January 31, 2015
by Avi Singer, Mashable
Smartphones are like security blankets, with 65% of digital natives reporting that they carry their devices from room to room with them. We feel safer knowing we have access at our fingertips to any information or people we need. We don’t need to know it all; our phone does. In a Pew Research social networking study, 72% of adults online reported that they use social media. In fact, use of all social platforms has dramatically increased since 2012. Technology has not only changed how we consume information, it’s also defining how we learn. Companies will need to rethink how their employees are taught new skills in light of the ideals of the changing workforce. Here are a few trends transforming learning in the workplace.
http://mashable.com/2015/01/24/social-trends-affecting-workplace/
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by Patrick Peterson, THE Journal
If you’re the kind of person who gets suspicious when learning becomes fun, just forget about the creators of “Two guys and Some iPads.” The bloggers, teachers, co-founders and enthusiastic showmen Brad Waid and Drew Minock brought their Two Guys Show to the FETC 2015 convention in Orlando, FL Thursday. In a session called “Bring a New Dimension to Learning with Augmented Reality,” the pair of award winning educators demonstrated how flat pages would come to 3D life with the help of an iPad and an augmented reality app. They ended the demonstration by throwing prizes into the audience that would help convert iPads into magical 3D devices.
http://thejournal.com/articles/2015/01/23/augmented-reality–bringing-a-new-dimension-to-learning.aspx
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by Corey Ohlenkamp, Star Press
Are students skipping class? The university knows. Are students having mid-term deficiencies? The university knows. Are students involved in clubs or attending sporting events? The university knows that, too. Each of those things, and many more, are tracked digitally and become sets of data. Because of that, a student’s digital footprint can be the fastest tool in Ball State’s arsenal when it comes to helping students achieve success and, ultimately, a diploma.
http://www.thestarpress.com/story/news/college/2015/01/25/tracking-students-digital-footprint-ball-state/22309715/
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January 30, 2015
By Rhea Kelly, Campus Technology
The New Year is a time for both reflection and resolution. We’ve channeled a little bit of both with our annual look at the hottest tech trends in higher education: In the following virtual roundtable discussion, five IT leaders from around the country share their thoughts on everything from analytics and personalized learning to badges and gamification.
http://campustechnology.com/articles/2015/01/22/9-ed-tech-trends-to-watch-in-2015.aspx
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By Ann Elliott, Edudemic
After testing the app for a month with two classes of students, I can endorse Study Habits as the best student productivity app for iOS. Compared to its competitors, Study Habits provides the richest array of features and augments its planning capabilities with proven study aids. The app enables students to manage their time, monitor their GPAs, and adopt effective study habits. Thanks to its educational-psychology-based learning and motivation strategies, Study Habits is unparalleled in the productivity app market. Read on to find out what Study Habits can do and why no other student planning app compares.
http://www.edudemic.com/study-habits-new-app-helps-students-get-organized-and-motivated/
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By Andrew Barbour, Campus Technology
To protect their networks and serve campus constituents effectively, IT departments need a mobile strategy that encompasses both the devices and the applications they run. While many higher-ed IT shops are still struggling to handle the flood of mobile devices onto campus networks, some industry experts now advise schools to adopt a broader strategy that goes beyond BYOD to encompass the applications they run, too. “We are transitioning from BYOD to bring-your-own-application (BYOA)—it’s really about the application,” said Chris LaPoint, vice president of product management at SolarWinds, a Texas-based company that develops IT management software. “The applications that run on those devices are potentially more important than the fact that these devices are showing up on the network. That’s the landscape of the problem.”
http://www.ecampusnews.com/top-news/colleges-move-byoa-188/
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January 29, 2015
by Karl M. Kapp, ASTD/ATD
Ever wonder how to improve attention within an online lecture and how to improve an online learner’s ability to learn? One method might be to quiz them frequently. Researchers have found that by interspersing online lectures with short tests, student mind-wandering decreased by half, note-taking tripled, and overall retention of the material improved. As the researchers pointed out, without the quizzing conditions, student’s minds wandered while participating in an online course. “In our experiments, when we asked students if they were mind-wandering, they said yes roughly 40 percent of the time. It’s a significant problem.”
https://www.td.org/Publications/Blogs/Science-of-Learning-Blog/2015/01/Study-Reveals-That-Adding-Frequent-Tests-to-Online-Learning-Improves-Retention
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by eSchool News
Amazon is rolling out a new e-textbook publishing service specifically for educators. Called Kindle Direct Publishing EDU, the self-publishing platform lets teachers create texts by marking up existing PDFs, which can be turned into textbooks that can be uploaded to the platform and shared with students on a range of computers and mobile devices, such as iPads and Android tablets. “Kindle Textbook Creator makes it easy for anyone to take any PDF and create a richly featured and widely available eTextbook,” said Chuck Kronbach, Director, Kindle Direct Publishing. “We look forward to seeing how authors use the new tool and getting their feedback to guide us in adding more features to KDP EDU over time.”
http://www.eschoolnews.com/2015/01/23/amazon-kindle-textbook-277/
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by Jill DiSanto, UPenn
For the first time last fall, the University of Pennsylvania invited Quakers from around the globe to participate in an alumni-exclusive version of a massive open online course. From Oct. 6 to Nov. 2, Penn offered a modified, four-week, intensive version of “History of the Slave South” taught by Stephanie McCurry of the history department in Penn Arts & Sciences. McCurry’s course is a popular choice among Penn undergraduates, and the 10-week course offered online through Penn’s Open Learning Initiative has attracted thousands of people of varied backgrounds worldwide. So it was a natural choice for an exclusive version for alumni. Almost 700 alumni ranging from the Class of 1940 to the Class of 2014 and from 15 countries signed up.
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January 28, 2015
by David Miller, Guru Focus
Huge numbers of corporations are making a shift toward e-learning. Why is that? Because the world of learning has changed forever. And why has this happened? Because of online education and learning management systems. With new technologies, like the learning management systems and increased users and internet access, people are making a massive and collective shift towards online education. The field of e-learning has grown exponentially and not just in terms of students who are taking online classes but in terms of educational online tools and interactive teaching methods that are being integrated into all grades and corporate training tools that keep companies up to date!
http://www.gurufocus.com/news/309235/why-are-corporations-making-the-shift-towards-elearning
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by Ava Seave, Forbes
“The number of English learners is going to go from 1 billion now to 2 billion in 2020,” says Bernhard Niesner, CEO & Co-founder of busu.com, the online language learning platform. “There is no doubt that digital language learning will happen to a large extent on mobile devices, especially given the fact that in emerging markets, many countries are pure mobile markets. People don’t have a desktop. Their first device is a mobile phone.” Very few people learn a language just to read a book. And therefore we believe the social part is absolutely crucial for the overall motivation and engagement of the product.”
http://www.forbes.com/sites/avaseave/2015/01/22/teaching-language-quicker-smarter-better-innovation-through-adaptive-learning-testing/
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by Michael E. Goldberg, the Conversation
More than 60 groups in 52 cities have formed to take MOOCs on Meetup, the world’s largest network of local groups. Coursera, the largest provider of MOOCs, has a Learning Hubs Initiative, which establishes physical spaces for students to access their classes. Coursera reports that their Learning Hubs participants show higher completion rates ranging from 30 – 100% vs. the 6.8% Coursera-wide average. Researchers at the Computer-Human Interaction in Learning and Instruction Lab (CHILI), École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Lausanne, Switzerland reported in a June 2014 study that “watching MOOCs in groups provides (a) highly satisfying learning experience as learners feel connected and interactions among them are enabled.” As the BBC’s Sean Coughlin wrote in his April 2014 article about the expansion of MOOC meet-ups around the world, “even virtual students want to have a cup of coffee and a conversation after a lecture.”
http://theconversation.com/moocs-and-meetups-together-make-for-better-learning-35891
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January 27, 2015
By: Amanda Vicinanzo, Homeland Security Today
A shortage of cybersecurity professionals in the public and private sectors has left the US vulnerable to major cyberattacks. In response, Cybrary, the world’s first and only free massive open online course for IT and cybersecurity professionals, announced the availability of free classes to the general public. “We have the firm belief that IT and cybersecurity training should be free,” Ryan Corey, co-founder of Cybrary, told Homeland Security Today. Th Cybrary is designed to provide comprehensive IT and cybersecurity training options for a range of users. With classes ranging from entry level to very advanced, Cybrary has attracted interest from people just breaking into the field as well as seasoned cyber professionals.
http://www.hstoday.us/briefings/industry-news/single-article/cybrarys-free-online-training-reshaping-cybersecurity-education/60d771bafa7b18158b7f059e6ebf0480.html
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by Michael Franco, CNet news.com
“20 years ago, the only planets we knew of were in our own solar system,” says course instructor Dimitar Sasselov. Times have changed, and this course will tell you how. Questions about whether there’s life beyond our own universe has filled millions of pages of speculative fiction, taken up years of time on movie and TV screens, and consumed billions of hours of kids’ and astrophysicists’ daydreams. Now, a new free online course offered by Harvard can arm you with facts you need to learn more about “alien life, how we search for it, and what this teaches us about our place in the universe.”
http://www.cnet.com/uk/news/become-an-alien-hunter-with-free-online-course-from-harvard/
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BY BEKEZELA PHAKATHI, Business Day Live
According to Rob Paddock, GetSmarter chief academic officer, short courses are proving popular among working professionals as the educational needs of modern working professionals have changed. “The existing higher education system worked exceptionally well for the industrial-era economy, at a time when information was scarce, and change happened slowly. After school you went to university to gain access to scarce information, and then you generally worked in one or two jobs for the rest of your life implementing the knowledge you gained at university,” Mr Paddock said. “Now that we have entered the information era that has all changed. The amount of knowledge in the world has doubled in the past 10 years and is doubling every 18 months, according to the American Society of Training and Documentation. The result is that modern working professionals now have to become lifelong learners if they wish to stay relevant and advance their careers.”
http://www.bdlive.co.za/national/education/2015/01/20/online-short-courses-proving-popular-among-professionals-in-sa
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January 26, 2015
by Matthew LeBarr, Forbes
Last year, AT&T and the online educational organization Udacity teamed up to offer a “nano-degree” that directly trains students for a job with AT&T. This move is in line with a new government report that suggests that more cooperation between universities and businesses is the key to economic success in the future. However, Michael Roth, the president of Wesleyan University, is skeptical of nano-degrees. The degrees, he claims, are no substitute for a liberal arts degree. The nano-degree is simply a different kind of beast than a liberal arts degree. Nano-degrees are targeted training for a single job, while liberal arts degrees provide skills for a variety of jobs. Dr. Roth shouldn’t fear for his institution, but neither should he dismiss the nano-degrees as useless. The two can coexist and serve different purposes. Comparing the two is inappropriate and only serves to make both look worse.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ccap/2015/01/19/nano-degrees-as-a-new-model-to-model-to-integrate-into-higher-education/
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by Seb Murray, Business Because
“One of the biggest transformations in education came about as a result of the ubiquity of [the] internet in our lives,” says Sanjay Sarma, director of online learning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Business schools have adopted the online delivery method, with a host of their programs being flipped online and Moocs being launched. Many of these courses are populated in part by educated and employed users seeking part-time study, but providers have sought to expand learning and bring educational to all. The web has enabled underrepresented groups around the world such as women, youth, the disabled and citizens in rural communities to gain quality education.
http://www.businessbecause.com/news/mba-distance-learning/3044/online-learning-revolution-brings-business-to-emerging-economies
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By Christine Kern, Business Solutions
Talent LMS, a cloud-based learning management system, has laid out its top 10 online learning trends for 2015 in an infographic. Among these trends are gamification, Big Data, personalization, m-learning, a focus on ROI, APIs (application programming interfaces), automation, augmented learning, corporate MOOCs (massive open online courses), and cloud learning management solutions. All of these technological trends are significant, because they address the changing demands from learners, who increasingly see online, social, and mobile technology as essential features of the learning experience.
http://www.bsminfo.com/doc/from-gamification-to-moocs-cloud-learning-increasingly-tech-based-0001
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January 25, 2015
BY SCOTT WUERZ, Belleville News Democrat
Local universities and colleges are increasingly embracing the trend of schools offering more Internet-based courses. Students, in many cases, can now go to school from start to finish and never set foot on campus – unless they choose to walk in graduation ceremonies. McKendree University senior Kyle Green, 30, lives in Joliet. He’s never laid eyes upon McKendree’s campus in Lebanon. But he expects to graduate from the school at the end of the spring semester. “It doubled my speed in finishing school,” Green said. “I’m planning to make my first trip to McKendree in May when I graduate.”
http://www.bnd.com/2015/01/17/3614503/it-doubled-my-speed-in-finishing.html
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by Ryan Craig, Venture Beat
Smartphone users’ sessions are currently 3x longer when they’re using apps vs. browsing websites. Apps are also visited much more frequently than websites. Total time spent on apps is currently growing at an annual rate of over 20 percent, and according to comScore, for smartphone users, apps now account for over 50 percent of total time spent with digital media. 18-24-year-olds are the heaviest app users. Apps are purpose-built. So it’s not a stretch to imagine one app for Economics 101 and another for Psychology 110. Apps are ideal for simulations and gamified learning experiences. They’re also perfect for incorporating real-world inputs (such as location of the student) into learning.
http://venturebeat.com/2015/01/17/why-online-learning-needs-to-get-serious-about-apps/
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By Leila Meyer, Campus Technology
Facebook and Twitter may be ubiquitous, but there are many other social media tools out there that can enhance teaching and learning. Here, three educators share their favorites. VoiceThread lets people upload and share images, videos and documents and then have an online conversation about each other’s posts through audio, video or text comments. Alexandra Pickett, director of the Open SUNY Center for Online Teaching Excellence and an adjunct instructor at SUNY Albany, started using VoiceThread in 2006, primarily as an icebreaking activity in her online course. She introduces herself to her students through an informal video of herself at home with her daughter, so her students can get a full picture of who she is, professionally and personally. “One of the things that you want to do initially in an online course is to establish a sense of social presence among the participants in the course and with the students,” said Pickett.
http://campustechnology.com/articles/2015/01/07/6-alternative-social-media-tools-for-teaching-and-learning.aspx
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