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The Department took those suggestions, and will be providing institutions with greater regulatory flexibility to design and test new approaches to student financial aid designed to meet the need of these students through several new experiments that will: Enable students to earn federal student aid based on how much they learn, rather than the amount of time they spend in class by providing federal aid to students enrolled in self-paced competency-based education programs. Provide flexibility for an institution to provide a mix of direct assessment coursework and credit hour coursework in the same program. Allow the use of federal student aid to pay for prior learning assessments, which can allow students—including returning adults or veterans—to decrease their time to get a degree.

Institutions that apply for and are granted these limited waivers would be able to have more flexibility over a portion of their federal student aid in order to implement experiments suggested by colleges, universities and the higher education community. Applications for the new experiments will be due in late September

Department is also announcing today that it will collaborate with the Department of Labor to develop a $25 million grant competition for an Online Skills Academy to support the development of a platform to enable high-quality, free or low-cost pathways to degrees, certificates, or other employer-recognized credentials

According to a new study from the Brookings Institution, students who are the least well prepared for traditional college also fare the worst in online courses. F

Thus, while online courses may have the potential to differentiate course work to meet the needs of students with weaker incoming skills, current online courses, in fact, do an even worse job of meeting the needs of these students than do traditional in-person courses,”

limited in scope

Among young adults who regularly use smartphones and tablets, just reading a story or performing a task on a screen instead of on paper led to greater focus on concrete details, but less ability to infer meaning or quickly get the gist of a problem,

Using a digital format can develop a "mental 'habit' of triggering a more detail-focused mindset, one that prioritizes processing local, immediate information rather than considering more abstract, decontextualized interpretations of information

the paper users were significantly more "abstract" in thinking. Digital participants reported preferring concrete rather than abstract descriptions of a behavior

That’s because our new best friend for the next four years was going to be an app called Total Educational Experience (TEx). Designed by The University of Texas System, TEx is our one-stop shop for everything – a vast array of textbooks and other course materials, online access to faculty and success coaches, endless quizzes and exams, social media-like interaction with classmates, and real-time metrics to measure our performance.

Ex tells me what materials I should be covering and what benchmarks I should be achieving. This helps with time management and keeping pace with the workload. Moreover, the app’s quizzes are helpful in prioritizing what points should be drawn from the readings. And the fact that there is an explanation for each question — whether it’s right or wrong — has allowed me to better understand the material.

’m not sure how many colleges are experimenting with using this type of app to deliver competency-based education. But I can tell you it works, and you don’t have to be tech-savvy to figure it out.

hat comes through in the video, imperfect as it surely is, is a sense of authenticity.

watching a clip repeatedly isn’t a bad thing when it comes to learning.

He had been worried about making his lecture videos perfect — thinking that he had to give a command performance every time the camera was rolling, as if he were in a Hollywood production

The lack of screen real estate will push us to think about what is really important in our classes.

result in cleaner, sparer, and more elegant learning experience

What we don't do very well is take things away.

TodaysMeet is the premier backchannel chat platform for classroom teachers and learners. Designed for teachers, TodaysMeet takes great care to respect the needs and privacy of students while giving educators the tools for success. Students join fast, easy to start rooms with no registration, and can immediately start powerful conversations that augment the traditional classroom.

odaysMeet helps harness the backchannel and turn it into a platform that can enable new activities and discussions, extend conversations beyond the classroom, and give all students a voice. Embracing the backchannel can turn it from distraction to engagement. Participants can learn from each other and share their insights, improving participation and deepening learning. TodaysMeet enables instant formative assessment, feedback, and much more.

Office of Digital Education & Innovation, charged with scaling up instructional innovation and experimentation across the institution. In its early days, the office was divided into three labs:    The Learning, Education and Design Lab, focused on doing research and scholarship to understand how instructional technologies and digital media can be used in teaching, learning and collaboration; The Digital Education & Innovation Lab, which was established to help create new digital courses, including MOOCs, and help develop open educational resources; and The Digital Innovation Greenhouse, which emphasized development of software specifically to help students.