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This is the course blog for the section of ETAD 470 that I teach for the College of Education. The current iteration of this site is for the term starting in January 2013.

Glass looks like only the headband of a pair of glasses - the part that hooks on your ears and lies along your eyebrow line - with a small, transparent block positioned above and to the right of your right eye. That, of course, is a screen, and the Google Glass is actually a fairly full-blown computer. Or maybe like a smartphone that you never have to take out of your pocket.

There's nothing particularly new about MOOCs. Most universities have offered online courses for many years and the basic technologies involved - video lectures, discussion forums, tests, and the like - are the same we have used with on-campus and distance students. The only difference is the scale.

" If you're a professor, teacher, or student within the college community, we encourage you to use Wikipedia in your course to demonstrate how an open content website works. Many of these projects have resulted in both advancing the students' knowledge and useful content being added to Wikipedia."

"There is no value in adding video production on top of and separate from other course goals. A better strategy is rather to use video as a platform to support typical liberal arts activities."

"More importantly, this results in 76.6% of US students regularly choosing not to buy the required books. Students say that aside from the high prices, they are frustrated by the fact that professors only put a few chapters of a required textbook on the mandatory reading list during a course."

It doesn't feel right to me, but we do have a MATH course at UD, that satisfies the University minimum math requirement, and includes no algebra. The course was designed specifically for those students who would likely not be able to graduate if they had to take algebra.

Powerful Instructional Tools for Instructors and Students Delivers an automatic grading solution for math and science courses. Reinforces student learning through practice and instant feedback. Offers instructors a wide selection of textbooks and advanced teaching tools.

New data from a long-term study by the Community College Research Center at Columbia University's Teachers College suggest that some of the students most often targeted in online learning's access mission are less likely than their peers to benefit from -- and may in fact be hurt by -- digital as opposed to face-to-face instruction.

it's no coincidence that the death of Google Reader corresponds with the rise of Google's own social networks. As Wired's Christina Bonnington points out, "No matter what Mountain View says about changing user habits, though, both Now and Plus do one thing: They keep you in Google's world." Of course, this is an industry-wide trend. Not just Google, but Facebook, LinkedIn and the other big networks are all gunning to become become true media properties. Just like traditional media outlets-from TV networks to newspapers - the more users they have and the better they hook those users, the more they can charge for ads.

"Duneier's "defection" - as the Chronicle put it - is particularly interesting considering he wasn't just considered a MOOC convert, but a model MOOC instructor. His decision is also worth noting given that while many professors see MOOCs as a threat, Duneier himself isn't directly threatened by their encroachment."

"What is a course? What is a class? What is a community? What is the relationship between those three questions and an even more basic one that is rarely asked in higher education: How do we learn? It is our conviction that, to address the literacies we need to thrive in the 21st century, we first need to step back and think about the conventions of education that we have inherited and to ask the big "why" and "how" questions of those conventions."

"I included the following question on my usual first day questionnaire: "What is the most important thing I can do to best help you learn, and to do well in this course?" I received responses from 41 out of the 42 students (all junior Met. majors) and those responses will be the topic of discussion."

"We are using the data from our initial offering of MOOCs to investigate the nuances of course persistence and completion, experiment with ways to measure learning outcomes such as peer-to-peer assessment, and discover and design new low-cost delivery models."

"It was two years ago, give or take a week, that the MOOC mania started. Think about the effects on higher education of this seminal event and how short a time it has been. In the past two years online education and ed tech have moved into the front pages, being discussed in the front pages of leading newspapers, popular media magazines, and in president's cabinets and board meetings for most institutions. Previously, online education was discussed in small circles and specific contexts, but not as a dominant theme whenever higher education was the topic. Below is a brief (and incomplete) timeline of the national media articles as MOOC mania started in August 2011"

It's a concept that has gotten an undeservedly bad name because supporters of so-called disruptive education have tied it to the controversial massive-open-online-course movement, which says students are served just as well, if not better, by an absent "star" professor than by faculty members employed by their university. That's a pretty serious misunderstanding of what a well-run, successful flipped class looks like. It takes a lot of effort to make one work, but the rewards can be great, as I have learned.

"At the end of the term, Hawkins will have completed the last college math class she will probably ever have to take. She will think back on this data-driven course model-so new and controversial right now-as the "normal" college experience. "Do we even have regular math classes here?" she asks."

""Where's the beef?" was the famous campaign slogan from the 1984 Presidential campaign. For two years, MOOC watchers have been asking the same question, as hundreds of thousands of students participated in free online courses that delivered knowledge but no certification of any real value. The Georgia Institute of Technology recently changed all that: Its May 14 announcement that the school would offer a fully accredited Online Masters of Science in Computer Science (OMS CS) for less than $7,000 suddenly brought the abstract potential of MOOCs into stark relief."

Howard University announced "Howard University Online," part of a comprehensive initiative that will expand the flagship research University's array of blended/online courses and programs in partnership with Pearson.