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very interesting article from the chronicle, touching on online teaching, innovation, instructional quality, faculty roles, and the needs of different student populations.

Great article on Learning Analytics. I respectfully disagree with Gardner Campbell's quote, but I do see where he's coming from and that is something that universities need to be careful of.

MIT steps into credentialing world. sounds like they are adding interactive pieces, a la stanford's growing portfolio of courses, but also offering certificates for fee. interesting on many levels.

Despite the iPad's popularity-Apple has sold nearly 15 million of them and just came out with the iPad2; and there are dozens of competitors, like the Samsung Galaxy-early studies indicate that these finger-based tablets are passive devices that have limited use in higher education. They are great for viewing media and allow students to share readings. But professors cannot use them to mark up material on the fly and show changes to students in response to their questions, a type of interactivity that has been a major thrust in pedagogy.

I think Stuart Selber would disagree with many of the limitations pointed out in this article. Most of the criticisms can be easily overcome with an app or accessory such as a stylus, bluetooth keyboard, or an app like iAnnotate. The people who were interviewed may have lacked the support of a good technologist.

jeff, I was very interested in this article and went looking for the "mountains of research" regrading success rates in online & f2f environments. after not having much success, I noticed that the author of the piece posted the 3 articles he used to support his argument in the comments section. you can draw your own conclusions from them, but I'll just say that I'm unconvinced of the 50%/75% gap that he mentions. retention & quality control are real issues in online education, and they are legitimate points to discuss. in terms of useful data, controlling for learner type would seem to be obvious; working adults are more likely to take online courses, and more likely to drop out. conflating these two findings is not all that useful, in my opinion, because working adults cannot always prioritize education the same way full-time 'traditional' students can.

It makes me wonder how we might take advantage of crowd sourcing here on campus? I worn if we could open videos to transcription by students or other fiends of the university.

There may be a magic formula involving a distributed community of hobbyists here. There's a lot of interest in the Civil War. The article mentions going to historical societies for help with the transcription. Oddly enough, this is a perfect example of "Cognitive Surplus" in action.

One big message here was pretty clear: Expertise still matters, and crowdsourcing doesn't change that (despite a stunningly silly argument I saw recently online that crowdsourcing laypeople is better than a doctor at diagnosing an illness. I mean, c'mon, let's not be ridiculous.). However, there are a few things going on here - building a community of people creating something based on a shared interest, which has manifold benefits. Cole, your example of transcribing videos....working with say the National Association of the Deaf to gather volunteers would make for a fantastic project. Also, there is a lot of learning potential in something like this. If something is done wrong by the crowd, then that's a teachable moment as to why it's wrong. Then you get a better crowd.

"The game EteRNA, which was started by the Stanford biochemist Rhiju Das and the Carnegie Mellon computer scientist Adrien Treuille, allows researchers to farm out some of the intellectual legwork behind RNA design to 26,000 players, rather than a relatively few lab workers. Players are given a puzzle design-an RNA molecule in the shape of a star or a cross, for example-that they must fill in with the components, called nucleotides, to produce the most plausible solution. The community of players then votes for the blueprint it thinks will have the best chance of success in the lab. The Stanford researchers select the highest-rated blueprints and actually synthesize them. The scientists then report back the results of the experiments to the crowd to inform future designs. The crowd-sourcing has produced results that tend to be more effective than computer-generated arrangements. "Computational methods are not perfect in making these shapes," says Mr. Das, "and as we get to more and more complex ones, they essentially always fail, so we know that there are rules to be learned." Players are figuring out these principles on their own, says Mr. Treuille. He says that while they're more like a grandmother's instructions on baking a cake than a strict scientific formula, they work remarkably well in practice. "EteRNA players are extremely good at designing RNA's," says Mr. Treuille, "which is all the more surprising because the top algorithms published by scientists are not nearly so good. The gap is pretty dramatic.""

Interesting example of crowdsourcing to work on scientific issues.

this is happening within the college of engineering, and our center is working to address the lack of hybrid options.

Nothing earth shattering, but I do find the "zombie" section extremely accurate. Getting people to keep the social spaces alive with content seems to be a big issue (at least with SITE, likely with others as well).

Good editorial on large class size and disengagement across large institutions. A very student-centered piece that rings true on a lot of fronts.