Group items tagged

"Unpaywall is a service that indexes open access repositories, university, government and scholarly society archives, and other sources that make articles available with authorization from the rightsholders and journals -- about 47% of the articles that its users seek."

"The average cost for a textbook bundle in the report sample was $157, versus $134 for a new textbook from the college bookstore or $56 for a used textbook from Amazon. The report calculated that by switching from publisher textbooks to open educational resources from organizations like OpenStax, the 40 colleges in the sample could save students up to $13 million per semester for these 10 courses."

"students using the openly licensed material were able to more efficiently internalize and remember the information conveyed. Students also rated the quality of the print version of the OER higher than the commercial equivalent, although the digital version received a lower ranking. The authors acknowledge that "the open textbook (in its first edition) and the commercial textbook (in its tenth) are written by different authors with differences in the breadth and depth of content coverage, organization, and writing style" and that a text's quality leans on several other factors besides the nature of its copyright."

"At Arizona State, Michael Crow has pioneered transdisciplinary structures and algorithm-driven apps to help students hone in on a college and career path. Crow says colleges and universities are too "fixed" and "rigid" and must figure out a way to "be very broadly engaged with society." At Northeastern, Joseph Aoun is attempting to supplement the traditional "human literacy" curriculum with "technological literacy" and "data literacy," and to power this via experiential education - "the most powerful way to learn": internships, co-ops, work study. "

"Twine is an open-source tool for telling interactive, nonlinear stories."

"The LCC Open Learn Lab was an experiment launched in Spring 2016 to see if a DoOO type project were feasible or valuable at a community college. LCC was the first community college to attempt a DoOO project.  The results of that initial experimentation period were enormously successful as documented in the final report for what had become "Phase I" of an ongoing project."

"The Jupyter Notebook is an open-source web application that allows you to create and share documents that contain live code, equations, visualizations and narrative text. Uses include: data cleaning and transformation, numerical simulation, statistical modeling, data visualization, machine learning, and much more."

"Australian company's investment of roughly $165 million in Coursera and FutureLearn suggests open course providers have found a viable business model. Not everyone is sold."

How will MOOCs Impact Higher Education?

"In this post I will explain the process of creating a digital textbook, tools for each step of the process and strategies for involving the students in its development."

Abandon LMS at Universities?

I think there is still a need for LMSs, but not all the features of the LMS. We need a gradebook, a quiz engine, and a private massaging/forum system for convenience and compliance. Everything else can be done elsewhere, as long as instructors are willing to open up their course materials. My $0.02.

From a business perspective, this is a supply and demand problem in that the demand for quality education is not being met by an adequate supply of learning opportunities. From a technology perspective, this is a problem that can now be solved with software. From a societal perspective, there should be alarm bells going off for everyone that this is an issue that requires our boldest ideas and brightest minds.

"Here's my main insight from the iPad Summit that I helped host over the last two days: If you are teaching and creating learning experiences with iPads, we really need you to share your practice online. "

A true educational Commons would be a force for reducing academic hierarchy and income inequality. I'm all in favor of that. You say you are too. But is that what you are telling your partners in finance and university administration? Or are you telling them that they can accumulate even more of what they already have-money and prestige-while appearing to be giving it away? I will know my course has been successful when my students understand Coursera's business model behind offering free higher education globally (along with the promise of greater social equality) as an exciting venture capital investment opportunity through which to increase privately-held wealth and lock in existing educational hierarchies.

"Although not specifically designed to optimise learning, claims have been made that MOOCs are based on sound pedagogical foundations that are at the very least comparable with courses offered by universities in face-to-face mode. To validate this, we examined the literature for empirical evidence substantiating such claims. Although empirical evidence directly related to MOOCs was difficult to find, the evidence suggests that there is no reason to believe that MOOCs are any less effective a learning experience than their face-to-face counterparts. Indeed, in some aspects, they may actually improve learning outcomes."

A year and a half ago, the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges (SBCTC) released the first 42 of Washington state's 81 high-enrollment courses under the Creative Commons Attribution license (CC BY). Now they have released the remaining 39 under the same terms, which means that anyone, anywhere, including the state's 34 public community and technical colleges and four-year colleges and universities, can use, customize, and distribute the course materials.

"Fluidity, flexibility and responsiveness seem like important skills for students to develop as part of their learning. Apart from anything else, it's a great way to bring some additional life into lectures and encourage students to think about their online presence; something they inevitably will have, but which is usually separate from their learning."

"THE NEW DEGREE FOR THE NEW WORLD. DEGREED IS A FREE SERVICE THAT SCORES AND VALIDATES YOUR LIFELONG EDUCATION FROM BOTH ACCREDITED (I.E. HARVARD) AND NON-ACCREDITED (I.E. ITUNESU, LYNDA.COM, KHAN ACADEMY, ETC.) SOURCES."

These are not small things but when I ask myself if they matter as much as the potential of a dangerous idea going un-noticed, un-documented, un-challenged in a public space I am inclined to think, "hell no."

MOOCS at Elite Universities