solidity.

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/01/hands-on-with-hololens-making-the-virtual-real/1/

Check out the video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAKfdeOX3-o

by Jacquie Posey, U Penn

For students in University of Pennsylvania Open Learning courses, the online education provided in the global classroom doesn’t end when the courses do. “Growing Old Around the Globe” from Penn’s School of Nursing is a shining example of the college-level continuing education that can be found in Penn’s free massive open online courses. Students enrolled in the MOOC, first offered in 2013, created a community of learners around the world who are still sharing perspectives on aging and learning about gerontology via the course teaching team’s social media outreach. Archived video lessons are available for public viewing on YouTube.

http://www.upenn.edu/pennnews/news/when-penn-open-learning-class-ends-continuing-education-does-not

by Associated Press

Two Tennessee college educators have submerged in an underwater habitat in a Florida Keys lagoon to teach online classes and attempt to break a record for the longest human underwater habitation. Roane State Community College associate professor Bruce Cantrell, 63, and adjunct professor Jessica Fain, 25, dove 25 feet to Jules Undersea Lodge Friday. While underwater, they are to host a weekly live online program about marine science open to all students via YouTube. In addition, Cantrell is to teach a college credit class online for Roane State students.While underwater, they are to host a weekly live online program about marine science open to all students via YouTube. In addition, Cantrell is to teach a college credit class online for Roane State students.

http://www.wtsp.com/story/news/weird/2014/10/04/professors-teach-underwater-habitat-key-largo/16710533/

By Meris Stansbury, eCampus News

To use or not to use faculty and admin created video in online learning has been a hot topic of debate in higher education, for many reasons. However, thanks to new research on video’s efficacy, best practices compiled over the last five years, and abundant technology resources, successfully creating and using video for online learning has never been easier to execute. According to a new report about instructor-generated video on student satisfaction in online classes, recently published in the MERLOT Journal of Online Learning and Teaching, instructor-generated video (when created through YouTube) can have a positive and moderate influence on student satisfaction with, and engagement in, online courses.

http://www.ecampusnews.com/top-news/video-online-learning-991/

by Peter High, Forbes

Juho Kim is a Ph.D. candidate in the User Interface Design Group at MIT CSAIL. He designs interactive technologies for online education, with a focus on leveraging collective learner activities to enhance the video learning experience. His research introduces learnersourcing, a set of methods and tools that collect, process, and visualize large-scale learner activities. He is interested in applying established learning theories beyond small, in-person classrooms. As a result of these findings, he has been working with a team at MIT to develop a better learning platform. The result is LectureScape, which has the ambition of becoming the “YouTube for MOOCs.” I caught up with Kim to ask him about the vision for LectureScape, the needs it hopes to address, and how he anticipates it will grow.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/peterhigh/2014/08/11/mit-team-turns-6-9-million-clicks-into-insights-to-improve-online-education/

by Stephen Ibaraki, Canadian IT Managers Blog

What are some controversies in your field and why?

“….Deep learning is very exciting and one of the confusions in the discipline is that the term ‘deep learning’ encompasses really two ideas. The first idea is called Supervised Learning in which if you have a lot of labeled data, these algorithms are fantastic at soaking up the labels to make accurate predictions….But there’s a second, not really unrelated body of ideas that also goes by the term deep learning that is very different, which is: ‘can you get a piece of software to watch YouTube or read text on the internet or listen to audio for hours on end and without you telling it anything or tagging or labeling any data and have it figure it out for itself?’….I think the second unsupervised learning, learning from unlabeled or untagged data is maybe most human-like. I think most humans learn primarily from unlabeled data and I think that this unsupervised learning idea has tremendous potential for letting us make a lot of progress in machine perception….”

http://blogs.technet.com/b/cdnitmanagers/archive/2014/06/16/chat-with-andrew-ng-co-founder-coursera-director-stanford-artificial-intelligence-lab-world-renowned-top-ranking-distinguished-researcher-innovator-and-entrepreneur.aspx

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 Mackenzie Hurlbert, Skilled-up

As a longtime expert in e-learning, Curtis Bonk, Professor of Instructional Systems Technology at Indiana University, has a reputation as a trend spotter and thoughtful analyst of online learning. He’s also an experienced teacher in this format himself, and his series of 27 YouTube videos on how to teach online was for many years the go-to resource for teachers new to this environment. Bonk is the author of several books about online education, including a new one titled Adding Some Tec-Variety: 100+ Activities for Motivating and Retaining Learners Online, which is available to download free as a PDF or to purchase in hard copy from Amazon.

http://www.skilledup.com/blog/online-learning-trends-curtis-bonk/

by Open Culture

In recent months, we’ve enhanced what’s now a list of 875 Free Online Courses from top universities. Here’s the lowdown: Our big list of free courses lets you download audio & video lectures from schools like Stanford, Yale, MIT, Oxford, Harvard and UC Berkeley. Generally, the courses can be accessed via YouTube, iTunes or university web sites.

http://www.openculture.com/2014/03/a-big-list-of-875-free-courses-from-top-universities-27000-hours-of-audiovideo-lectures.html

By Dian Schaffhauser, Campus Technology

The ruling this week by a federal court on the Open Internet (Net Neutrality) Order may turn out to be, as one commenter called it, “a terrible idea,” or, as another observer put it, a source of “a lot of overheated rhetoric.” Education, for its part, could well see major changes to how it’s able to deliver learning content to students online while at the same time positioning itself to become a major alternative supplier of broadband in this country. Net neutrality is the idea that all data on the Internet should be treated equally, no matter who’s providing it, where it’s coming from, what it consists of, what devices it touches, or who it’s going to. A YouTube video from Khan Academy, for example, should receive the same treatment by an Internet service provider (ISP) as a movie from Netflix or a commercial from Procter & Gamble.

http://campustechnology.com/Articles/2014/01/16/Will-Net-Neutrality-Ruling-Doom-Education-to-Second-Class-Status.aspx

By Kim Da-ye, Korean Times

Long before lectures went online in American colleges, e-learning became popular in Korea, replacing costly private tuition. The Chalk Academy, founded by Yeo Soo-a, a 27-year-old physics student at KAIST, currently offers 159 mini lectures to nearly 4,500 student. It is modeled after the Kahn Academy, a website set up by Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate Salman Kahn who rose to fame for his short tutorials published on YouTube. “I wondered why the intellectuals in Korea including professors haven’t started a MOOC. I thought if college students started the trend, intellectuals would join the movement,” said Yeo in an interview with The Korea Times.

http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/people/2013/12/178_148883.html