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"During the second half of the semester, student work outside the classroom is focused primarily on the completion of specialization badges. Students are encouraged to forge their own path through the course material by completing badges from the following categories: coding, industry analysis, graphic design, user experience, power user skills, and entrepreneurship. In order to earn an A grade on the badge component, students must master at least eight specialization badges. To ensure breadth, all students must complete at least one badge in each category in order to pass the course. (Note: Students were also allowed to pitch their own badges if they could make the case for the badge's connection to course themes.)"

"the key reasons include: 1. branding and affiliation with elite institutions and professors, 2. well established courses with rich support on resources and assessment (grading/peer assessment), 3. granting of certificates of achievement or statements of attainment (in recognition), 4. degrees of difficulties - xMOOCs are much easier compared to cMOOCs, 5. perceptions of learners - xMOOCs are based on 1,2,3 above, and 4 - learners - cMOOCs would have to curate resources and create blog posts/join forums, 6. pedagogy, 7. assessment."

THE SCHOOL DISTRICT of Philadelphia is getting into the cyber-school business this fall in an attempt to win back city students who attend cyber-charter schools, which cost the district more per pupil. The Philadelphia Virtual Academy, for kids in grades six through 12, would offer some real-life perks, such as a drop-in center where students can meet up with fellow students as well as a support team for each pupil. Every team includes a teacher and technical specialist.

San Jose State has already achieved remarkable results with online materials from edX, a nonprofit online provider, in its circuits course, a longstanding hurdle for would-be engineers. Usually, two of every five students earn a grade below C and must retake the course or change career plans. So last spring, Ellen Junn, the provost, visited Anant Agarwal, an M.I.T. professor who taught a free online version of the circuits class, to ask whether San Jose State could become a living lab for his course, the first offering from edX, an online collaboration of Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

after teaching the class once and seeing the historical grade distribution instantiate itself, it seemed to me that if I wanted to do something about this acculturation problem, I needed to do three things that weren't happening already:

"It speaks to students learning at their developmental level - what is right for them at that particular time (differentiated instruction, maybe even restructuring the grade system). Even as an adult, learning benefits when you have someone there to guide you through the process. My tile job is far from perfect. It would have been much better had there been someone to model the processes and give me feedback towards my performance. For other types of learners, videos would suffice (something which Salmon Khan banks on)."

I have the pleasure of being a Kindergarten teacher in Vermont. I have been teaching for 25 + years. During my teaching career I have worked with 1st through 4th grade. I am now embarking on a new journey… Kindergarten!

"How can companies get a better idea of which skills employees and job candidates have? While university degrees and grades have done that job for a long time, they've done it imperfectly. In today's rapidly evolving knowledge economy, badges, nanodegrees, and certificates have aimed to bridge the gap - but also leave a lot to be desired. While HR departments are eager for better "people analytics," that concept is still fuzzy. And simply collecting data is not enough - to be used, data has to be presented usefully."

"Order and assign textbooks, articles, or your PDFs in Perusall. Students annotate the readings and asynchronously respond to each other's comments and questions about the readings in context. With novel data analytics, Perusall automatically generates optimal student groupings and social interactions, grades students' engagement to ensure they are prepared for class, and nudges those who need help to keep everyone on track. "

"nd ten minutes after finding out that Zaption was closing up shop, I stumbled across Edpuzzle -- which offers the same feature set as Zaption -- the ability to create annotated video tutorials, the ability to ask students questions and automatically grade their answers, the ability to see how many times students watched a tutorial. Better yet, Edpuzzle offers seamless two-way integration with Google Classroom -- a Google Apps for Education product that has become the primary hub for all of the online work that I'm sharing with students on my learning team."

As I'm reflecting on the #eci831 experience and actually thinking about something like a grade for my participation, I realize that I may not have been as good a student as I thought. Not that I didn't do a lot of wandering around the interwebs, connecting myself, exploring spaces of education, learning about digital learning theories, examining how others were using these theories, and determining what, of all of this, would be useful to me and to the analogue educators I am closest with. I certainly did that, but I didn't capture all that here. Why is that a problem? Because if you didn't blog it, it didn't happen.

This must be the educator in you talking. Metacognitively speaking => the ability to discuss what you have learned is one of the great opportunities of the web 2.0. And a great way to reinforce your learning, so this idea of "if you didn't blog it, it didn't happen" is an interesting idea for educators. I have a link to post about this.

"Thirty-five" was the answer to the following question posed to a marketing agency's hiring manager: "What is the minimum Klout score a college student can have and still be considered for an internship at your firm?" I immediately went into a state of shock - Shock that Klout has gone mainstream so quickly, and shock because my digital marketing student's Klout scores typically range from 15 to 25. As an instructor, I had to ask myself: "Am I doing everything I could to prepare my students for the real world workplace?"

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.

"The key to effective socialized course design lies in understanding and configuring the LMS as not (just) a content delivery mechanism for distributing grades and PDFs but also as a potentially valuable niche online networking platform that can support a series of socialized assignments."

The proficiency-based approach university officials described shares much in common with competency-based programs offered by institutions like Western Governors University, Southern New Hampshire's College for America and the new "Flexible Option" from the University of Wisconsin System.

Yes, I can buy a jar of commercially produced pickles (typically including high-fructose corn syrup, artificial coloring, dried onions, and chemicals that I do not recognize as food), just as we can scale up our production in the classroom by increasing class size, using computer-graded tests, and reducing or eliminating the student writing that requires a faculty member to provide focused attention to each piece of work.

Which ultimately does more good-an article or monograph that is read by 20 or 30 people in a very narrow field, or a blog post on a topic of interest to many (such as grading standards or tenure requirements) that is read by 200,000? What if the post spurs hundreds of comments, is debated publicly in faculty lounges and classrooms, and gets picked up by newspapers and Web sites across the country-in other words, it helps to shape the national debate over some hot-button issue? What is it worth then?

"When students and educators have a growth mindset, they understand that intelligence can be developed. Students focus on improvement instead of worrying about how smart they are. They work hard to learn more and get smarter. Based on years of research by Stanford University's Dr. Dweck, Lisa Blackwell Ph.D., and their colleagues, we know that students who learn this mindset show greater motivation in school, better grades, and higher test scores."

Two teachers and a few students at Monday's school board meeting questioned the decision, noting the other services provided by Google - such as Google Docs - in some classrooms. One student involved with the National Honor Society said his club uses Google's Gmail to communicate with one another. One teacher said her students use Google Docs to prepare essays. The program, she said, offers students a chance to review each other's papers and she can view students' projects from her computer as they are working on them. "My kids love this," said Laurie Davidson, a seventh-grade language arts teacher.

"Although massive open online courses (MOOCs) are seen to be, and are in fact designed to be, stand-alone online courses, their introduction to the higher education landscape has expanded the space of possibilities for blended course designs (those that combine online and face-to-face learning experiences). Instead of replacing courses at higher education institutions, could MOOCs enhance those courses? This paper reports one such exploration, in which a Stanford University Machine Learning MOOC was integrated into a graduate course in machine learning at Vanderbilt University during the Fall 2012 semester. The blended course design, which leveraged a MOOC course and platform for lecturing, grading, and discussion, enabled the Vanderbilt instructor to lead an overload course in a topic much desired by students. The study shows that while students regarded some elements of the course positively, they had concerns about the coupling of online and in-class components of this particular blended course design. Analysis of student and instructor reflections on the course suggests dimensions for characterizing blended course designs that incorporate MOOCs, either in whole or in part. Given the reported challenges in this case study of integrating a MOOC in its entirety in an on-campus course, the paper advocates for more complex forms of blended learning in which course materials are drawn from multiple MOOCs, as well as from other online sources."