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."

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.

"New York Times to Suspend Online-Education Program"

"EDMONTON - These days, online literacy is part of classroom learning. However, for one Alberta school division, navigating social media isn't enough. It's making sure students are using the medium for good. In Parkland School Division, teachers and children are encouraged to learn about social media. "As adults, we really need to understand this world, and help the kids navigate it as opposed to just saying, 'hey just do whatever, we're too old to do this,'" explains Division Principal George Couros. "

"Welcome to Starfish Retention Solutions! Never before has helping students cross the finish line been more important. Every day, we work with leading academic institutions around the world to help students complete their academic goals. How? Starfish makes it easy for your institution to enlist your whole community as active participants in your student success initiatives by automating student tracking, early alert, online appointment scheduling, and assessment. The results are powerful. The outcomes are measurable. The impact is personal. "

I'm proud to announce that Stephanie Schipper will be joining Mozilla Foundation as VP, Web Strategy. At it's most basic, Stephanie's job is to make sure we are awesome on the web. More specifically, she is joining us to bake participation into everything we do online.

"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."

"Nanoogo is an online platform used by kids to write stories, create original artwork, and express their unique talents! It is meant to be fun, but we are serious about its educational value. Teachers are using Nanoogo in many ways to enhance classroom engagement while addressing the core curriculum. "

"The Tin Can API (sometimes known as the Experience API) is a brand new specification for learning technology that makes it possible to collect data about the wide range of experiences a person has (online and offline). This API captures data in a consistent format about a person or group's activities from many technologies. Very different systems are able to securely communicate by capturing and sharing this stream of activities using Tin Can's simple vocabulary."

"From America's leading technology companies: Internet: $9.95 per month high-speed Internet for free school lunch families Computers: $150 laptop or desktop computer for free school lunch families Free Training: Free digital literacy training online"

Apprennet is an online platform where educators create challenges to help learners improve their skills.

"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."