Great read on cultivating active learning, including the role of technology (though not transformative technology) in the classroom. Talks about engaging the more "shy" / deeply thinking students in class via Twitter chat - "smart students like to talk, smarter students like to listen."
A special report on the future of higher education and the role of innovation - lots of interesting and relevant topics here, including rethinking assessment standards, flipping classrooms, and reinventing the academic calendar.
Really interesting article about the potential of a lifelong and nonlinear path through college - reminiscent of Prof. Dede's lifelong and life-wide learning propositions/models.
Naomi S. Baron, a linguistics professor at American University, studies how cell phones and online messaging change social interactions. She talks to the Tech Therapy team about her concern that colleges push too much technology on students and professors. Should colleges encourage e-mail-free Fridays?
Interesting to think about technology saturation is impacting college students. Some college professors are even resisting technology integration in the classroom because of it - if you're interested in Higher Ed, the Chronicle of Higher Education has many interesting articles about technology in university settings.
I think it's curious that you're having universities like Antioch and others that are including MOOC courses as for credit options without any kind of evaluation or data on the actual efficacy of MOOCs, let alone specific classes.
My understanding of the pilot program is that students will still have faculty-led components, though, so it's not purely MOOC. It's more like a blended-learning environment that uses the MOOC as the digital part. So the students will have Antioch exams and homework sets, discussions, etc. If they are satisfied with the efficacy after the pilot, then they will expand the model.
November 26, 2012, 11:00 am This month Google's Niantic Labs quietly released a location-based game called Ingress that plays with data on multiple levels. The game, currently in invite-only beta, invites players to join either the Enlightenment or the Resistance and move through the physical world hunting "Exotic Matter", and coincidentally generating data and pictures for Google on the way. This looks similar to EcoMobile!
A group of 10 highly selective colleges has formed a consortium to offer online courses that students enrolled at any of the campuses can take for credit. The group, which includes Wake Forest and Brandeis Universities, will offer semester-long online courses using software from 2U, an education-technology company formerly called 2tor.
Websites are springing up that sort and collect reviews of MOOC courses. Meta-MOOC's essentially. Interesting how quickly an ecosystem can begin to develop around a new technology.
Wow, pretty interesting that Coursera is getting into this game. I always thought that was a strong suit of Udacity and one possible way for them to get sustainable revenue.
"Coursera announced its employee-matching service, called Coursera Career Services. Some high-profile tech companies have already signed up-including Facebook and Twitter"