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Maureen Greenbaum

The Future of College? - The Atlantic - 29 views

  • proprietary online platform developed to apply pedagogical practices that have been studied and vetted by one of the world’s foremost psychologists, a former Harvard dean named Stephen M. Kosslyn, who joined Minerva in 2012.
  • inductive reasoning
  • Minerva class extended no refuge for the timid, nor privilege for the garrulous. Within seconds, every student had to provide an answer, and Bonabeau displayed our choices so that we could be called upon to defend them.
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  • subjecting us to pop quizzes, cold calls, and pedagogical tactics that during an in-the-flesh seminar would have taken precious minutes of class time to arrange.
  • felt decidedly unlike a normal classroom. For one thing, it was exhausting: a continuous period of forced engagement, with no relief in the form of time when my attention could flag
  • One educational psychologist, Ludy Benjamin, likens lectures to Velveeta cheese—something lots of people consume but no one considers either delicious or nourishing.)
  • because I had to answer a quiz question or articulate a position. I was forced, in effect, to learn
  • adically remake one of the most sclerotic sectors of the U.S. economy, one so shielded from the need for improvement that its biggest innovation in the past 30 years has been to double its costs and hire more administrators at higher salaries.
  • past half millennium, the technology of learning has hardly budge
  • fellow edu-nauts
  • Lectures are banned
  • attending class on Apple laptops
  • Lectures, Kosslyn says, are cost-effective but pedagogically unsound. “A great way to teach, but a terrible way to learn.”
  • Minerva boast is that it will strip the university experience down to the aspects that are shown to contribute directly to student learning. Lectures, gone. Tenure, gone. Gothic architecture, football, ivy crawling up the walls—gone, gone, gone.
  • “Your cash cow is the lecture, and the lecture is over,” he told a gathering of deans. “The lecture model ... will be obliterated.”
  • One imagines tumbleweeds rolling through abandoned quads and wrecking balls smashing through the windows of classrooms left empty by students who have plugged into new online platforms.
  • when you have a noncurated academic experience, you effectively don’t get educated.
  • Liberal-arts education is about developing the intellectual capacity of the individual, and learning to be a productive member of society. And you cannot do that without a curriculum.”
  • “The freshman year [as taught at traditional schools] should not exist,” Nelson says, suggesting that MOOCs can teach the basics. “Do your freshman year at home.”) Instead, Minerva’s first-year classes are designed to inculcate what Nelson calls “habits of mind” and “foundational concepts,” which are the basis for all sound systematic thought. In a science class, for example, students should develop a deep understanding of the need for controlled experiments. In a humanities class, they need to learn the classical techniques of rhetoric and develop basic persuasive skills. The curriculum then builds from that foundation.
  • What, he asks, does it mean to be educated?
  • methods will be tested against scientifically determined best practices
  • Subsidies, Nelson says, encourage universities to enroll even students who aren’t likely to thrive, and to raise tuition, since federal money is pegged to costs.
  • We have numerous sound, reproducible experiments that tell us how people learn, and what teachers can do to improve learning.” Some of the studies are ancient, by the standards of scientific research—and yet their lessons are almost wholly ignored.
  • memory of material is enhanced by “deep” cognitive tasks
  • he found the man’s view of education, in a word, faith-based
  • ask a student to explain a concept she has been studying, the very act of articulating it seems to lodge it in her memory. Forcing students to guess the answer to a problem, and to discuss their answers in small groups, seems to make them understand the problem better—even if they guess wrong.
  • e traditional concept of “cognitive styles”—visual versus aural learners, those who learn by doing versus those who learn by studying—is muddled and wrong.
  • pedagogical best practices Kosslyn has identified have been programmed into the Minerva platform so that they are easy for professors to apply. They are not only easy, in fact, but also compulsory, and professors will be trained intensively in how to use the platform.
  • Professors are able to sort students instantly, and by many metrics, for small-group work—
  • a pop quiz at the beginning of a class and (if the students are warned in advance) another one at a random moment later in the class greatly increases the durability of what is learned.
  • he could have alerted colleagues to best practices, but they most likely would have ignored them. “The classroom time is theirs, and it is sacrosanct,
  • Lectures, Kosslyn says, are pedagogically unsound,
  • I couldn’t wait for Minerva’s wrecking ball to demolish the ivory tower.
  • The MOOCs will eventually make lectures obsolete.”
  • Minerva’s model, Nelson says, will flourish in part because it will exploit free online content, rather than trying to compete with it, as traditional universities do.
  • The MOOCs will eventually make lectures obsolete.”
  • certain functions of universities have simply become less relevant as information has become more ubiquitous
  • Minerva challenges the field to return to first principles.
  • MOOCs will continue to get better, until eventually no one will pay Duke or Johns Hopkins for the possibility of a good lecture, when Coursera offers a reliably great one, with hundreds of thousands of five-star ratings, for free.
  • It took deep concentration,” he said. “It’s not some lecture class where you can just click ‘record’ on your tape.”
  • part of the process of education happens not just through good pedagogy but by having students in places where they see the scholars working and plying their trades.”
  • “hydraulic metaphor” of education—the idea that the main task of education is to increase the flow of knowledge into the student—an “old fallacy.”
  • I remembered what I was like as a teenager headed off to college, so ignorant of what college was and what it could be, and so reliant on the college itself to provide what I’d need in order to get a good education.
  • it is designed to convey not just information, as most MOOCs seem to, but whole mental tool kits that help students become morethoughtful citizens.
  • for all the high-minded talk of liberal education— of lighting fires and raising thoughtful citizens—is really just a credential, or an entry point to an old-boys network that gets you your first job and your first lunch with the machers at your alumni club.
  • Its seminar platform will challenge professors to stop thinking they’re using technology just because they lecture with PowerPoint.
  • professors and students increasingly separated geographically, mediated through technology that alters the nature of the student-teacher relationship
  • The idea that college will in two decades look exactly as it does today increasingly sounds like the forlorn, fingers-crossed hope of a higher-education dinosaur that retirement comes before extinction.
Tony Baldasaro

Benefits of Online Learning | Education Guidance | WorldWideLearn.com - 45 views

  • anytime, from anywhere
  • Online learning enables student-centered teaching approaches
  • attendance to class is only evident if the student actually participates in classroom discussion
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  • increases student interaction
  • exposed to knowledge that can't be learned in books
  • Participating online is much less intimidating than "in the classroom.
  • Students can also think longer about what they want to say and add their comments when ready
  • While "brick and mortar" institutions will never be eliminated,
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    "Why do students flock to the online learning environment? With over 4 million students are enrolled in online schools and universities (and that number is growing 30% per year), there are many compelling arguments for attending a cyber classroom (Lewis, 2005). "
eileenanne

ilearnOhio - Your source for online learning - 37 views

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    ilearnOhio is a comprehensive e-learning platform funded by the Ohio General Assembly to ensure that Ohio students have access to high-quality online courses. This statewide platform includes a searchable repository of standards-aligned educational content (courses and digital resources), an e-commerce marketplace, and a learning management system to facilitate the delivery of course content from multiple providers to various end users. ilearnOhio is administered by the Ohio Resource Center, located at the College of Education and Human Ecology at The Ohio State University, under the direction of the Ohio Board of Regents.
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    ilearnOhio is a comprehensive e-learning platform funded by the Ohio General Assembly to ensure that Ohio students have access to high-quality online courses. This statewide platform includes a searchable repository of standards-aligned educational content (courses and digital resources), an e-commerce marketplace, and a learning management system to facilitate the delivery of course content from multiple providers to various end users. ilearnOhio is administered by the Ohio Resource Center, located at the College of Education and Human Ecology at The Ohio State University, under the direction of the Ohio Board of Regents.
Julie Golden

Need your help!! - 25 views

eLearning faculty please consider taking my survey. It is anonymous, so I won't be able to send a proper thank you. Please know that I will pay your kindness forward to another doctoral student in ...

education elearning edtech faculty community collaboration online research

started by Julie Golden on 13 Sep 15 no follow-up yet
Steven Szalaj

The Practical University - NYTimes.com - 24 views

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    Online classes at universities have strengths and limitations - this essay points to a role that higher education can fill beyond what MOOCs offer.  
Randolph Hollingsworth

Digital History Project hub site for historians - 28 views

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    Digital history is an emerging and rapidly changing academic field. The purpose of the Digital History Project is to educate scholars and the public about the state of the discipline by providing access to: interviews with scholars about topics related to digital history; presentations and essays about the field by noted scholars; syllabi and student projects from courses in digital history; reviews of major online projects and of tools which may be of use to digital historians; indices of peer-reviewed scholarship and digital projects; a directory of historians practicing digital history; and a clearinghouse of current events and news items of interest. Partners The site is made available through the generous support of the John and Catherine Angle Fund. It received production assistance from the New Media Center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. This site is maintained by Douglas Seefeldt, Assistant Professor of History & Faculty Fellow, Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, and William G. Thomas, III, John and Catherine Angle Chair in the Humanities and Professor of History, both of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
Maureen Greenbaum

Grade Change: Tracking Online Education in the United States, 2013 | The Sloan Consortium - 34 views

  • 7.1 million of higher education students are taking at least one online course. The 6.1 % growth rate represents over 400,000 additional students taking at least one online course. The percent of academic leaders rating the learning outcomes in online education as the same or superior to those as in face-to-face instruction, grew from 57% in 2003 to 74% in 2013. The number of students taking at least one online course continued to grow at a rate far in excess of overall enrollments, but the rate was the lowest in a decade.
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    Using responses from more than 2,800 colleges and universities, this study is aimed at answering fundamental questions about the nature and extent of online education: Download 45 page pdf
Randolph Hollingsworth

The Personal Is Political on Social Media: Online Civic Expression Patterns and Pathway... - 11 views

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    by Emily C. Weinstein, Harvard University International Journal of Communication 8 (2014), 210-233. Social media have dramatically altered the communication landscape, offering novel contexts for individual expression. But how do youth who are civically engaged off-­line manage opportunities for civic expression on social media? Interviews with 70 U.S.-­based civic youth aged 15 to 25 revealed three main patterns characterizing the relationship between off-­line participation and online expression: blended, bounded, and differentiated. Five sets of empirically derived considerations influencing expression patterns emerged: organizational policies, personal image and privacy, perceived alignment with civic goals, attitudes toward the platform(s), and perceptions of their audience(s). Most civic youth express the civic online, yet a minority highlight tensions that lead them to refrain from sharing in certain or all online context.
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.
  •  
    On why MOOCs are flawed
Tracy Tuten

A guide to online educational resources. - NYTimes.com - 90 views

  • Richard Ludlow started the nonprofit Academic Earth two years ago after M.I.T.'s OpenCourseWare helped him pass linear algebra as a Yale undergraduate. His site offers the courses of 10 elite universities — 130 full courses and more than 3,500 video lectures. Viewers can turn the tables on professors and grade courses. Other guidance includes "Editor's Picks" and "Playlists," lectures selected around a theme like "First Day of Freshman Year" and "You Are What You Eat."
  • Connexions, started at Rice University 10 years ago, debundles education for the D.I.Y. learner. Anyone can write a "module," the term for instructional material that can be a single sentence or 1,000 pages. Connexions hosts more than 16,000 modules that make up almost 1,000 "collections." A collection might be, say, an algebra textbook or statistics course.
  • Daniel Colman is a curator of sorts. He sifts through the vast amount of free courses, movies and books offered online to find what he considers the very best in content and production value. Then he features them on Open Culture, the Web site he founded in 2006. It's a task in keeping with his mission as associate dean and director of Stanford's continuing education program.
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  • At last count, the site had 2,700 audio and video lectures from more than 25 universities; 268 audio books; and 105 e-books. Dr. Colman says he looks for lectures that "take ideas and make them come to life." And so you can learn 37 languages on Open Culture, or stream Jane Austen audio books, Hitchcock films and a John Hopkins biology lecture.
  • Why pay for test prep? M.I.T. OpenCourseWare has culled introductory courses in physics, calculus and biology, along with problem sets and labs, to help students prep for the Advanced Placement exams. (Not to miss an opportunity, there’s a link to the admissions office.)
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    Thousands of pieces of free educational material - videos and podcasts of lectures, syllabuses, entire textbooks - have been posted in the name of the open courseware movement. But how to make sense of it all? Businesses, social entrepreneurs and "edupunks," envisioning a tuition-free world untethered by classrooms, have created Web sites to help navigate the mind-boggling volume of content. Some sites tweak traditional pedagogy; others aggregate, Hulu-style.
  •  
    Amazing online resources for education
Ed Webb

Dawn of the cyberstudent | University challenge | guardian.co.uk - 0 views

  • students often have more experience of using new technologies than many university managers — even if they need guidance in using them effectively
    • Ed Webb
       
      And there's the rub. Students can often read, too, in the basic sense. But our job as higher educators is to get them to really read, to read critically and do something with that reading. So, too, with the affordances of web2.0.
  • the research process is likely to become much more open
    • Ed Webb
       
      We can hope
  • a balance that suits them, which may lead to more varying degrees of face-to-face and online contact,
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  • "If you are in Second Life listening to a lecture, your ability to fly through a bush isn't that relevant,
  • All this will put added pressure on university staff, with increasing demands to respond to students 24/7. Read suggests one answer could be for universities in different parts of the world to share the load so that, as often happens already in industry "the work moves around with the sun".
    • Ed Webb
       
      Interesting concept. Dickinson and other internationally-connected institutions would be in good shape to innovate here.
  • learning culture
  •  
    Guardian on how higher ed will have to adapt. Not sure the revolution is here quite yet.
  •  
    "Cyberstudent" is a hideous term.
Daryl Bambic

University of the People - The world's first tuition-free online university - 160 views

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    Jeff Utech turned me onto this one!
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    Are there not a number of Universities offering free access to all course content and only charging those who actually wish to be assessed?
Tonya Thomas

course-builder - Course Builder - Google Project Hosting - 3 views

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    Course Builder is our experimental first step in the world of online education. It packages the software and technology we used to build our Power Searching with Google online course. We hope you will use it to create your own online courses, whether they're for 10 students or 100,000 students. You might want to create anything from an entire high school or university offering to a short how-to course on your favorite topic.
Martin Burrett

Adolescents do not 'get the gist' when it comes to making risky decisions online - 18 views

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    "Adolescents are more likely than adults to take online risks, regardless of the gamble involved, according to new research by the University of Plymouth. The study, led by Claire White from the School of Psychology, was carried out to explore the psychological mechanisms underpinning why teenagers are more likely to take risks online when compared to young adults."
Dennis OConnor

James Burke - The Day The Universe Changed | Watch Free Documentary Online - 42 views

  • The Day the Universe Changed is a ten-part documentary television series presented by science historian James Burke. The series tells a series of stories of how specific scientific and technological advances have shaped the Western way of life.
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    Links to the full documentary are online at this site. 
webExplorations

Disrupting College - 3 views

  • Using online learning in a new business model focused exclusively on teaching and learning, not research—and focused on highly structured programs targeted at preparation for careers—has meanwhile given several organizations a significant cost advantage and allowed them to grow rapidly.
  • Using online learning in a new business model focused exclusively on teaching and learning, not research—and focused on highly structured programs targeted at preparation for careers—has meanwhile given several organizations a significant cost advantage and allowed them to grow rapidly.
  • Using online learning in a new business model focused exclusively on teaching and learning, not research—and focused on highly structured programs targeted at preparation for careers—has meanwhile given several organizations a significant cost advantage and allowed them to grow rapidly.
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  • Recommendations for existing institutions of higher education also emerge from an understanding of disruptive innovation. These colleges and universities should: Apply the correct business model for the task. These institutions have conflated value propositions and business models, which creates significant, unsustainable overhead costs. Drive the disruptive innovation. Some institutions have this opportunity, but to do so, they need to set up an autonomous business model unencumbered by their existing processes and priorities. They can leverage their existing fixed resources in this autonomous model to give themselves a cost advantage over what to this point have been the low-cost disruptive innovators. Develop a strategy of focus. The historical strategy of trying to be great at everything and mimic institutions such as Harvard is not a viable strategy going forward. Frame online learning as a sustaining innovation. Institutions can use this new technology to disrupt the existing classroom model to extend convenience to many more students as well as provide a better learning experience.
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    An article showing how online learning is a disruptive technology. Shining [the challenges of today's higher ed] through the lens of these theories on innovation will provide some insights into how we can move forward and a language that allows people to come together to frame these challenges in ways that will create a much higher chance of success. This report assumes that everyone is adept at online learning. This is not the case and students will have to be trained on how to be effective online learners. Courses will also have to address multiple learning styles and not just the read/write that most online courses currently are programmed for. Despite this missing piece, this is a very important article that focuses on some very key issues of our current higher ed system. The recommendations at the end of the article for policy makers are very apt. Highly recommended reading!
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    Are high schools preparing students for success in college and careers when what we do is so very different from what they will experience when they leave our little boxes?
Wanda Terral

Download free textbooks online - 44 views

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    Download free textbooks online: Bookboon's free online textbooks for students are focused and to the point. They are all written by highly respected professors from top universities in the world and cover topics such as economics, statistics, IT, engineering and natural science.
Jay Swan

100 Best (Free) Science Documentaries Online - 99 views

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    From site: "No matter how much you know, there is always something new to learn about science. While your college courses may cover the basics, you can get a more in-depth look at a wide variety of topics from Internet resources such as these great documentaries. These selections will help you explore everything from the inner reaches of the human mind to the outer areas of our universe and just about everything else in between. Better yet, they're all free to watch online so you can learn more without spending a dime."
wcnesmith

Open Source University - 2 views

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    Welcome to the Internet's first attempt to provide a sustainable model of education by open sourcing it to the entire world. Open Source University acts as a gateway to connect you with passionate, compassionate, and dynamic teachers around the world who provide free online education because they care about the subjects and people they deal with.
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