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Continuing the discussion of how to make online learning count towards actual degree credits, the ACE accreditation service I described yesterday provides colleges and universities the means to judge whether a course taken by one institution (or taken online) is equivalent to a course taken locally.

Kwedit, an online lending site, lets teens sign a virtual "play now, pay later" contract in exchange for real-world currency for virtual games. Is this model really valuable for teaching credit responsibility, or does it take advantage of the draw of virtual games to make a profit...or both?

Future of MOOCs

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.

Here's an example of a for-credit college course built into a simulation game.

Interesting article and video about a new way of teaching children to program. A credit-card sized computer designed to help teach children to code has gone on sale for the first time. The Raspberry Pi is a bare-bones, low-cost computer created by volunteers mostly drawn from academia and the UK tech industry.

I just heard about this from a friend and then stumbled across your link - and then wound up on the Raspberry Pi website to try to find out more about the education component of it (which is supposedly the whole motivation). Right now, the website is focused on showcasing the capabilities of the device and the hardware/software choices that they made. I was disappointed to find, when looking through their FAQ, that there is only one small blurb about educational material in which they vaguely state that support resources are currently under development. No doubt they are allowing a greater number of people access to a cheap Linux machine, but that does not mean those people are going to use it to learn to program. I'll be interested to see if the focus really does shift to education as the resources come together... right now it just seems like a cool new toy for a Linux geek (with the potential to be so much more!)

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