Group items tagged

"The Delaware Department of Education (DDE) recently joined a national movement to use high-quality, openly licensed educational resources in schools. In support of the #GoOpen campaign, launched by the United States Department of Education's Office of Education Technology, Delaware will build a statewide repository of open educational resources (OER). "

"That's from The Onion, of course-just one of the many sneakily corrosive, sadly spot-on pieces the satirical outlet has published in its 20-year online history, which also includes the likes of "Nation Celebrates Full Week Without Deadly Mass Shooting" and "God Angrily Clarifies 'Don't Kill' Rule.""

A student-driven initiative plans to turn the page on skyrocketing textbook costs by promoting an affordable, online educational resource that's picking up steam across the nation: open-source textbooks. Starting this fall, the University System of Maryland Student Council will pilot a program to allow interested faculty members in high-enrollment, entry-level classes to use open-source textbooks.

"The ambitious agenda set by Daniels - including a tuition freeze that broke 36 years of price increases - has captured the kind of national attention he once earned as the state's outspoken conservative governor. Daniels now enters his second year at the helm of Purdue with an expanded set of priorities but a continued commitment to cost cutting."

This report is the result of a National Science Foundation-Sponsored Computing Research Association Workshop held at MIT on January 9-11, 2013. This workshop developed a framework for understanding current disruptive change in higher education learning delivery models and outlined steps towards a research agenda for realizing possible benefits while avoiding future pitfalls.

"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"

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?

There's a subtle but steady shift happening in classrooms across the nation. More and more, schools are seeking efficient, cost-effective alternatives to using paper and supporting over-priced textbook companies. One way is by supporting technology in schools. Schools are seeking ways to upgrade and sustain wireless infrastructures and integrate mobile devices that broaden teaching and learning opportunities. Similarly, schools are decreasing their dependency on paper and incorporating digital workflows.

"The taxpayer-funded National Institutes of Health (NIH) is the world's largest funder of biomedical research. Researchers are not paid for the articles they write for scholarly journals, nor for the time and expertise they donate by peer-reviewing and serving on editorial boards. Yet the publishers claim copyright to the researchers' work and charge hefty fees for access to it. "

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.

The dichotomy she describes is a lot like the conceptual move from merely connecting with other educators to collaborating on specific projects. The internet has greatly enhanced educators' capacity to connect with one another, something that only used to happen during professional development or at conferences. But taking that ability to the next level, using it to innovate and produce something new, would mean collaborating beyond districts or even national boundaries.

"By "standards … effectiveness … accountability," what Rhee means, of course, is more emphasis on her reform agenda of assessing schools, teachers and students with high-stakes test scores - not at all an agenda uniformly accepted by top-scoring nations. Finnish educator Pasi Sahlberg corrected her on a blog site at the Washington Post, noting that Finland's PISA scores are routinely at or near the top, yet "the Finnish approach to educational policy has stood in direct opposition to the path embraced by the United States.""

"After rigorous review, the National College Credit Recommendation Service (NCCRS, Regents Research Fund, USNY) has recommended six Saylor Foundation course exams for potential credit, bringing the total of recommended exams to nine. Students who pass proctored exams for these nine courses could earn up to twenty-eight transferable college credits."

"The lack of teacher training in education schools has also been borne out recently by a new report by the National Council on Teacher Quality, entitled "Training Our Future Teachers." The question the group asked was a simple one: Do education schools teach classroom management? The answer was: not very much. The group examined 122 teacher-preparation programs and found that while most programs could say they had classroom management as part of their curriculum, classroom management strategies rarely received "the connected and concentrated focus they deserve." What's more, "instruction is generally divorced from practice (and vice versa) in most programs, with little evidence that what gets taught gets practiced." Education schools, says Kate Walsh, who leads the group, "don't see their job as training teachers. They see their job as creating professional identity.""

"According to the recently released 2013 Speak Up National Research Project findings, Flipped Learning-defined in the survey as using lecture videos as homework while using class time for more in-depth learning such as discussions, projects, experiments, and to provide personalized coaching to individual students-is surpassing all other digital trends, including mobile apps and technology…at least, that is, in K-12."

"A new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences addressed this question by conducting the largest and most comprehensive review of the effect of active learning on STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) education. Their answer is a resounding yes. According to Scott Freeman, one of the authors of the new study, "The impact of these data should be like the Surgeon General's report on "Smoking and Health" in 1964-they should put to rest any debate about whether active learning is more effective than lecturing.""

These are just a glimpse of some of the most recent (within the last two years) updates to distance education policy standards set forth by regional and national accrediting organizations in the U.S. And as many institutions begin implementing online programs, it's never been a more critical time for administrators and leaders to become well-acquainted with the hallmarks of quality required for both new, and currently in-place, distance-ed programs.

"What this tool can do for you: Help you better understand how to determine the "fairness" of a use under the U.S. Copyright Code. Collect, organize & archive the information you might need to support a fair use evaluation. Provide you with a time-stamped, PDF document for your records [example], which could prove valuable, should you ever be asked by a copyright holder to provide your fair use evaluation and the data you used to support it. [why is this important?] Provide access to educational materials, external copyright resources, and contact information for copyright help at local & national levels."

"The National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES) and its Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) provide the most official data on colleges and universities in the United States. At long last they have started to include data fields for online education (technically distance education, the vast majority of which is online) starting with the preliminary data released through Fall 2012 term. Despite all of the talk about data and measuring online programs, we can only now start to get official information from a central source rather than relying on surveys or institutional data."

This is a collection of slides, handouts and links that accompany my presentation during the USDLA's National Distance Learning Week events.