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Google is hoping that schools like Stanford and MIT will use the light weight web application to build rudimentary online courses.

Google is releasing its own version of an online course builder. Open Source.

Interesting EDC study showing positive results with an online Algebra course for rural students in Maine and Vermont.    The 8th graders taking the virtual algebra course performed much better and were more likely to take advanced math classes by the 10th grade.  It's an example of educational technology being used in a very effective and appropriate way to address rural student equity issues.

Debate continues on virtual learning, on quality and assessment. Educators try to find how to exploit technology in a way that advances access to AP courses, specialized courses, customized individual learning, and full online school.

MIT announcing next Monday that they will launch an online learning initiative called M.I.T.x,which will offer the online teaching of M.I.T. courses free of charge to anyone in the world. This course will not offer M.I.T. deploma, but will offer a M.I.T. certificate of completion. How will this impact for-profit online universities, such as, University of Phoenix?

Check out nb a very cool, collaborative note taking tool developed by MIT's Haystack Group. Last night I got into a discussion with Sanjoy Mahajan, an Olin College professor who got his Phd at MIT.  We were talking about Eriz Mazur's Peer Instruction technique when he began describing how in his flipped-classroom courses he uses the MIT Haystack Group's "nb" software to enable his student's to collaboratively discuss the course readings (online in pdf form) through shared, online annotations & notes.   Sanjoy's students are required to participate in the online annotation discussion, making their own annotations and responding to others, the night before his class.  He then reviews the annotations to prepare the next day's discussion and peer-instruction lesson plan.

even offline courses are headed online

This paper presents the first experimental evidence on the effects of live versus internet media of instruction. Students in a large introductory microeconomics course at a major research university were randomly assigned to live lectures versus watching these same lectures in an internet setting, where all other factors (e.g., instruction, supplemental materials) were the same. Counter to the conclusions drawn by a recent U.S. Department of Education meta-analysis of non-experimental analyses of internet instruction in higher education, we find modest evidence that live-only instruction dominates internet instruction. These results are particularly strong for Hispanic students, male students, and lower-achieving students. We also provide suggestions for future experimentation in other settings.

The authors are very misleading in their claim that this study is the first on live versus internet. There is a huge literature on this topic stretching back decades. The claims about the generalizability of the study are also very suspect.

Chris, I think the authors are claiming it is the first experimental trial where participants were randomly assigned to a treatment or control condition. They contrast their study with the DOE meta-analysis, which I don't think includes experimental studies--at least as experiments are defined within econometrics. My problem with the study is that they are aren't really comparing live vs. internet so much as live vs. recorded video. They are very careful to not take advantage of any of the potential affordances of internet mediated instruction, except broadcasting a lecture, to preserve the "purity" of their experiment. Of course, that's not a terribly interesting experiment. The more interesting experiments, which they deride as "not apples-to-apples," is to compare a traditional lecture format with an online course that takes full advantage of the affordances of the internet. These studies would confound the carefully balanced design of an apples-to-apples comparison, but no serious education technologist thinks we should just record all the lectures and post them...

Popular nerd site, Gizmodo, is offering online electronics courses for their readers. Wish this had been around when I had to take electronics courses in college. Sometimes, simple videos that you can play and replay can do so much more for you than a PhD clad professor and a book.

There are many courses to choose from in various subject matters. Creating Interactive Multimedia & Web 2.0 in the Education section looked especially interesting to me.

The partnership of Knewton and publisher Pearson will give a boost to digital textbooks and online course materials. The objective is to present educational content personalized to each student's learning pace and abilities. This deal will give it access to millions of students for the first time. Knewton uses alogrithm to personalize education, and the Pearson deal will give it access to millions of titles to create the network effects necessary for its algorithms to be adopted.

This is HUGE! School for One will have a run for its money against the breadth and depth of content that Pearson has that can be tied to individualized learning through this type of algorithm and logic! Its a nice place for Pearson (and me) to be!

Stanford Medical School is working on flipped classroom model for some of its courses.

The University of Texas system just decided to join the edX movement, with a $5 million dollar contribution. Gov. Rick Perry is trying to cap costs for a college education in Texas, so he approves of the measure...UT also seems closer than other schools to allowing students to get actual credit for the courses, as the article mentions they are considering tiered payments for classes.

Coursera announced Signature Track, a new option that will give students in select classes the opportunity to earn a Verified Certificate for completing their Coursera course. 30-100$ per course. Signature Track offers: Identity Verification. Verified Certificates. Sharable Course Records.

"This would be a big change, acknowledging that colleges aren't the only ones who can offer college courses," said Burck Smith, the founder of Straighterline. "It means rethinking what a college is."

""No one's got the model that's going to work yet," said James Grimmelmann, a New York Law School professor who specializes in computer and Internet law. "I expect all the current ventures to fail, because the expectations are too high. People think something will catch on like wildfire. But more likely, it's maybe a decade later that somebody figures out how to do it and make money." "