"Legitimate research has determined that student evaluations of professors are biased, and so their "customer ratings" aren't fair. Legitimate research also indicates that while professorial popularity and effectiveness do overlap, one does not immediately signify or correlate with the other. Further, most students don't actually view themselves as customers, because they know how education works and actually want to get one."
"Under Chairman of the Board Martin Lipton and President John Sexton, New York University has been to operate as a real estate development/management business with a predatory higher-education side venture. A group of 400 faculty members at NYU, Faculty Against the Sexton Plan (FASP), have been working for years against what Pam Martens has called "running NYU as a tyrannical slush fund for privileged interests." FASP just published a devastating document, The Art of the Gouge, which describes how NYU engages in a mind-numbing range of tricks and traps to extract as much in fees as possible from students, while at the same time failing to invest in and often degrading the educational "product"."
"The survey or more than 431,000 K-12 students in more than 8,000 schools in the U.S. found that nearly 60 percent of high school students are using their own smartphones and tablets to learn while in school."
"Writing learning outcomes is very difficult for faculty who were never trained to think about their teaching in such terms. We are great at describing what content our course will cover; we are pretty good at knowing that we expect our students to master a certain amount of content or skill set by the end of the semester. We are terrible at framing our expectations for student learning in terms of learning outcomes, with all of our learning activities in the course aligned to those learning outcomes. We are even worse at measuring learning outcomes. We conflate grades with learning outcomes on the regular."
"If administrators really wanted to improve the quality of any particular online course, they would cut the professor a check and walk away. No, I'm not talking free money here. There'd be a call for proposals, and reports at the end to demonstrate that the professors who got the money did what they said they'd do. All the usual accountability measures. If the professor needs help making this happen, then they can call the instructional designers rather than the other way around. If administrators wanted to find a place to fund these checks, they could just cut out all the money going to for-profit Silicon Valley startups rather than the actual educational experience and give it to faculty instead."
"The eTexts: Adopt, Remix, Create program supports instructors who want to find better textbook options for their students. This initiative is being piloted by DoIT Academic Technology and the UW Libraries to encourage a transition away from high cost commercial textbooks and to explore new paradigms for course readings. We encourage instructors to think broadly and creatively about what might make their course materials better."
""We're the parents of 'Success Kid' for goodness sake," Laney told The Daily Dot. "If anyone understands the power, the mass, and goodwill of the Internet, it's those of us lucky to experience it daily."
A few newspapers got word of it, and soon a Redditor put the word out: "Calling All Redditors: Success Kid's Dad needs a Kidney. Donate Here."
It went viral and in a few days, the campaign hit $100,000 - well over the target."
"Digital medicine is poised to transform biomedical research, clinical practice and the commercial sector. Here we introduce a monthly column from R&D/venture creation firm PureTech tracking digital medicine's emergence."
"With the advent of the Internet and online learning, however, I eventually realized the need to expand my vision of learning communities beyond the class cohort. After all, if learning is essentially a phenomenon of network activity (think complex adaptive system), the ability to expand each learner's network capacity by introducing additional communities increases the her or his learning potential as well as the possibility for feedback into the network."
"ReCon is designed to raise and discuss current issues to do with research communication in academia and beyond. These issues range from the use of metrics for evaluating research, access to publications, how to share and store data, government policy to how this affects careers and incentives for researchers. ReCon includes speakers from government agencies, academics, publishers, people working in outreach and founders of startups working in the research space."
""The biggest elephant in the room is that a lot of the systems that are used in higher ed are very course-centric in nature," Kroner said. "What we see is that probably is the biggest limiting factor of not just current-gen ed-tech products, but also the administrative systems that support them.""
"it falsely assumes that today's students intrinsically understand the nuanced ways in which technologies shape the human experience-how they influence an individual's identity, for example, or how they advance and stymie social progress-as well as the means by which information spreads thanks to phenomena such as algorithms and advertising."
"The Internet, increasingly affordable computing, open licensing, open access journals and open educational resources provide the foundation for a world in which a quality education can be a basic human right. Yet before we break the "iron triangle" of access, cost and quality with new models, we need to develop sustainable open business models with open policies: public access to publicly funded resources."
"For Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley, his original vision for the location-based service is finally becoming a reality.
Speaking with TechCrunch's Matthew Panzarino at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York City, Crowley mentioned that one of the original goals of Foursquare was for the service to teach users about things and places they didn't know about as they walked around the world."
"As to the future of digital learning, Bailey predicts increasing opportunities for students to take course online or in blended learning environment, more options for state-approved online classes, and a focus on competency-based learning. "State policy can remove roadblocks to students' digital learning opportunities, Bailey said"
"Get the free ebook The Theory and Practice of Online Teaching and Learning: A Guide for Academic Professionals, brought to you by Routledge Education and featuring hand-picked content from some of our leading titles."
"FOAM is the movement that has spontaneously emerged from the exploding collection of constantly evolving, collaborative and interactive open access medical education resources being distributed on the web with one objective - to make the world a better place. FOAM is independent of platform or media - it includes blogs, podcasts, tweets, Google hangouts, online videos, text documents, photographs, facebook groups, and a whole lot more."
"To start college, the typical student must meet admission requirements (if any), enroll and pay tuition. But what if anyone anywhere could try out a prominent university's classes for a small fee and wait until the end to decide whether to pay tuition for credit toward a diploma?
That is one of the groundbreaking ideas behind an Arizona State University plan, announced Wednesday, to offer a freshman curriculum online through the nonprofit Web site called edX."