"Babson Survey Research Group (BSRG) just released its annual survey of online learning in US higher education (press release here). This year they have moved from use of survey methodology for the online enrollment section to use of IPEDS distance education data. Russ Poulin from WCET and I provided commentary on the two data sources as an appendix to the study."
Coursera is a platform for instruction, discussion and grading at Internet scale. It extends the influence of universities around the world, and it provides them data-driven insights into how to adapt higher education to the global promise of the Internet.
"In this course we'll learn common techniques for visualizing data, as well as some strategies for managing information digitally. But first, a brief history."
Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have the potential to enable free university-level education on an enormous scale. A concern often raised about MOOCs is that although thousands enrol for courses, a very small proportion actually complete the course. The release of information about enrollment and completion rates from MOOCs appears to be ad hoc at the moment - that is, official statistics are not published for every course. This data visualisation draws together information about enrollment numbers and completion rates from across online news stories and blogs.
E-Publishing is here to stay. We're here to provide answers to all your E-Publishing questions. We're using real numbers, real data, and real examples from our experiences. Sit down, settle in, and breathe in the future. WG2E
1-let commuters donate their unused MetroCard balances to charity 2-reroute traffic 3-reduce street violence by crowdsourcing anonymous tips from the community, then filter and organize the data so it is actionable,
Posted on this site are excerpts of original manuscripts, each of which has been annotated by undergraduates who have spent a semester critically evaluating the work and assessing the authors' own perspectives.
Deep research by UGs. By including their interviews with primary investigators, links to background information, and tips for understanding and critically interpreting data, these undergraduates have developed a unique pedagogical tool that should enhance their peers ability to navigate and understand the primary literature. Developing scholars will benefit from their colleagues' insights as they are invited to explore the living history of a scientific inquiry.
a website that catalogs infographics from across the web. Visual.ly has more than 5,000 infographics arranged in twenty-one categories. Some of the infographics are useful displays of information and others, like the one below are just for fun.
A couple of infographic résumé sites, vizualize.me and re.vu, sprouted up that use your LinkedIn data to show your career stats. Just create an account, connect it to LinkedIn, and you get some graphs that show when and where you worked. It's a visual form of your LinkedIn profile with a goal to replace the "old" and "boring" résumé that uses just text.
TimeGlider is a data-driven interactive timeline application built on the (Adobe) Flash platform. You can "grab" the timeline and drag it left and right, and zoom in and out to view centuries at a time or just hours. TimeGlider allows you to create event-spans so that you can see durations and how they overlap. Being web-based, TimeGlider lets you collaborate and share easily.
You can create timelines about the last year of your family, the last century of world events, or about pre-historical (bce/bc) times. Currently, one can zoom out to a scope of millenia: In 2009, we plan to improve the breadth of our zooming capability to include the Big Bang.
For many years the rhetoric and substance of national reports written by bands of technologists eager to see electronic devices work their wonder on children and adults in schools have puzzled me. I am especially puzzled now as I try to make sense of the mountain of data I have collected at Las Montanas, a 1:1 laptop school in northern California (see posts of August 7, 13, and 20). In these national reports issued periodically by U.S. government sponsored agencies (e.g., Office of Technology Assessment, the National Education Technology Plan) or privately-funded groups (e.g., CEO Forum on Education and Technology), I noted two things.
Higher education conferences over the past few years have been
full of presentations, papers and panels on the processes
involved in migrating a campus and its people to Google Apps
for Education. While it is useful to hear about marketing
tchotchkes, data validation, and the pros and cons of web clients,
what seems to get ignored is the process that led to the decision
to move to Google Apps in the first place. At North Carolina
State University, where students were already using Google
Apps, the decision to move employees involved almost as much
time, effort and heartache as the technical migration. As the
users saw it, they had a working system, even if that system only
worked because of huge expenditures of time and money both
on the backend server maintenance and the client need to
implement terribly complex workarounds for simple
functionality. The end result: a 94-page white paper and the
realization that it's hard to sell ice to Eskimos1
, even if you
show them that their ice has already melted. This paper and
presentation will discuss the information gathering and needs
assessment done by NC State prior to the decision to move
employees to Google Apps, and the successes and difficulties
involved.
CloudCourse is a course scheduling system.
Built entirely on App Engine, CloudCourse allows anyone to create and track learning activities. It also offers calendaring, waitlist management and approval features.
CloudCourse is fully integrated with Google Calendar and can be further customized for your organization with the following service provider interfaces (replaceable components):
* Sync service - to sync CloudCourse data with your internal systems
* Room info service - to schedule classes in your locations
* User info service - to look up user profile (employee title, picture, etc)
CloudCourse has been developed in Python, using the Django web application framework and the Closure Javascript library.
"Retrieving legacy files
As the old dropbox knew no separation of files by assignment (one of its major limitations), it was not possible to move these files into assignments during the upgrade, and there is no storage area facility available into which they could have been moved, so they are not directly accessible within the application after an upgrade or in courses restored from earlier versions. The old dropbox code used Perl, which has been completely removed from the web application in release 9, so the dropbox cannot be accessed anymore to retrieve the legacy files. A rudimentary Java-based interface is being provided to enable each user individually to download any legacy files they may wish to retrieve. These files can then be submitted in newly created assignments as desired or stored in one's Virtual Hard Drive inside the Blackboard Content System, if that is licensed by the institution and enabled by the system administrator.
Unfortunately this interface is not exposed via any link in the application. System administrators or helpdesk staff can however make available such a link to their users, either assisting them with file retrieval on an individual basis or by publishing the download link to their users, e.g. in a system announcement.
Community Engagement license holders may also wish to add an HTML portal module with this link, thus simplifying the download process, or add it as external link to the tool panel (in the portal menu column). The location of this interface (relative to your server root) is:
/webapps/blackboard/execute/ddb
It is important to note that this is not a file system location. You actually have to access the URL via a web browser!
Sample HTML for a portal module named something like "Digital Dropbox Download":
Download your digital dropbox files here
When a user accesses this link, he will either see a message that no files were found for him, or a list of courses in w