Group items tagged

"He compares traditional teaching to "giving people thousands of rubber mallets and asking them to drill a hole through a mountain." He said, "We need nitroglycerine." His "nitroglycerine" is Saylor.org, a nonprofit online university he backs as sole trustee of the Saylor Foundation. Saylor's model is to offer students a free, one-stop shop for self-paced college courses. Saylor.org aggregates free content offered by open-source providers like MIT OpenCourseWare and Open Yale Courses, and groups it so that students can pursue a continuous sequence of courses in a major. The model takes a different approach than that of high-profile providers of massive open online courses, or MOOC's, mainly in its role as an aggregator of online content into comprehensive courses. Instead of following a professor through a series of video lectures and peer-graded exercises on Coursera, for example, students in Saylor courses read, listen to, and watch material from different sources and grade themselves using answer keys."

"All Our Ideas is a research project that seeks to develop a new form of social data collection by combining the best features of quantitative and qualitative methods. Using the power of the web, we are creating a data collection tool that has the scale, speed, and quantification of a survey while still allowing for new information to "bubble up" from respondents as happens in interviews, participant observation, and focus groups. "