Group items tagged

What would happen if you decreed (or maybe strongly suggested - we don't really decree in higher ed), that by 2015 that mobile will be the primary platform that our students will interact with digital curriculum and learning platforms.

"OpenStax College, the year-old Rice University startup that produces free online textbooks, will more than double the number of fields in which it has titles by 2015, the university announced today. A grant from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation will allow OpenStax College to add to its current offerings in physics and sociology, and its two new biology books and an introductory anatomy text coming out this fall. The new titles will be in precalculus, chemistry, economics, U.S. history, psychology and statistics, Rice said, toward its goal of producing high-quality open-source books in the 25 most-enrolled college courses. OpenStax says its existing two texts have been downloaded more than 70,000 times so far."

"In 2014 the UCISA Digital Capabilities Group (then the User Skills Group) launched the inaugural Digital Capabilities survey of the UK higher education sector. The survey focussed on what has been variously referred to as digital capabilities, digital literacies or digital competencies. The need to improve the country's digital capabilities has been highlighted in a House of Lords committee report published in February 2015. Make or break: the UK's digital future notes that the higher education sector "has not responded to the urgent need for reskilling" and calls for institutions to develop courses to give students the skills they need."

"The House joined the Senate in approving "Tennessee Promise," the plan Haslam laid out in February to cover the full cost of two-year college for every high school graduate starting in fall 2015. The plan also calls for reducing the amount of Hope scholarships for freshmen and sophomores at state universities to $3,500, a cut of $500 a year. Juniors and seniors would receive $4,500."

""It's time to embrace our very human inefficiencies." Audrey Watters struck a post-digital note as she wrapped her opening keynote on the first day of the Digital Pedagogy Lab 2015 Institute. She reminded the audience that teaching is affective labor, that it requires heart, patience, diligence, and creativity - things which technology fails in its attempts to mimic - and she asked, "What happens to love, to our soul, to our labor as we digitize the world?""

"The public is invited to join Senator Bryan Townsend, Delaware's 2015 Teacher of the Year Megan Dalfovo-Szabo, and DelaCORE leaders for a lively discussion and book signing with filmmaker and education advocate M. Night Shyamalan."

"The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will require grant recipients to make their research publicly available online -- a multibillion-dollar boost to the open access movement. The sweeping open access policy, which signals the foundation's full-throated approval for the public availability of research, will go into effect Jan. 1, 2015, and cover all new projects made possible with funding from the foundation. The foundation will ease grant recipients into the policy, allowing them to embargo their work for 12 months, but come 2017, "All publications shall be available immediately upon their publication, without any embargo period.""

"She said that Gartner foresess "strong growth" in wearables this year, with smartwatches, fitness bands and other trackers selling nearly 70 million units - up 38 percent from 2014. She added, "While the wearables market is currently a relatively low penetrated market, it has the opportunity to grow in double digits in the long term." Accordingly, Gartner forecasts sales of wearables to reach 514 million units in 2020. "

"Open educational resources rate as one popular strategy, with 92 percent of faculty members and 97 percent of administrators saying instructors should assign more of them. Still, past research has suggested many faculty members haven't heard of OER or don't know where to discover open content. David Wiley, chief academic officer of Lumen Learning, said the report builds on previous findings about OER."

"Although the movement in course materials in colleges and universities is clearly from print towards digital, the survey data suggest it will be a slow process. Asked when they thought the majority of their course materials would be primarily digital, fully a fourth of the surveyed faculty indicated "never," while another 9 percent said by fall 2022, and 17 percent indicated by fall 2020. In contrast, fully a sixth (16 percent) reported that majority of their current course materials were digital as of fall 2015, and a third (34 percent) anticipated primarily digital course materials by fall 2018. "

"The costs of filming a new SMOC are between $9,000 and $66,000, according to data provided by Williams, with about two-thirds of classes between spring 2015 and fall 2018 costing more than $20,000. These figures don't include instructional costs."

"The number of distance education students grew by 5.6% from Fall 2015 to Fall 2016 to reach 6,359,121 who are taking at least one distance course, representing 31.6% of all students."

"To hold ourselves accountable for building upon this favorable impact, we made the Learner Outcomes Survey a permanent part of our platform experience: every learner, anywhere in the world, who completes a course now receives a survey a few months later. And since a lot has changed on Coursera since 2015 - we've gone from 90 active courses on our platform to 2,000, and more than doubled the size of our learner community - we decided it was time for another deep dive into the data."

"At the time, DeRosa was an English professor teaching a course with the Heath Anthology of American Literature, a textbook she said cost about $90. In May 2015, she and a group of student volunteers began work on what would become her free open textbook, the Open Anthology of Earlier American Literature."

"Every single company today is a technology company. Whether you are a mining organization looking at automated trucks, a real estate firm deploying an internal social network, a warehouse looking to leverage wearable devices, an agricultural company exploring the internet of things, or a hospital interested in teaming up with IBM Watson, every single company today is a technology company. Organization's must embrace this new way of thinking because when we look at the future of work, technology is one of the most disruptive factors that also yields the greatest opportunities."

"Over half of American college students have used an eTextbook in their studies, but only around 3% of textbook sales in the United States are digital. Institutional adoption of eTextbooks is low in the United States, as only 5% are broadly deploying them. Adoption in the United States is typically limited to pilots or individual faculty."

"We met with the most obvious first: the textbook managers at the campus bookstore, where only 1% of book sales were in digital form. We received a demonstration of the digital platform and are now doing informal testing. This led to the creation of a Digital Course Materials page, to share the university's materials ordering policy, information about the digital platform, and textbook alternatives."

"For Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley, his original vision for the location-based service is finally becoming a reality. Speaking with TechCrunch's Matthew Panzarino at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York City, Crowley mentioned that one of the original goals of Foursquare was for the service to teach users about things and places they didn't know about as they walked around the world."

"it falsely assumes that today's students intrinsically understand the nuanced ways in which technologies shape the human experience-how they influence an individual's identity, for example, or how they advance and stymie social progress-as well as the means by which information spreads thanks to phenomena such as algorithms and advertising."

""The biggest elephant in the room is that a lot of the systems that are used in higher ed are very course-centric in nature," Kroner said. "What we see is that probably is the biggest limiting factor of not just current-gen ed-tech products, but also the administrative systems that support them.""