"Hemingway is a markdown editor that coaches you to write more clearly, helping you to emulate Ernest Hemingway's trademark sparse, journalistic style. Though I don't use it as my main markdown editor, I've been thinking about ways it can be useful in a variety of learning tasks."
"A year-to- year increase of 226,375 distance education students, a 3.9 percent increase, up over rates recorded the previous two years.
More than one in four students (29.7 percent) now take at least one distance education course (a total of 6,022,105 students)."
Students will confront real issues and assess real scenarios using current information from executives of real companies with real job opportunities. Education should reward creativity while being fun, relevant, practical, interactive, and up-to-date.
"This means anyone can create and organize a class on the platform, which allows educators to set up and manage course, including both in person and online remote education courses. Classroom is available across platforms, since it's web-based, and it's pretty easy to get set up and started with, so this should be a big boon for private educational organizations, independent skills coaches, hobby instructors and many more."
"panOpen and Learnosity announced today that they have partnered to integrate the full suite of Learnosity's assessment and homework capabilities into panOpen's Open Educational Resources-based learning platform. The first of its kind, this partnership creates a resource that preserves the low cost and flexibility of open content while offering advanced digital tools that have previously been reserved for commercially copyrighted content."
"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."
"The gap between the skills people learn and the skills people need is becoming more obvious, as traditional learning falls short of equipping students with the knowledge they need to thrive, according to the World Economic Forum report New Vision for Education: Fostering Social and Emotional Learning Through Technology."
""Relate" videos get the student to feel connected to the instructor. They seek to establish instructor presence. They also prompt students to reflect on their own prior experiences with the topic and reasons for taking the course.
"Narrate" videos share stories, anecdotes, or case studies that illustrate a concept or put the learning in context. They tap into the power of narrative to make learning sticky.
"Demonstrate" videos illustrate how to do something in a step-by-step way. They pull back the curtain on invisible phenomena or procedures. They visually demonstrate how students will complete assignments and apply learning in the real world.
"Debate" videos are perhaps the most important if you want students to actually change the way they think. These videos explicitly surface and address the misconceptions that students have about a domain and showcase competing points of view."
"It raises the question of which is better for students: an imperfect textbook or no textbook at all?
To address this concern, publishers of open textbooks are beefing up academic oversight to offer peer-reviewed material that they say is comparable to proprietary textbooks. And, they're finding an audience."
"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)."
"You asked, Font Awesome delivers with 41 shiny new icons in version 4.7. Want to request new icons? Here's how. Need vectors or want to use on the desktop? Check the cheatsheet."
"while these are worthwhile efforts, it is crucial for institutions to use predictive analytics ethically. Without ethical practices, student data could be used to curtail academic success rather than help ensure it. For example, without a clear plan in place, an institution could use predictive analytics to justify using fewer resources to recruit low-income students because their chances of enrolling are less sure than for more affluent prospective students. "