Group items tagged

"Some of the essential aspects of academic institutions - in particular the quality of the education they provide - are largely intangible and their results are difficult to measure." Indeed, he adds, the "result is that much of what is important to the work of colleges and universities may be neglected, undervalued, or laid aside in the pursuit of more visible goals."

"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."

"Out of 841,687 registrants in 17 courses offered in 2012 and 2013 by the universities' joint EdX program, 43,196 saw the classes to conclusion, according to an e-mailed statement from the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based schools. Some of the students signed up for multiple courses, according to the statement."

"But school need not be your exclusive provider of learning. Just because you've finished your formal education, doesn't mean that your education is over!"

This is a course for educators who want to learn about US copyright law in the education context. P2PU also offers a similar courses for Australia, if that content is more appropriate. Educators who are not in the US are welcome to sign up, too, if they want to learn about copyright law in the US.

"In January 2013, Leuphana University ventured into global online learning with the launch of Leuphana Digital School's prototype course "ThinkTank - Ideal City of the 21st Century", a cost-and-barrier-free academic platform that offered collaborative web-based learning led by distinguished scholars and experts. This new program introduced a fresh, unique approach to collaborative learning - a university project open to participants from all over the world, regardless of where they live and what they do."

"A quick search for "edtech communities" returns thousands of results. Here's a helpful list of some of the best communities for professors, administrators and IT workers. "

Harvard University on Monday became the latest elite institution that will seek to organize its online education offerings with the creation of a high-ranking administrative position. Although not a widespread practice, early adopters say institutions should consider following suit sooner rather than later.

How updating the communication device known as a "diploma" will help students acquire the right skills and help companies hire the right talent.

"Enjoy free online courses from leading UK and international universities."

" instead of professors and students, there's facilitators and participants, instead of one-directional lectures, you have discussions, and instead of tests and quizzes you create projects and artifacts. If it all sounds too squishy and feel-good, make no mistake, this is serious learning, tackling the amazingly heady topic of feminism and technology and created by bona fide, longtime professors in their fields. It's rigorous, complex and in San Antonio, you don't need to be a college student (past or present) or even own a computer to access it. That's the new international network FemTechNet in a nutshell, one of those ideas that seems to have suddenly arrived fully formed, like Athena springing out of Zeus' head. Obviously a lot more work went into it than that, but the actual creation timeline for the Network took a little more than a year-and-a-half according to co-creators Anne Balsamo and Alexandra Juhasz, Dean of the New School's Media Studies program and professor of media studies at Pitzer College, respectively."

Imagine how transformative it would be if we could combine self-paced, self-directed postsecondary learning (which has been around in one form or another for millennia) with online delivery of content that has embedded in it both the sophisticated assessment of learning and the ability to diagnose learning problems, sometimes even before the learner is aware of them, and provide just-in-time interventions that keep the learner on track. Add to that the opportunity for the learner to connect to and participate in groups of other learners, and, to link directly to the faculty member and receive individualized attention and mentoring. What you would have is the 21st-century version of do-it-yourself college, grounded in but well beyond the experienced reality of the thousands of previous DIYers such as Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, and Thomas Edison.

"In a series we're dubbing How Do I Do It?, our inaugural course "Design a Classroom Game" brings together a team of game designers, learning designers and teachers who will lead you through the process of designing your own learning game to play with your students."

"pedagogy has become a much more complicated process that has evolved from an art that one can acquire by oneself to a subject requiring formal preparation. The need for such training is all the more urgent because of the conditions that many graduate students will encounter in their professional careers. Only one-quarter of the recent Ph.D.'s seeking academic careers are finding jobs in research universities. Most of the others obtain positions in institutions with students who tend to be less motivated and less prepared for college than the undergraduates their teachers knew, and teaching them successfully will be a greater challenge."

"All visionary entrepreneurs must, at some point, find their own sense of romance in the compromises they make to build a profitable business, and the size of the crowd is where Thrun finds his. He's moved by the idea of many, many students from many, many places learning something because of him--even if it's something as mundane as a Salesforce.com API. I have a hard time believing that he really wants his son to get Salesforce certified rather than Stanford educated, but in this one thing Thrun seems entirely earnest."

""The emergence of 'advocacy philanthropy' has resulted in the unabashed use of foundation strategies to influence government action, policy, and legislation," the Claremont researchers concluded. That's a departure, they wrote, "from the established norms in higher education philanthropy, norms that generally created a distance between foundation activity and politics.""

"What confuses me is the lack of reference to or connection with the existing open education movement. This is a frustrating Silicon Valley attribute. Don't learn from others. Learn it yourself. By joining existing networks, you add power to an existing structure. By creating your own, you subvert other networks and create your own integrated power structure."

"We want to challenge both the president's and the faculty member's narratives, not because we want to replace them with a "better" or "truer" one, but because the most interesting conversations happen when people on both sides of the argument start realizing that the situation is more complicated than they thought it was."