Group items tagged

"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. "

"Ideo identified six basic vectors that it says are instrumental to an innovative, adaptive company: Purpose, experimentation, collaboration, empowerment, looking out (i.e. staying informed about what's happening in the industry), and refinement (the ability to successfully execute new ideas)."

"To hold ourselves accountable for building upon this favorable impact, we made the Learner Outcomes Survey a permanent part of our platform experience: every learner, anywhere in the world, who completes a course now receives a survey a few months later. And since a lot has changed on Coursera since 2015 - we've gone from 90 active courses on our platform to 2,000, and more than doubled the size of our learner community - we decided it was time for another deep dive into the data."

""Teachers who are skilled at improving students' math achievement may do so in ways that make students less happy or less engaged in class," writes University of Maryland's David Blazar in the study, published in the peer-reviewed journal Education Finance and Policy."

"Graduate programs should incorporate more courses focused explicitly on pedagogy. If teaching is 40 - 90% of most full-time faculty jobs in higher ed., pedagogical study should constitute at least 40% of the work graduate students do toward a graduate degree. I was recently laughed at by someone in a traditional academic discipline when I offered this as a provocation, but it feels hardly provocative to me. For some programs, even requiring a single graduate course in pedagogy would be a step in the right direction, but 40% of coursework seems an incredibly reasonable bar (even if also well out of current reach for many programs)."

"a study"

"Agarwal believes that education is about to change dramatically. The reason is the power of the Web and its associated data-crunching technologies. Thanks to these changes, it's now possible to stream video classes with sophisticated interactive elements, and researchers can scoop up student data that could help them make teaching more effective. The technology is powerful, fairly cheap, and global in its reach. EdX has said it hopes to teach a billion students."

"with nothing more than this anonymous location data, someone who wanted to badly enough could easily figure out who you are by tracking your smartphone. Patterns of our movements, when traced on a map, create something akin to a fingerprint that is unique to every person."

This is a unique transition course designed to facilitate students' integration into the learning community of the University. The course enhances student's skills for academic success, develops understanding of university culture, increases understanding of self, and fosters educational engagement.

the re­sults of­fer ev­i­dence that des­ig­nat­ing full-time fac­ul­ty members to fo­cus chief­ly on teach­ing, par­tic­u­lar­ly at research-in­ten­sive uni­ver­si­ties like Northwestern, may not be the cause for alarm that many see. It may even improve students' learning. "Per­haps," they wrote, "the grow­ing prac­tice of hir­ing a com­bi­na­tion of re­search-in­ten­sive ten­ure-track fac­ul­ty mem­bers and teach­ing-in­ten­sive lec­tur­ers may be an ef­fi­cient and edu­ca­tion­al­ly pos­i­tive so­lu­tion to a re­search uni­ver­si­ty's mul­titask­ing prob­lem."

"Digital Storytelling 106--better known as "ds106"--sprouted in 2010 as a computer science class on digital storytelling at University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia. Founded by Jim Groom, educational technology consultant Alan Levine, and instructional technologists Martha Burtis & Tom Woodward, ds106 has evolved into a model for all instructors and students who aspire to experience, explore, and extend connected learning."

"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."

More than 800,000 international students, nearly half of them from China, India and South Korea, were enrolled in a U.S. college or university last year, a 7.2% increase over the previous year.

"Last fall, Vanderbilt computer science professor Doug Fisher "flipped" his graduate-level course on machine learning. Instead of having his students read their textbook before class or watch lecture videos that he created, as is typical for a "flipped" classroom, Doug asked his students to prepare for class by taking another professor's course, a massive open online course (MOOC) offered by Stanford computer science professor Andrew Ng on the Coursera platform. Doug's students watched Professor Ng's lecture videos and completed quizzes and other assignments within the MOOC, then came to class to discuss that material with Doug along with additional readings that went beyond the MOOC material. When Andrew Ng's course ended, Doug's students spent the remaining weeks of the semester engaged in projects that required them to apply what they had learned throughout the course."

At Flashnotes we didn't invent the concept of students working together, we just made sharing notes and knowledge with your classmates better.

""These devices have become such an entrenched part of our lives that who can really accurately gauge their own media use?" said Hoffman, associate professor of communication. "Scholars have surveyed people about how and why they use media, but that use is very fluid. It's so interspersed with other daily activities that most people would find it difficult to say exactly how many minutes they spend on particular kinds of websites.""

""In other words," the researchers wrote, "students who have positive attitudes about multitasking and prefer to multitask appear to better control this academically disadvantageous behavior in face-to-face courses." They attribute the students' "control" heavily to what Lepp called the "norms of the classroom" -- essentially, pressure from peers or the instructor not to multitask."

"We were happy to find no difference in the effectiveness, performance ratings,  or promotions for individuals and teams whose work requires collaboration with colleagues around the world versus Googlers who spend most of their day to day working with colleagues in the same office. Well-being standards were uniform across the board as well; Googlers or teams who work virtually find ways to prioritize a steady work-life balance by prioritizing important rituals like a healthy night's sleep and exercise just as non-distributed team members do. At the same time, we did hear from Googlers that working with colleagues across the globe can make it more difficult to establish connections-in many senses of the word. Coordinating schedules across time zones and booking a conference room for a video chat takes more logistical brain power than dropping by a coworkers desk for a meeting over coffee. The technology itself can also be limiting- glitchy video or faulty sound makes impromptu conversations that help teammates get to know, and trust each other, seem like more trouble than they're worth."