Educational Technology

By Tyler Kingkade, The Huffington Post

Some Florida lawmakers want to see a new public university opened in the cloud, but education leaders in the state remain skeptical after seeing the results of an independent study of the idea. Florida House Speaker Will Weatherford (R-Wesley Chapel) asked the state’s Board of Governors to look into creating an online-only school as a way to increase access to distance learning, the Miami Herald reports. The Parthenon Group, a consulting firm, then looked at four options for expanding online education in Florida, including adding to existing infrastructure and creating an entirely new institution. The study concluded that creating a whole new online-only institution would cost a minimum of $50 million to start, according to the Tallahassee Democrat.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/20/florida-online-only-university_n_2337970.html

By Instructure

Hybrid Pedagogy, an online journal of teaching and technology, has announced it will host its second MOOC MOOC on the Canvas Network by Instructure, starting January 6, 2013. The course is open to the public and is currently accepting enrollments at MOOC MOOC course page. “Our goal with this second MOOC MOOC is to work even deeper into the ideas behind MOOCs. We’re not yet satisfied that MOOCs are a solution to the current educational crisis, but they may point the way to something very interesting indeed,” said Sean Morris, director of educational outreach at Hybrid Pedagogy. “We’re hosting the course on the Canvas Network because it allows us the flexibility to design the learning experience in a way that is meaningful to us.”

http://www.virtual-strategy.com/2012/12/20/hybrid-pedagogy-online-journal-host-mooc-focused-moocs-canvas-network

by CityTownInfo

Florida college leaders want to expand the state’s online education offerings. As reported by the Sun Sentinel, the goal of such an expansion would be to promote the production of more bachelor’s degrees, particularly in fields that suit the state’s workforce needs. According to StateImpact Florida, the Florida Board of Governors (BOG), which oversees the state university system, hired the Parthenon Group, a consulting firm, to analyze Florida’s current online offerings and come up with recommendations that would help boost the state’s economy. BOG met on Monday to discuss the data and options presented by the firm.

http://www.citytowninfo.com/career-and-education-news/articles/florida-explores-ways-to-expand-online-education-12121901

by Michael B. Horn and Heather Staker, THE Journal

In the year ahead we will see more public schools adopt blended learning, meaning online learning in physical schools. Blended learning is no longer entirely new or untried, and school leaders are hungry for a way to do more with less. Below are 10 predictions for blended learning in 2013.

http://thejournal.com/articles/2012/12/18/10-predictions-for-blended-learning-in-2013.aspx

by Edutopia

The Khan Academy is well known for its online video lectures, which have the potential to free up time for more hands-on learning in the classroom. In their Discovery Lab summer camp, Khan Academy staff experimented with project-based learning activities to build better student engagement.

http://www.edutopia.org/khan-academy-discovery-lab-video

by Center for Digital Education

In a survey of 610 higher education, state and local government, healthcare and business workers, CDW found that 84 percent said tablets make them better multi-taskers. That’s interesting because when tablets first came out, many people said that the devices don’t allow users to multi-task. Other interesting highlights include these stats:

Tablet users say they gain 1.1 hours of productivity each day by using their tablets.

More than half of respondents use their personal tablets for work.

They can’t live without email and Web browsing on their tablets, but are ambivalent about photo and video editing.

http://www.centerdigitaled.com/news/Tablets-Multi-Tasking.html

By Tanya Roscorla, Center for Digital Education

More than 60 campuses and groups expressed interest in open software for academic communities. Now a team from the City University of New York (CUNY) Academic Commons has made it a reality. Universities and other organizations have access at no charge to the Commons in a Box software, which allows them to easily install and manage community sites for faculty, staff, administrators and students. It runs on WordPress and a plug-in for WordPress called BuddyPress. BuddyPress presents a high barrier of entry for many people, especially small university staff. When in-house developers built CUNY Academic Commons in 2009, they had to manually code interactions between the plug-ins.

http://www.centerdigitaled.com/news/Open-Software-Academic-Communities.html

By Tanya Roscorla, Center for Digital Education

Educators across the globe have been experimenting with a new tool designed to create communities around specific topics. Since the launch preview of Google+ Communities on Dec. 6, educators of all stripes started building communities around education technology, technology leadership, Common Core and other subjects. These communities come with public or private settings, feature discussion categories and allow members to set up events and hangouts for the group.

http://www.centerdigitaled.com/news/Google-Plus-Communities.html

By Tanya Roscorla, Center for Digital Education

Massachusetts community colleges are exploring how an MITx course will work for their students. MassBay and Bunker Hill community colleges plan to offer an adapted version of the Introduction to Computer Science and Programming course in spring 2013. This course is part of university offerings on edX, which provides a platform for universities to open courses with no fee to large numbers of students. These massively open online courses, MOOCs for short, have exploded this year as more universities partner with edX, Udacity, Coursera, 2U and other platform providers. “What Harvard and MIT have done in spinning off edX I think is a major step in bringing further democracy to education, not just in America, but in the world,” said John O’Donnell, president of MassBay Community College.

http://www.centerdigitaled.com/news/MITx-Course-Community-College.html

by Katie Lepi, Eduemic

Do you love to pin? Are you addicted to Pinterest? It’s okay if you are. You’re not alone. In fact, there are plenty of professors out there pinning right along with you. They’re using it to share quotes, lectures, notes, research material, get student or peer critiques, and more. What follows below is one of the most useful infographics I’ve seen on Pinterest’s role in education. And I’ve seen a lot. One of my favorite parts is toward the bottom where it lists out how exactly different universities are using Pinterest in the classroom (in the appropriately named ‘In The Classroom’ section).

http://edudemic.com/2012/12/a-straightforward-guide-to-using-pinterest-in-education/

by My American High School

Kids young and old were thrilled with the recent premier of the teaser trailer for Iron Man 3! Scheduled for release in May, 2013, tweens and teens alike are fired up to see what debacle their favorite billionaire genius gets into this time. What better way to spend those long months than developing another genius; their own! Clever middle schoolers across the country are combining their love of everything high tech with their education at an American high school online. My American High School, a K-12 online school, offers an array of engaging and challenging courses for middle school students.

http://www.digitaljournal.com/pr/978124

by Edudemic

The battle over online education is not just heating up. It’s on fire. So how are non-profits battling the for-profit schools currently owning the space? A new infographic sheds some light on the current state of online education, how non-profits are slicing up the pie, and what you should know about online education. Hint: it’s huge and getting more huger. Yes, that’s a term. Editor’s Note: The following infographic is from Online Degrees and is meant to be informative and simply interesting. It’s not from a third-party source and may be biased. Just a heads up.

http://edudemic.com/2012/12/how-non-profits-are-approaching-online-education/

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 Alastair Creelman, Corridor of Uncertainty

Does the advent of heavyweight MOOC consortia mean that participating universities will transfer existing online courses to the MOOC world and keep their core business of traditional campus teaching under their own roof? Instead of seeing all this as some kind of conflict between the the old and the new I think we are seeing the establishment of universal access to education. By making educational resources freely available on the net we can make education accessible to all even if there are major infrastructure problems in many countries. With the help of internet cafes, libraries, learning centres and smart mobiles educational resources can be accessed even by the millions without any hope of owning a computer or mobile. What is now being established is a free basic layer offering universal access to learning resources and organised course models.

http://acreelman.blogspot.com/2012/12/a-new-layered-model-for-education.html

by Edudemic

Education got a lot more mobile in 2012 as in-school iPad initiatives, the iPhone 5 launch and online learning providers in general made classroom experiences more interesting—and don’t expect to see teaching head back to desktop PC’s in 2013. In fact, as MOOCs and hybrid programs continue to evolve, mobile should have an ever more significant role to play. Looking back at some of 2012′s most significant app launches and updates, Education Dive assembled a list of a few of the best apps on iOS and Android devices that we think educators should know about for 2013. Some of these are already out in the wild, and some are still twinkles in their developers’ eyes. All of 23 of them stand to be important, however, in the new year.

http://edudemic.com/2012/12/the-20-apps-to-know-about-in-2013/

By Paul Fain, Inside Higher Ed

“Self-employed professor” could soon be an actual job title, thanks to two companies that are helping a small group of college professors market their own online courses, set prices for them and share the tuition revenue.

In January StraighterLine will launch 15 professor-taught courses. This is new territory for the company, which currently offers 42 low-cost and self-paced online courses. A growing number of colleges have agreed to issue credit for at least some successfully completed courses at StraighterLine, which is not accredited and is ineligible for federal financial aid. Students can also earn credit recommendations from the American Council on Education (ACE).

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/12/14/two-companies-give-faculty-more-control-online-courses

by Abby Abazorius, MIT CSAIL

In an effort to bring a more human dimension to the online-education experience, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Associate Professor Rob Miller has developed a new computer system that will help provide students with feedback on their homework assignments and create more interaction between students, teachers and alumni. Called Caesar, the system was developed by Miller, a principal investigator at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL), and two of his graduate students, Mason Tang and Elena Tatarchenko, to address the challenge of how to facilitate instructor feedback to the hundreds of students taking his introductory computer science course each semester.

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2012/new-online-learning-tool-brings-the-crowd-into-homework-assignments.html

by Dylan Barth, Barth Blog

Starting in September of this year, our team of ninjas-in-training plus Jamie got hacking in Jamie’s lab (which is a [barely] 10 foot square office with old electronics and research papers scattered everywhere, vegan/Python jokes plastered on the walls, and a white board that has never seen an eraser). It’s no lab. It’s a hack zone. And after 10 weeks of solid work by the entire team (and mostly Jamie), the paint is just starting to dry on the first public launch of KA-Lite, a lightweight web app for hosting Khan Academy content from a local server, without the need for an Internet connection. How cool is that? If bringing high quality educational content to the rest of the world is important to you, please read more about KA-Lite and how you can support the project. I also highly recommend reading what Jamie has to say about the project as well as my co-ninja-in-training Matt.

http://dylanbarth.com/kalite/

BY R.F. MACKAY, Stanford News

Professors Eric Roberts, Mehran Sahami and other exceptional teachers in the Department of Computer Science saw an opportunity, not an obstacle, in the large course, and they have turned it into a veritable Stanford institution. Their track record in recent years justifies their enthusiasm and pride. Programming Methodology (CS106A), the biggest class on campus, had some 650 students this quarter. “No other university has anything similar,” said Roberts, the Charles Simonyi Professor in the School of Engineering. It works precisely because of its size, not despite it, he said, and also because of the technological resources the faculty marshal. It is not a massive open online course (MOOC), though it’s practically large enough to qualify as one, but it does incorporate many features found in online courses: video lectures, online problem sets and a robust website containing all course materials. The course and its second part, 106B, are taught every quarter, with undiminished demand.

http://news.stanford.edu/news/2012/december/online-programming-class-121312.html

by NATASHA LOMAS, Tech Crunch

12 UK universities are getting together to form a new company that will offer the online courses — under the brand name of FutureLearn Ltd. The universities are: Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff, East Anglia, Exeter, King’s College London, Lancaster, Leeds, Southampton, St Andrews and Warwick, along with UK distance-learning organization The Open University (OU). Several U.S. universities have already jumped aboard the MOOC mobile, including the likes of Harvard and MIT, and while FutureLearn’s partner universities are not the first UK universities to chase a slice of MOOC pie either — Edinburgh University, for example, joined the Coursera consortium in July — they appear to be the first such large group to set up a dedicated MOOC business located in the UK.

http://techcrunch.com/2012/12/13/12-u-k-universities-forge-moocs-alliance-futurelearn-consortium-will-offer-uni-branded-open-online-courses-starting-next-year/

by K12.com

Market Data Retrieval (MDR) and K12 recently conducted a survey of over 220 educators at all levels to understand the most critical success factors for implementing credit recovery, online courses, and full time programs. This report reveals the four highest rated factors that are critical to a successful implementation of credit recovery, online courses, and full time online schooling.

http://online.educators.k12.com/BenchmarkSurveyReport.html