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Victorious Kidss Educares Pune

Develop the seed of Humanity inside your children - Victorious Kidss Educares - 0 views

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    When you make your eyes big and point finger at them, you are showing that you don't believe in the divinity in them. As parents we are always wagging our finger at our children, with a critical eye and are saying do this and do not do that. See more @ http://www.victoriouskidsseducares.org/blogs/develop-the-seed-of-humanity-inside-your-children/
Xavier Moya

Assajos sobre educació oberta I - P2P Foundation - 0 views

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    1 Paul S. Adler and Charles Heckscher: Towards Collaborative Community 2 Ernesto Arias (et al.) on Transcending the Individual Human Mind through Collaborative Design 3 Adam Arvidsson on the Crisis of Value and the Ethical Economy 4 Yaneer Bar-Yam on Complexity, Hierarchy, and Networks 5 Richard Barbrook on the 'High-tech Gift Economy' 6 Yochai Benkler on Peer Production 7 James Boyle, on the Public Domain and the Second Enclosure movement 8 Vasilis Kostakis: At the Turning Point of the Current Techno-Economic Paradigm 9 George Caffentzis: On the Antagonistic Usage of the Commons Concept 10 Kevin Carson, on expanding peer production to the physical domain 11 Predrag Cicovacki, on the metaphysics of co-evolution and transdisciplinary methodology 12 Julia Cohen, on copyright law and sharing 13 Mark Cooper on a Policy for Collaborative Production 14 Mariarosa Dalla Costa on the Commons of Land and Food 15 Massimo De Angelis on The Production of the Commons and the Explosion of the Middle Class. 16 Massimo De Angelis on a political strategy to unite commons and political/social movements 17 Paul de Armond, on netwar in political protest 18 Erik Douglas, on peer governance and democracy 19 Stephen Downes on Free Learning and P2P epistemology 20 Nick Dyer-Witheford on the Circulation of the Common 21 Jo Freeman, on the dark side of Peer Governance 22 Brett Frischmann, an economic theory for the Commons 23 Richard Heinberg on The Decentralized Provisioning of the Basic Necessities as the Fight of the Century 24 John Heron on the relational ground of human consciousness: Notes on Spiritual Leadership and Relational Spirituality 25 Yasuhiko Genku Kimura: Creating a ommicentric Ideosphere 26 Vasilis_Kostakis et al. on Peer Production and Desktop Manufacturing 27 Magnus Marsdal on Socialist Individualism 28 Ugo Mattei: The State, the Market, an
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    29 influential papers on Open Education collected by P2P Foundation
Victorious Kidss Educares Pune

How to start educating your baby? - 0 views

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    In a perfect world, parenting would come down to one sentence: Show only love, be only love. But in the world we all cope with, children grow up to face much non-loving behavior, primarily outside the home but sometimes within it as well. In Victorious Kidss Educares - Best IB school education starts as soon as the mother conceives. Research has shown that the unborn child is a highly responsive being, who is constantly acquiring new skills. It is easy, and simple to create a master piece of human excellence if education starts from the pre-natal days. Click here to read full blog http://www.victoriouskidsseducares.org/blogs/how-to-start/
anonymous

Udacity's Sebastian Thrun, Godfather Of Free Online Education, Changes Course | Fast Co... - 1 views

  • Higher education is an enormous business in the United States--we spend approximately $400 billion annually on universities, a figure greater than the revenues of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Twitter combined
  • The man who started this revolution no longer believes the hype.
  • If this was an education revolution, it was a disturbingly uneven one.
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  • "I'd aspired to give people a profound education--to teach them something substantial,"
  • And yet, all of these efforts have been hampered by the same basic problem: Very few people seem to finish courses when they're not sitting in a lecture hall.
  • "Sebastian is like the smartest guy you've ever met, but on speed,"
  • His trip in March of 2011 to the TED Conference in Long Beach, California, where he delivered a talk about his work, led to an unexpected change in his plans. Thrun movingly recounted how a high school friend had been killed in a car accident, the result of the kind of human error that self-driving cars would eliminate. Although he was well received, Thrun was upstaged by a young former hedge-fund analyst named Sal Khan, who spoke of using cheaply produced, wildly popular web videos to tutor millions of high school students on the Internet. Thrun's competitive streak kicked in. "I was a fully tenured Stanford professor . . . and here's this guy who teaches millions," he would later recount. "It was embarrassing." Though Thrun insists the timing was coincidental, just a few weeks later, he informed Stanford that he would be giving up tenure and joining Google full time as a VP. (He did continue teaching and is still a faculty member.)
  • "I can't teach at Stanford again," he said definitively. "I feel like there's a red pill and a blue pill. And you can take the blue pill and go back to your classroom and lecture your students. But I've taken the red pill. I've seen Wonderland."
  • It's hard to imagine a story that more thoroughly flatters the current sensibilities of Silicon Valley than the one into which Thrun stumbled. Not only is reinventing the university a worthy goal--tuition prices at both public and private colleges have soared in recent years, and the debt burden borne by American students is more than $1 trillion--but it's hard to imagine an industry more ripe for disruption than one in which the professionals literally still don medieval robes. "Education hasn't changed for 1,000 years," says Peter Levine, a partner with Andreessen Horowitz and a Udacity board member, summing up the Valley's conventional wisdom on the topic. "Udacity just seemed like a fundamentally new way to change how communities of people are educated."
  • Learning, after all, is about more than some concrete set of vocational skills. It is about thinking critically and asking questions, about finding ways to see the world from different points of view rather than one's own. These, I point out, are not skills easily acquired by YouTube video. Thrun seems to enjoy this objection. He tells me he wasn't arguing that Udacity's current courses would replace a traditional education--only that it would augment it. "We're not doing anything as rich and powerful as what a traditional liberal-arts education would offer you," he says. He adds that the university system will most likely evolve to shorter-form courses that focus more on professional development. "The medium will change," he says.
  • "The sort of simplistic suggestion that MOOCs are going to disrupt the entire education system is very premature," he says.
  • "We were on the front pages of newspapers and magazines, and at the same time, I was realizing, we don't educate people as others wished, or as I wished. We have a lousy product," Thrun tells me. "It was a painful moment." Turns out he doesn't even like the term MOOC.
  • "From a pedagogical perspective, it was the best I could have done," he says. "It was a good class." Only it wasn't: For all of his efforts, Statistics 101 students were not any more engaged than any of Udacity's other students. "Nothing we had done had changed the drop-off curve," Thrun acknowledges.
  • At a press conference the following January, Brown and Thrun announced that Udacity would open enrollment in three subjects--remedial math, college algebra, and elementary statistics--and they would count toward credit at San Jose State University, a 30,000-student public college. Courses were offered for just $150 each, and students were drawn from a lower-income high school and the underperforming ranks of SJSU's student body. "A lot of these failures are avoidable," Thrun said at the press conference. "I would love to set these students up for success, not for failure."
  • Viewed within this frame, the results were disastrous. Among those pupils who took remedial math during the pilot program, just 25% passed. And when the online class was compared with the in-person variety, the numbers were even more discouraging. A student taking college algebra in person was 52% more likely to pass than one taking a Udacity class, making the $150 price tag--roughly one-third the normal in-state tuition--seem like something less than a bargain. The one bright spot: Completion rates shot through the roof; 86% of students made it all the way through the classes, better than eight times Udacity's old rate.
  • "These were students from difficult neighborhoods, without good access to computers, and with all kinds of challenges in their lives," he says. "It's a group for which this medium is not a good fit."
  • Udacity won't disclose how much it is making, but Levine of Andreessen Horowitz says he's pleased. "The attitude from the beginning, about how we'd make money, was, 'We'll figure it out,'" he says. "Well, we figured it out." Thrun, ever a master of academic branding, terms this sponsored-course model the Open Education Alliance and says it is both the future of Udacity and, more generally, college education. "At the end of the day, the true value proposition of education is employment," Thrun says, sounding more CEO than professor. "If you focus on the single question of who knows best what students need in the workforce, it's the people already in the workforce. Why not give industry a voice?"
  • Thrun initially approached the problem of low completion rates as one that he could solve single-handedly. "I was looking at the data, and I decided I would make a really good class," he recalls.
  • This January, several hundred computer science students around the world will begin taking classes for an online master's degree program being jointly offered by Udacity and the Georgia Institute of Technology. Fees will be substantial--$6,600 for the equivalent of a three-semester course of study--but still less than one-third of what an in-state student would pay at Georgia Tech, and one-seventh of the tuition charged to an out-of-state one.
  • Georgia Tech professors will teach the courses and handle admissions and accreditation, and students will get a Georgia Tech diploma when they're done, but Udacity will host the course material. Thrun expects the partnership to generate $1.3 million by the end of its first year. The sum will be divided 60-40 between the university and Udacity, respectively, giving the startup its single largest revenue source to date.
  • Crucially, the program won't ultimately cost either Udacity or Georgia Tech anything. Expenses are being covered by AT&T, which put up $2 million in seed capital in the hope of getting access to a new pool of well-trained engineers.
  • "There's a recruiting angle for us, but there's also a training angle," says Scott Smith, an SVP of human resources at the telco. Though Smith says the grant to Georgia Tech came with no strings attached, AT&T plans to send a large group of its employees through the program and is in talks with Udacity to sponsor additional courses as well. "That's the great thing about this model," Smith says. "Sebastian is reaching out to us and saying, 'Help us build this--and, oh, by the way, the payoff is you get instruction for your employees.'" Says Zachary, "The Georgia Tech deal isn't really a Georgia Tech deal. It's an AT&T deal."
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    Great insights into Sebastian Thrun, and MOOCs -- especially the "sponsored MOOC." 
Sasha Thackaberry

The Future of Higher Education | Higher Ed Beta @insidehighered - 0 views

  • With a number of leading for-profits beset by legal and financial woes, enrollment in online education leveling off, and MOOCs off the front pages, one might reasonably conclude that the threats to higher ed posed by what was hailed as “disruptive innovation” have abated. 
  • No so. At this point, institutions are disrupting themselves from the inside out, not waiting for the sky to fall. True disruption occurs when existing institutions begin to embrace the forces of transformation.
  • The innovations taking place may not seem to be as dramatic as those that loomed in 2012, but the consequences are likely be even more far-reaching, challenging established business and staffing models.
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  • Innovation 1:  Learning Analytics
  • Innovation 2:  Microcredentialing
  • Innovation 3:  Competency-Based Education
  • Especially attractive is competency-based education’s prospect of accelerating time to degree, since students can potentially receive credit for skills and knowledge acquired through life experience or alternative forms of education.
  • But with the U.S. Department of Education and accreditors increasingly willing to allow institutions to experiment with competency-based models and direct assessment, such programs are poised to take off. The trend is moving beyond just a few institutions like Western Governors University, as even Harvard Business School, for example, launched its HBX CORe program, a “boot camp” for liberal arts college students who want to understand the fundamentals of business. 
  • Innovation 4:  Personalized Adaptive Learning
  • Personalization has been the hallmark of contemporary retailing and marketing, and now it’s coming to higher education
  • But recognition of the fact that all students do not learn best by following the same path at the same pace is beginning to influence instructional design even in traditional courses, which are beginning to offer students customized trajectories through course material.
  • Innovation 5:  Curricular Optimization
  • Convinced that a curricular smorgasbord of disconnected classes squanders faculty resources and allows too many students to graduate without a serious understanding of the sweep of human history, the diversity of human cultures, the major systems of belief and value, or great works of art, literature, and music, a growing number of institutions have sought to create a more coherent curriculum for at least a portion of their student body.
  • Innovation 6:  Open Educational Resources
  • companies like Learning Ace are creating new portals that allow faculty and students to easily search for content in e-books, subscription databases, and on the web.
  • Innovation 7:  Shared Services
  • By promoting system-wide or state-wide purchasing, institutions seek to take advantage of scale in procurement of software and other services.
  • large-scale data storage, and high bandwidth data access, enables researchers within 15 UT System institutions to collaborate with one another
  • Innovation 8:  Articulation Agreements
  • As more and more students enroll in community college to save money, a great challenge is to insure that courses at various institutions are truly equivalent, which will require genuine collaboration between faculty members on multiple campuses.
  • Innovation 9:  Flipped Classrooms
  • By inverting the classroom, off-loading direct instruction and maximizing the value of face-to-face time, the flipped classroom are supposed to help students understand course material  in greater depth.
  • Institutions like MIT, “Future of MIT Education” and Stanford, “Stanford2025,” aware of such tensions and risks, are taking both bottom-up and top-down approaches to ensure they get the best of the flipped classroom without sacrificing face-to-face interactions.
  • Innovation 10:  One-Stop Student Services
  • A growing number of institutions are launching a single contact point for student services, whether involving registration, billing, and financial aid, academic support, or career advising.  The most innovative, inspired by the example of the for-profits, make services available anytime. When it opens in Fall 2015, the new University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, which will serve an expansive 60-mile-wide region, will offer students a holistic student lifecycle management and CRM and support system accessible across the region.
  • Even as these ten innovations gradually become part of the higher education ecosystem, several new educational models are appearing, which potentially challenge business as usual.
  • Model 1:  New Pathways to a Bachelors Degree
  • Early college/dual enrollment programs that grant high school students college credit.  Expanded access to Advanced Placement courses. Bachelor degree-granting community colleges. Three-year bachelors degree programs. All of these efforts to accelerate time to degree are gaining traction. Particularly disruptive is the way students now consume higher education, acquiring credits in a variety of ways from various providers, face-to-face and online.
  • Model 2:  The Bare-bones University
  • The University of North Texas’s Dallas campus, designed with the assistance of Bain & Company, the corporate management consulting  firm, has served as a prototype for a lower-cost option, with an emphasis on teaching and mentoring, hybrid and online courses (to minimize facilities’ costs), and a limited number of majors tied to local workforce needs. 
  • Model 3:  Experimental Models
  • Minerva Project, seek to reinvent the university experience by combining a low residency model, real-world work experience through internships, and significantly reduced degree costs through scaled online learning
  • the University of Phoenix, Kaplan, and other online-only institutions have created physical locations and even MOOC providers stress the importance of learner MeetUps and are focused on implementing hybrid courses on traditional campuses.
  • While some corporations partner with academic institutions (GM, for example, offers a MBA through Indiana University), the number of stand-alone corporate universities now exceeds 4,200
  • Model 4:  Corporate Universities
  • Although these corporate units do not offer degrees, they may well pose a threat to traditional universities in two ways.  First, by their very existence, the corporate universities infer that existing undergraduate institutions fail to prepare their graduates for the workplace. Second, these entities may well displace enrollment in existing graduate and continuing education programs.
  • Model 5: All of the Above
  • The irony may be that all the so-called disruption will actually bring higher education back to its core mission. In the words of the public intellectual du jour, William Deresiewicz, “My ultimate hope is that [college] becomes recognized as a right of citizenship, and that we make sure that that right is available to all.”
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    "With a number of leading for-profits beset by legal and financial woes, enrollment in online education leveling off, and MOOCs off the front pages, one might reasonably conclude that the threats to higher ed posed by what was hailed as "disruptive innovation" have abated.  No so. At this point, institutions are disrupting themselves from the inside out, not waiting for the sky to fall. True disruption occurs when existing institutions begin to embrace the forces of transformation."
Walco Solutions

walcosolutions - careers - 0 views

shared by Walco Solutions on 09 Jun 15 - No Cached
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    We believe that the most valuable resource of any organisation is the human resource. For more ... http://walcosolutions.com/index
Jay Collier

The Ax-Wielding Futurist Swinging for a Higher Ed Tech Revolution - 0 views

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    "Alexander also has doubts about houses of higher learning. "I'm optimistic about learning, but often pessimistic about educational institutions," he says. "This is the best time in human history to be a learner. We have so much access, but college and university business models are often straining at the seams." Rather than seeing these online tools as a way to make money or replace traditional models, Alexander sees them as a way to supplement the brick-and-mortar campus experience. When he thinks of Transforming the University in the 21st Century - the title of his next book - Alexander sees places like his beloved Ann Arbor shifting but still standing."
anonymous

EBSCOhost: The trouble with competence - 0 views

  • Wood & Power go on to say that a successful conceptualisation of competence would show "how specific competencies are integrated at a higher level and would also accommodate changing patterns of salience among these skills and abilities at different ages and in different contexts" (pp. 414-415). These authors emphasise the importance of a developmental approach to competence that is not fixated by operational definitions such that what we can measure is taken to be what develops.
  • Typically competencies are described in terms of observable behaviour and explicit criteria. Like its forerunner behavioural objectives, the language of competence invites a spurious precision and elaboration in the definition of good or effective practice. The specification of competence is assessment led in that it is usually associated with a statement which defines performance criteria and expected levels of performance. Like the objectives model, competency-based approaches to professional education and training attempt to improve educational practice by increasing clarity about ends.
  • Such models can be highly reductive, providing atomised lists of tasks and functions, or they can be highly generalised, offering descriptions of motivational dispositions or cognitive abilities such as problem-solving. In the case of the former the sum of the parts rarely if ever represents the totality of good practice; paradoxically the role is under-determined by the specification. In the case of the latter it is difficult if not impossible to provide an operational account of a disposition or ability that does not rest solely on situational judgement. A more significant feature of models of competence is that in their tidiness and precision, far from preserving the essential features of expertise, they distort and understate the very things they are trying to represent.
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  • Glass (1977) identifies six techniques for determining the criterion score or point in criterion-referenced assessment: (i) the performance of others, (ii) counting backwards from 100%, (iii) bootstrapping on other criterion scores, (iv) judging minimal competence, (v) decision-theoretic approaches, (vi) operations research methods [ 3]. He argues that educational movements in the USA like accountability, mastery learning, competency-based education and the like rest on the common notion that a minimal acceptable level of performance on a task can be specified.
  • To put it bluntly there is a massive mismatch between the appealing language of precision that surrounds competency or performance-based programmes and the imprecise, approximate and often arbitrary character of testing when applied to human capabilities.
  • If competence is about what people can do then at first sight it appears to circumvent the issue of what people need to know-it shifts the balance of power firmly in the direction of practice and away from theory. It focuses attention on questions of relevance: knowledge for what purpose? By making education and training more practical, by emphasising what a person can do rather than what they know, competency-based approaches supposedly make access more open.
  • What is needed are standards of criticism and principles of professional judgement that can inform action in the context of uncertainty and change.
  • actions cannot in themselves be seen as competent. Rather, competence is to be located in the accounts used to license or warrant actions. In this analysis the mark of a competent practitioner, in this instance police officers, is one who can choose the right account for the right audience. The approach recognises that what is good practice cannot be defined simply by reference to the function of the organisation or its aims and objectives. There are, Fielding would argue, a plurality of audiences who may or may not judge competence in similar ways.
  • locates the definition of competence firmly within the interaction between values and situational decision-making
  • there is nothing new about competency-based approaches to education and training
  • Cambridge Journal of Education. Nov91, Vol. 21 Issue 3, p331. 11
anonymous

The End of College? (or Maybe Just the End of Kevin Carey's Career) | John Seery - 0 views

  • ought to write a companion book -- a sequel to The End of College -- called The End of Sex. The argument would go like this: Disruptive innovations in virtual technologies everywhere are rendering residential sex obsolete. Match.com is clearly more efficient than old, clumsy courtship rituals, and improved algorithms will obviate the need entirely for bar hopping. Virtual sex is disease-free and quantifiable. Advancements in robotics, tactile interactivity, customizable AI, and neuro-scientific sensory mapping are all conspiring to supplant old-school face-to-face sexuality. Virtual sex is market-friendly and doesn't rely on unfair status credentials. Carey will probably make good money if he puts forth The End of Sex book, and he'll be able to laugh at stodgy PhDs all the way to the bank.
  • discounts the value of face-to-face human relations and overlooks the inherent (and irreplaceable) joy of such encounters. Many (we'd say most) professors and students do what they do, not because they are motivated primarily by status or job concerns, but because they love learning and learning with others.
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