Group items tagged

"Ten Years Later: Why Open Educational Resources Have Not Noticeably Affected Higher Education, and Why We Should Care"

"Black Mountain SOLE (BMS) opens this year as the world's first tuition-free, residential, self-organized learning environment for higher education. The novel institution provides a much-needed educational alternative for the country's most talented and driven learners. It provides blended learning and personalized one-on-one mentoring within an intellectually stimulating and supportive community. Its innovative programs embrace open-source content and novel educational technology to empower self-directed learning."

"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."

It is not uncommon for true visionaries to perform poorly in the constraints of a classroom. No matter how progressive the teacher, a classroom has a certain level of restriction. Teachers have preconceived notions about what students need to learn and how they should learn it. The most forward-thinking, creative students often tend to be frustrated by those restrictions. As a result, they are limited by instructors who cannot accept, or do not want to accept, new possibilities. Shortly after Sir John Gurdon won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine this year, a report circulated that had been written by one of his high-school biology teachers. The report lambasted the young scientist, stating: "Several times he has been in trouble, because he will not listen, but will insist on doing his work in his own way." This perfectly illustrates how teachers can fail to recognize a new way of thinking. In our most obstinate moments, the mere suggestion that a student can do something contrary to the way we teach it and still become successful is inconceivable.

Freelance Professors December 14, 2012 - 3:00am By Paul Fain "Self-employed professor" could soon be an actual job title, thanks to two companies that are helping a small group of college professors market their own online courses, set prices for them and share the tuition revenue. Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/12/14/two-companies-give-faculty-more-control-online-courses#ixzz2J7h5IRxb Inside Higher Ed

Disintermediating students and teachers.

"Digital Devices Invade Campus, and Networks Feel the Strain"

"New York Times to Suspend Online-Education Program"

"The Predictive Analytics Reporting (PAR) Framework is a multi-institutional data mining project that brings together 2 year, 4 year, public, proprietary, traditional, and progressive institutions to collaborate on identifying points of student loss and to find effective practices that improve student retention in U.S. higher education. Current efforts focus on removing barriers to student success in online and blended programs. With sixteen WCET member institutions, over 1,700,000 anonymized student records and 8,100,000 institutionally de-identified course level records, the PAR Framework offers educational stakeholders a unique multi-instituional lens for examining dimensions of student success from both unified and contextual perspectives. More benefits of PAR Framework participation."

"Subject: Applying for Title IV Eligibility for Direct Assessment (Competency-Based) Programs Summary: This letter provides guidance to institutions1 that wish to have direct assessment (competency-based) programs considered for title IV, Higher Education Act (HEA) program eligibility. The letter outlines how institutions can have competency-based programs approved under the current regulations on direct assessment programs."

"University Ventures (UV) is the premier investment firm focused exclusively on the global higher education sector. UV pursues a differentiated strategy of 'innovation from within'. By partnering with top-tier universities and colleges and then strategically directing private capital to develop programs of exceptional quality that address major economic and social needs, UV expects to set new standards for student outcomes and advance the development of the next generation of colleges and universities on a global scale. "

"The instructor can then pull together material from various sources into one e-book-two chapters from a published textbook, three videos from MIT's OpenCourseWare, and a research study from Harvard University, for example. The instructor can also upload his or her own material, like a syllabus for the course. The system then calculates a price for the Pearson and third-party content."

"The big theme of Mr. Shirky's talk was openness. Taking advantage of technology, he argued, will require "doing more sharing than we're used to and then learning to live with results." He underscored the power of sharing with an anecdote about what happened when the Smithsonian Institution made a cache of photographs available on Flickr, the photo-sharing site. Users catalogued the archive with tags that reflected an unpredictable range of interests, including facial hair, the history of photography, and the fiction genre known as Steampunk. "There's all kinds of hidden value in our systems which you can't even understand until you open them up to see what people do with them," Mr. Shirky said. "The thing that drives me craziest in conversations with large institutions about large data sets is they want to know in advance what will happen. Why should we open up our data? To which the answer is, you open up your data to see where the value is. It's the value you can't even predict until you try it that you get back.""

"Saylor.org is a free and open collection of college level courses. There are no registrations or fees required to take our courses, and you will earn a certificate upon completion of each course. Because we are not accredited, you will not earn a college degree or diploma; however, our team of experienced college professors has designed each course so you will be able to achieve the same learning objectives as students enrolled in traditional colleges."

"In fifty years, if not much sooner, half of the roughly 4,500 colleges and universities now operating in the United States will have ceased to exist. The technology driving this change is already at work, and nothing can stop it. The future looks like this: Access to college-level education will be free for everyone; the residential college campus will become largely obsolete; tens of thousands of professors will lose their jobs; the bachelor's degree will become increasingly irrelevant; and ten years from now Harvard will enroll ten million students."

"Can you go to college on your computer? Some say yes, and others respond with a resounding no. But one thing is for sure: there is a boatload of public money to be vacuumed off an overcrowded, underfunded educational establishment desperate for at least the appearance of a quick fix. "

"Basic Technology Advice for Students"

That's really good stuff. Here's the main doc https://docs.google.com/a/nitle.org/document/d/1X074ZTCmZrs591jWM3iaaNPBFBCNqQ45pknHp3MQ43A/edit