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Lisa C. Hurst

Inside the School Silicon Valley Thinks Will Save Education | WIRED - 9 views

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    "AUTHOR: ISSIE LAPOWSKY. ISSIE LAPOWSKY DATE OF PUBLICATION: 05.04.15. 05.04.15 TIME OF PUBLICATION: 7:00 AM. 7:00 AM INSIDE THE SCHOOL SILICON VALLEY THINKS WILL SAVE EDUCATION Click to Open Overlay Gallery Students in the youngest class at the Fort Mason AltSchool help their teacher, Jennifer Aguilar, compile a list of what they know and what they want to know about butterflies. CHRISTIE HEMM KLOK/WIRED SO YOU'RE A parent, thinking about sending your 7-year-old to this rogue startup of a school you heard about from your friend's neighbor's sister. It's prospective parent information day, and you make the trek to San Francisco's South of Market neighborhood. You walk up to the second floor of the school, file into a glass-walled conference room overlooking a classroom, and take a seat alongside dozens of other parents who, like you, feel that public schools-with their endless bubble-filled tests, 38-kid classrooms, and antiquated approach to learning-just aren't cutting it. At the same time, you're thinking: this school is kind of weird. On one side of the glass is a cheery little scene, with two teachers leading two different middle school lessons on opposite ends of the room. But on the other side is something altogether unusual: an airy and open office with vaulted ceilings, sunlight streaming onto low-slung couches, and rows of hoodie-wearing employees typing away on their computers while munching on free snacks from the kitchen. And while you can't quite be sure, you think that might be a robot on wheels roaming about. Then there's the guy who's standing at the front of the conference room, the school's founder. Dressed in the San Francisco standard issue t-shirt and jeans, he's unlike any school administrator you've ever met. But the more he talks about how this school uses technology to enhance and individualize education, the more you start to like what he has to say. And so, if you are truly fed up with the school stat
Shannon Smith

Need resources to assist in creating a 21st century learner training/ professional deve... - 133 views

Thank you! This is great information! James McKee wrote: > Shannon, > > I was recently referred to this video of Michael Wesch who teaches cultural anthropology at Kansas State University. He ...

professional development 21st century learners technology

Thieme Hennis

530 Free Online Courses from Top Universities | Open Culture - 88 views

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    Bookmark our collection of free online Economics courses. And find free econ textbooks in our Free Textbook collection. Bookmark our collection of free online History courses. To start learning 40 foreign languages, please see our extensive collection called Learn Languages for Free. You can download or stream free lessons in French, Spanish, English, German, Mandarin, Italian and more.
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    over 500 free online courses
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    "Get free online courses from the world's leading universities. This collection includes over 530 free courses in the liberal arts and sciences. Download these audio & video courses straight to your computer or mp3 player."
Tracy Tuten

The real economics of massive online courses (essay) | Inside Higher Ed - 2 views

  • Is there a model out there, or an institution/student mix that could effectively utilize MOOCs in such a way as to get around this flaw? It’s hard to tell. Recent articles on Inside Higher Ed have suggested that distance education providers (like the University of Maryland’s University College – UMUC) may opt to certify the MOOCs that come out of these elite schools and bake them into their own online programs. Others suggest that MOOCs could be certified by other schools and embedded in prior learning portfolios.
  • The fatal flaw that I referred to earlier is pretty apparent:  the very notions of "mass, open" and selectivity just don’t lend themselves to a workable model that benefits both institutions and students. Our higher education system needs MOOCs to provide credentials in order for students to find it worthwhile to invest the effort, yet colleges can’t afford to provide MOOC credentials without sacrificing prestige, giving up control of the quality of the students who take their courses and running the risk of eventually diluting the value of their education brand in the eyes of the labor market.
  • In other words, as economists tell us, students themselves are an important input to education. The fact that no school uses a lottery system to determine who gets in means that determining who gets in matters a great deal to these schools, because it helps them control quality and head off the adverse effects of unqualified students either dropping out or performing poorly in career positions. For individual institutions, obtaining high quality inputs works to optimize the school’s objective function, which is maximizing prestige.
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  • We also know that there are plenty of low- to no-cost learning options available to people on a daily basis, from books on nearly every academic topic at the local library and on-the-job experience, to the television programming on the National Geographic, History and Discovery channels. If learning can and does take place everywhere, there has to be a specific reason that people would be willing to spend tens of thousands of dollars and several years of their life to get it from one particular source like a college. There is, of course, and again it’s the credential, because no matter how many years I spend diligently tuned to the History Channel, I’m simply not going to get a job as a high-school history teacher with “television watching” as the core of my resume, even if I both learned and retained far more information than I ever could have in a series of college history classes.
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    On why MOOCs are flawed
Sasha Thackaberry

E-learning on the rise - 28 views

  • ​E-learning is a growing trend at community colleges, according to survey results from the National Association for Community College Entrepreneurship (NACCE) and Hewlett-Packard (HP).
  • E-learning is already used at 47 percent of community colleges and is expected to increase to 55 percent within two years. The survey of 578 community college faculty was conducted by Eric Liguori, an assistant professor at California State University.
  • Eighty-four percent of respondents believe e-learning is a valuable educational tool.
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  • The top five benefits of e-learning identified by respondents are: It increases access through location and time-flexible learning. More resources and information are available to students 24/7. Teachers can use a wide variety of tools and methods for teaching. It is a good supplement to face-to-face curriculum. It can lead to a richer learning experience if integrated correctly, freeing up class time for more engaging activities. This experience is often referred to as “flipping the classroom.”
  • When asked about the barriers to adopting online learning, faculty cited such concerns as doubt about its capability and reliability, acceptance by students and teachers, and lack of resources, such as time and technical support.
  • Twenty-three percent of respondents said the effectiveness of e-learning depends on the resources available, including the format and features of courses. For example, e-learning is best when teachers are adequately trained to use it, there is high-quality content and curriculum design, it’s used in conjunction with real-world situations and there is opportunity for student-teacher interactions, discussion boards and collaborative projects.
  • “Our survey looked at how community college faculty members are using e-learning as a cost-effective means” to increase completion rates and ensure that “students walk away with credentials that are meaningful in the workplace and that they are prepared for the careers they hope to pursue, including, for many, the start of entrepreneurial endeavors,” said NACCE President and CEO Heather Van Sickle.
D. S. Koelling

Font Size May Not Aid Learning, but Its Style Can, Researchers Find - NYTimes.com - 110 views

  • Is it easier to remember a new fact if it appears in normal type, like this, or in big, bold letters, like this?
  • Font size has no effect on memory, even though most people assume that bigger is better. But font style does.
  • New research finds that people retain significantly more material — whether science, history or language — when they study it in a font that is not only unfamiliar but also hard to read.
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  • “So much of the learning that we do now is unsupervised, on our own,” said Robert A. Bjork, a psychologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, “that it’s crucial to be able to monitor that learning accurately; that is, to know how well we know what we know, so that we avoid fooling ourselves.”
  • “Studying something in the presence of an answer, whether it’s conscious or not, influences how you interpret the question,” Dr. Bjork said. “You don’t appreciate all of the other things that would have come to mind if the answer weren’t there. “Let’s say you’re studying capitals and you see that Australia’s is Canberra. O.K., that seems easy enough. But when the exam question appears, you think: ‘Uh oh, was it Sydney? Melbourne? Adelaide?’ ” That’s why some experts are leery of students’ increasing use of online sites like Cramster, Course Hero, Koofers and others that offer summaries, step-by-step problem solving and copies of previous exams. The extra help may provide a valuable supplement to a difficult or crowded course, but it could also leave students with a false sense of mastery. Even course outlines provided by a teacher, a textbook or other outside source can create a false sense of security, some research suggests. In one experiment, researchers found that participants studying a difficult chapter on the industrial uses of microbes remembered more when they were given a poor outline — which they had to rework to match the material — than a more accurate one.
  • a cognitive quality known as fluency, a measure of how easy a piece of information is to process.
  • On real tests, font size made no difference and practice paid off, the study found.
  • And so it goes, researchers say, with most study sessions: difficulty builds mental muscle, while ease often builds only confidence.
  • To test the approach in the classroom, the researchers conducted a large experiment involving 222 students at a public school in Chesterland, Ohio. One group had all its supplementary study materials, in English, history and science courses, reset in an unusual font, like Monotype Corsiva. The others studied as before. After the lessons were completed, the researchers evaluated the classes’ relevant tests and found that those students who’d been squinting at the stranger typefaces did significantly better than the others in all the classes — particularly in physics. “The reason that the unusual fonts are effective is that it causes us to think more deeply about the material,” a co-author of the study, Daniel M. Oppenheimer, a psychologist at Princeton, wrote in an e-mail. “But we are capable of thinking deeply without being subjected to unusual fonts. Think of it this way, you can’t skim material in a hard to read font, so putting text in a hard-to-read font will force you to read more carefully.” Then again, so will raw effort, he and other researchers said. Concentrating harder. Making outlines from scratch. Working through problem sets without glancing at the answers. And studying with classmates who test one another.
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    Students' raw effort improves learning [No surprise there, huh?]
globalwrobel

Digital Natives: Do They Really THINK Differently? - 41 views

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    by Marc Prensky Our children today are being socialized in a way that is vastly different from their parents. The numbers are overwhelming: over 10,000 hours playing videogames, over 200,000 emails and instant messages sent and received; over 10,000 hours talking on digital cell phones; over 20,000 hours watching TV (a high percentage fast speed MTV), over 500,000 commercials seen-all before the kids leave college. And, maybe, at the very most, 5,000 hours of book reading. These are today's ―Digital Native‖ students. 1 In Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants: Part I, I discussed how the differences between our Digital Native students and their Digital Immigrant teachers lie at the root of a great many of today's educational problems. I suggested that Digital Natives' brains are likely physically different as a result of the digital input they received growing up. And I submitted that learning via digital games is one good way to reach Digital Natives in their ―native language.‖ Here I present evidence for why I think this is so. It comes from neurobiology, social psychology, and from studies done on children using games for learning.
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    by Marc Prensky Our children today are being socialized in a way that is vastly different from their parents. The numbers are overwhelming: over 10,000 hours playing videogames, over 200,000 emails and instant messages sent and received; over 10,000 hours talking on digital cell phones; over 20,000 hours watching TV (a high percentage fast speed MTV), over 500,000 commercials seen-all before the kids leave college. And, maybe, at the very most, 5,000 hours of book reading. These are today's ―Digital Native‖ students. 1 In Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants: Part I, I discussed how the differences between our Digital Native students and their Digital Immigrant teachers lie at the root of a great many of today's educational problems. I suggested that Digital Natives' brains are likely physically different as a result of the digital input they received growing up. And I submitted that learning via digital games is one good way to reach Digital Natives in their ―native language.‖ Here I present evidence for why I think this is so. It comes from neurobiology, social psychology, and from studies done on children using games for learning.
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    Hi. I wrote a paper about digital natives as part of an anthropology assignment for a doctoral course. Researchers from around the world have empirically proven that Prensky's theories are false. Additionally, while neuroscience has shown that brains do change as a result of neuroplasticity, to argue that it is generational is also a false claim. Though cognitive theory shows that learners bring their prior experiences to the interpretation of new educational opportunities - impacting attention and interpretation - all generations have had this occur. There is merit to the point that we should take learner's prior experience into consideration when designing instruction; however, Prensky's digital native claims may have done more to create tension between students and teachers than to provide instructional support. If you would like any of the scholarly studies, I have a published reference list at http://brholland.com/reference-list. Beth
Thieme Hennis

Find Online College Courses That Fit Your Life - 1 views

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    "Taking your education to the next level! Online College Courses is dedicated to bringing you the best and latest information about continuing and online education. Go ahead, try our finder!"
Amy Burns

OpenStax CNX - 10 views

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    A collaborative community of education resources. Like MIT courseware.
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    Connexions is: a place to view and share educational material made of small knowledge chunks called modules that can be organized as courses, books, reports, etc. Anyone may view or contribute: authors create and collaborate instructors rapidly build and share custom collections learners find and explore content
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    "Discover learning materials in an Open Space. View and share free educational material in small modules that can be organized as courses, books, reports or other academic assignments. "
Jason Finley

Diigo in Education - 108 views

Marie, my primary use and focus with Diigo is the social networking aspect that you mentioned. There is definitely truth to the statement that "Chance favors the connected mind." I've created a g...

Diigo

Maureen Greenbaum

SNHU: How Paul LeBlanc's tiny school has become a giant of higher education. - 1 views

  • Students are referred to as “customers.”
  • t deploys data analytics for everything from anticipating future demand to figuring out which students are most likely to stumble.
  • “Public institutions will not see increasing state funding and private colleges will not see ever-rising tuition.”
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  • tackle what colleges were doing poorly: graduating students. Half the students who enroll in post-secondary education never get a degree but still accumulate debt
  • school spends millions to employ more than 160 “admissions counselors” who man the phones, especially on weekends, guiding prospective students into the right degree program
  • vast majority are working adults, many with families, whose lives rarely align with an academic timetable.
  • “College is designed in every way for that 20 percent—cost, time, scheduling, everything,” says LeBlanc. He set out to create an institution for the other 80 percent, one that was flexible and offered a seamless online experience
  • low completion rate can be blamed partly on the fact that college is still designed for 18-year-olds who are signing up for an immersive, four-year experience replete with football games and beer-drinking. But those traditional students make up only 20 percent of the post-secondary population.
  • online courses are created centrally and then farmed out to a small army of adjuncts hired for as little as $2,200 a class. Those adjuncts have scant leeway in crafting the learning experience.
  • An instructor’s main job is to swoop in when a student is in trouble. Often, they don’t pick up the warning signs themselves. Instead, SNHU’s predictive analytics platform plays watchdog, sending up a red flag to an instructor when a student hasn’t logged on recently or has spent too much time on an assignment
  • highly standardized courses, and adjuncts who act more like coaches than professors
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    The Amazon of Higher Education- How tiny, struggling Southern New Hampshire University has become a behemoth.
Javier E

The Default Major - Skating Through B-School - NYTimes.com - 41 views

  • Dr. Mason, who teaches economics at the University of North Florida, believes his students are just as intelligent as they’ve always been. But many of them don’t read their textbooks, or do much of anything else that their parents would have called studying. “We used to complain that K-12 schools didn’t hold students to high standards,” he says with a sigh. “And here we are doing the same thing ourselves.”
  • all evidence suggests that student disengagement is at its worst in Dr. Mason’s domain: undergraduate business education.
  • “Business education has come to be defined in the minds of students as a place for developing elite social networks and getting access to corporate recruiters,”
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  • It’s an attitude that Dr. Khurana first saw in M.B.A. programs but has migrated, he says, to the undergraduate level.
  • Second, in management and marketing, no strong consensus has emerged about what students ought to learn or how they ought to learn it.
  • Gains on the C.L.A. closely parallel the amount of time students reported spending on homework. Another explanation is the heavy prevalence of group assignments in business courses: the more time students spent studying in groups, the weaker their gains in the kinds of skills the C.L.A. measures.
  • The pedagogical theory is that managers need to function in groups, so a management education without such experiences would be like medical training without a residency. While some group projects are genuinely challenging, the consensus among students and professors is that they are one of the elements of business that make it easy to skate through college.
  • “We’ve got students who don’t read, and grow up not reading,” he says. “There are too many other things competing for their time. The frequency and quantity of drinking keeps getting higher. We have issues with depression. Getting students alert and motivated — even getting them to class, to be honest with you — it’s a challenge.”
  • “A lot of classes I’ve been exposed to, you just go to class and they do the PowerPoint from the book,” he says. “It just seems kind of pointless to go when (a) you’re probably not going to be paying much attention anyway and (b) it would probably be worth more of your time just to sit with your book and read it.”
  • “It seems like now, every take-home test you get, you can just go and Google. If the question is from a test bank, you can just type the text in, and somebody out there will have it and you can just use that.”
  • This is not senioritis, he says: this is the way all four years have been. In a typical day, “I just play sports, maybe go to the gym. Eat. Probably drink a little bit. Just kind of goof around all day.” He says his grade-point average is 3.3.
  • concrete business skills tend to expire in five years or so as technology and organizations change.
  • History and philosophy, on the other hand, provide the kind of contextual knowledge and reasoning skills that are indispensable for business students.
  • when they hand in papers, they’re marked up twice: once for content by a professor with specialized expertise, and once for writing quality by a business-communication professor.
  • a national survey of 259 business professors who had been teaching for at least 10 years. On average, respondents said they had reduced the math and analytic-thinking requirements in their courses. In exchange, they had increased the number of requirements related to computer skills and group presentations.
  • what about employers? What do they want? According to national surveys, they want to hire 22-year-olds who can write coherently, think creatively and analyze quantitative data, and they’re perfectly happy to hire English or biology majors. Most Ivy League universities and elite liberal arts colleges, in fact, don’t even offer undergraduate business majors.
Julia Gardiner

Lateline - 29/10/2012: PMs plan for every child to learn an Asian language - 14 views

    • Julia Gardiner
       
      The rationale or thinking behind introducing languages early in primary school
  • Gillard Government's Asian Century white paper sets an aspiration for Australia to rank as the world's 10th biggest economy by 2025, capitalising on the rapid economic growth in the region.
  • education will be the key and wants all school students to study an Asian language.
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  • funded
  • where all the new teachers might come from
  • where all the new teachers might come from.
  • the gold standard
    • Julia Gardiner
       
       The gold standard =any excellent example of something, like how Olympians are the gold standard for athletes
  • If you understand through the learning of language how people think, how they construct meaning, what is important to them culturally, then I think that gives us better insights into the people that we're going to be working with in the future and negotiating with.
  • The Prime Minister says she'll force the curriculum changes by tying them to Commonwealth funding to state and private schools.
    • Julia Gardiner
       
      Is this  good policy making? Some would  consider  it 'blackmail'!
  • Broadly, teachers and education experts have welcomed the plan, but question where the money is going to come from.
  • catchcry of the Hawke and Keating governments
    • Julia Gardiner
       
      The Hawke-Keating Government refers to the Federal Government of Australia from 11 March 1983 to 11 March 1996. It was a Labour government
  • Currently across all levels of schooling there's around 18 per cent of our young people who are studying one of the four priority Asian languages: Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, Indonesian and Korean. And that diminishes to fewer than 6 per cent by the time they get to Year 12.
    • Julia Gardiner
       
      How do we encourage students to  continue  learning an Asian language into the final years  of high school and  eyond?
  • say we simply don't have enough Asian language teachers to deliver the Prime Minister's vision and for the last decade the numbers of graduates have been declining.
  • hat's happened because universities have been under these budget constraints and when they've made decisions about what to cut, they cut courses with low enrolments and there goes the languages.
  • JEANNIE REA, PRESIDENT, NATIONAL TERTIARY EDUCATION UNION
    • Julia Gardiner
       
      Suggested reasons for the decline in language graduates and therefore  in language teachers. 
  • will help.JULIA GILLARD: We live in an age of different learning possibilities and choices. What we can do through the National Broadband Network, what we can do through having the world's first online national curriculum, which is what the Australian curriculum is, means we can get a deeper penetration of language, literacy and learning.
  • e Prime Minister acknowledges the shortages, but says technology
  • will help.
    • Julia Gardiner
       
      This argument t can be debated.  It would suggest that technology in itself will be a solution!
  • we need to be looking very carefully at what sort of encouragement and incentives we can provide to students so they continue doing a language, go on and major in a language in university and then go on to teach in the area.
  • JEANNIE REA:
    • Julia Gardiner
       
      What type of incentive scan be offered/
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    The Prime Minister wants all school students to study an Asian language to secure Australia's future in the Asian Century.
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    Completely deluded. Even here in Singapore, surrounded supposedly by chinese speakers the international schools are not getting it right and success stories are unusual ...
anonymous

Anant Agarwal Discusses Free Online Courses Offered by a Harvard/M.I.T. Partnership. - ... - 4 views

  • Granted, there are no papers to grade, and assignments aren’t free-form, but how does one professor handle so many students? We had four teaching assistants, and my initial plan was that they would spend a lot of time on the discussion forum, answering questions. One night in the early days, I was on the forum at 2 a.m. when I saw a student ask a question, and I was typing my answer when I discovered that another student had typed an answer before I could. It was in the right direction, but not quite there, so I thought I could modify it, but then some other student jumped in with the right answer. It was fascinating to see how quickly students were helping each other. All we had to do was go in and say that it was a good answer. I actually instructed the T.A.’s not to answer so quickly, to let students work for an hour or two, and by and large they find the answers.
  • Most students who register for MOOCs don’t complete the course. Of the 154,763 who registered for “Circuits and Electronics,” fewer than half even got as far as looking at the first problem set, and only 7,157 passed the course. What do you make of that?
  • EdX operates under an honor code, with no way to verify that the student who registered is the one doing the work. Is that likely to change? It’s quite possible employers would be happy with an honor certificate. We’re looking at various methods of proctoring. We have talked about people going to centers to take exams. There are also companies that use the cameras inside a laptop or iPad to watch you and everything else that’s happening in the room while you take an exam, and that may be more scalable.
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  • And because we will have all this data on how students actually use our materials, there are opportunities for research on learning. We can watch how many attempts students made before they got an exercise right, and if they got it wrong, what they used to try to find a solution. Did they go to the textbook, go back and watch the video, go to the forum and post a question?
Thieme Hennis

Find Courses ~ MOOC - 39 views

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    list of connectivist online courses and xMOOC providers
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