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Thanks for sharing this interesting article Uche. I think that while the major benefit of online courses is scale and reach, its downside is that it doesn't cater to individual student's ZPD. Still, the article ended nicely with an emphasis on the lecturer carrying out the online course. Great teaching X technology > teaching X great technology.

Duke's entrance into the MOOC space with a course on Bioelectricity. Participation peaked at 1000 students per week. 12,000 students enrolled from 100 countries. The educational range of students varied greatly. 313 students successfully completed the course.

Clark Aldrich's "The Complete Guide to Simulations and Serious Games" is a good complement to Prensky's books on the subject. We require both in our "eLearning Games" course at UB. The instructor of that course directed my to these two resources.

Thanks for sharing this, Chris. It's both interesting and relevant to my project for this course. A comment at the bottom suggested that really the companies need to change their unrealistic minimum criteria for job candidates. I've heard that argument before, and sometimes I do wonder when I see complaints from companies looking only for people with 5+ years of STEM work experience railing on the state of STEM education. What do you think?

Thanks for sharing Chris! I can totally relate to this. I remember having to sit through those "weed out" intro biology and chemistry courses in undergrad. They were the antithesis of motivating but I pushed through because I knew without them I couldn't do the "cool science" I wanted to. I remember at the time thinking these courses were weeding out people who were entertaining the idea of a STEM career but just didn't want to put up with the cut throat nature of these courses. It seemed to me the classes were more concerned about weeding out people than by providing an environment that really fostered learning.

Saw it in H561's discussion! Interesting idea! 

Nothing is hotter in the education world right now than the massive open online course, or MOOC. MOOCs make an elite education available to anyone, typically for free but without course credit. But how completely can online courses reproduce the college experience? Lexington writer and entrepreneur Jonathan Haber wanted to find out.

"When students transition to college, they're shocked to find that instructors don't spoon-feed them information. Instead, teachers ask them to motivate themselves as they grapple with concepts and problems, said Zach Widbin, physics teacher and engineering course instructor at Brophy College Preparatory in Phoenix." [not a] Surprise: rigorous hands-on project-based learning (supported by University of Arizona) engages kids. I wonder how many collaborative projects there are like this, with a local School of Ed actively working with neighboring schools beyond traditional student teaching and observation?

If computers can score writing, of course the first use will be for assessment. No surprise there. But how might we use this more creatively?

I tried to bring an scoring software program into my school. Nobody liked it except for myself. I thought the objective measure would be more motivating to students. But the other teachers thought that the students should have more practice with rubrics themselves. My school focused heavily on peer editing and scoring. Also, when teachers see such a large number of average scores they tend to disbelieve the results. For example, when I score the essays, there may be a lot of 'B's but I've sees the difference in between Betty's 'B' and Joe's 'B'. The grade is more of a reminder of my experience scoring Betty's writing. When the software scores it, I haven't necessarily seen the essay therefore the score doesn't mean as much. Of course the scoring makes much more sense for official assessments. Open Ended Responses are a much better measure of a student's understanding than multiple choice, if the software is able to distinguish the nuance of language. Some programs are scoring grammatical patterns, sentence length, and paragraph length; therefore, a student can be totally off topic and get a high score. I'm curious if this latest software corrected for this.

This is a great tool for doing mock-ups of engaging user interfaces. The free version is more than adequate. We use it in a course on graphical user interface design at my university.

Jerry, Thanks for sharing this resource. Coincidentally, my partner and I used this tool for generating a wireframe for a project in another course just two days back. I was not able to find a 'free' version on the website. There is a 7 day evaluation desktop version and a subscription based web version. I have a PC laptop. Is the free version available for Mac?

The 24 new courses will use video, interactive software, games, social media and other digital materials to present math lessons for kindergarten through 10th grade and English lessons for kindergarten through 12th grade..

relates to my T545 course this spring

Future of MOOCs

An attempt to crowdsource Harvard alums to contribute to the community of a new MOOC.