Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

"Google is teaming up with EdX, an open-source online education nonprofit started by Harvard and MIT, to create a new site that EdX's president compared to a "YouTube for MOOCs." The site is called mooc.org-MOOC being the unfortunate acronym for "massive open online courses." It will use the same EdX platform through which professors at Harvard, MIT, and other EdX-partner universities now offer their online courses. But it will be open to everyone, including businesses, governments, and private individuals as well as professors at non-EdX colleges."

The Blended Schools Network is hosting a massive open online course (MOOC). Starting on Monday, October 21, 2013 this course is designed for educators who wish to Learn the fundamentals of being a quality online teacher using a pre-built online course. Note: This course is designed for educators that have access to online course content via a course management system of their choosing (e.g. Blackboard, Canvas, Edmodo, Moodle etc.). If you do not have access to an online course the Blended Schools Network can provide you with a sample online course for use during the MOOC. This MOOC is an online course consisting of: Weekly online lesson content that can be completed at any time during the assigned week Weekly online collaboration activities that can be completed at any time during the assigned week Weekly online presentation and discussion sessions that can be attended live or viewed as a recording

This looked interesting - very interesting.....

"Although massive open online courses (MOOCs) are seen to be, and are in fact designed to be, stand-alone online courses, their introduction to the higher education landscape has expanded the space of possibilities for blended course designs (those that combine online and face-to-face learning experiences). Instead of replacing courses at higher education institutions, could MOOCs enhance those courses? This paper reports one such exploration, in which a Stanford University Machine Learning MOOC was integrated into a graduate course in machine learning at Vanderbilt University during the Fall 2012 semester. The blended course design, which leveraged a MOOC course and platform for lecturing, grading, and discussion, enabled the Vanderbilt instructor to lead an overload course in a topic much desired by students. The study shows that while students regarded some elements of the course positively, they had concerns about the coupling of online and in-class components of this particular blended course design. Analysis of student and instructor reflections on the course suggests dimensions for characterizing blended course designs that incorporate MOOCs, either in whole or in part. Given the reported challenges in this case study of integrating a MOOC in its entirety in an on-campus course, the paper advocates for more complex forms of blended learning in which course materials are drawn from multiple MOOCs, as well as from other online sources."

""In the world of texting and IMing … the default is to end just by stopping, with no punctuation mark at all," Liberman wrote me. "In that situation, choosing to add a period also adds meaning because the reader(s) need to figure out why you did it. And what they infer, plausibly enough, is something like 'This is final, this is the end of the discussion or at least the end of what I have to contribute to it.'""

"If you take a look at my blog and particularly at posts under the Conferences category, you'll notice many gaping holes to embedded content.  These holes are where my slides posted in Slideshare and embedded on my blog appeared until recently. Without warning, Slideshare didn't just suspend my account, but deleted the entire account and its contents because I've violated their Terms of Service agreement. From what I understand from their twitter evangelist, this account is now irretrievable. "

""I mean, man, it's like not real life. Not. Real. Life. Why would you be on there when there's this," he gestured, with his chin, to everything around him, the bottleneck of teens, grouping off, chattering. Then he looked over at a small pack of guys dressed a little like him, ambling towards us. "Those are my boys," he said, then offered me his hand to shake. "Hope this helps," he said, adding, at the last moment, "Obviously, like, Facebook is not cool.""

"For those who can crack the top 20 percent, there is great promise. Most people in that elite group, Rank told me, will spend at least part of their careers among the truly affluent, earning more than $250,000 a year. For those at work in the much larger pool, there will be falling or stagnant wages and far greater uncertainty. A college degree is an advantage, but it no longer offers any guarantee, especially for those who graduate from lower-ranked for-profit schools."

" Together with AT&T and an initial funding from AT&T Aspire of more than $1.5 million, we are launching nanodegrees: compact, flexible, and job-focused credentials that are stackable throughout your career. And the nanodegree program is designed for efficiency: select hands-on courses by industry, a capstone project, and career guidance. Efficient enough that you can get a nanodegree as you need it and earn new ones throughout your career, even if you need to switch paths since a career isn't always a straight line. "

When asked "What is the one website, social network, or app that you could not live without?" Facebook was the clear winner at 24 percent for students of all ages. Google came in at a distant second with 7 percent, and Twitter was in third place with 3 percent. But perhaps the most interesting finding was that high schoolers were twice as likely as college students, and 6x more likely than graduate students, to say they couldn't live without Twitter.

"At the end of the semester, however, students would be required to return the print version to the publisher, preventing them from selling their used casebooks back to a bookstore or to their peers. "My immediate reaction was: 'My goodness, they are trying to to kill first sale!'" said Mr. Grimmelmann, a professor of law at Maryland."

Pioneers like Salesforce popularized SaaS, web-based business applications that were easy to use and even easier to purchase, with a click. With that, they took one of the first swings at the command-and-control business culture that has defined the Industrial Age. A $40 billion SaaS industry followed.

Google+ isn't as big as Facebook, but it's bigger than Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram and all the rest. But size is irrelevant at this point. The fact is that it's way too big and active to kill. Google+ provides the best information Google has at its disposal for understanding hundreds of millions of users' social relationships, interests, identity and product and brand affinities. Google+ supports serious initiatives in the company like Android, Chrome, Chromebooks, Search and more.

"At a recent talk at the University of Colorado Boulder I discussed various definitions of digital scholarship and how we might categorize digital scholarship. My forthcoming essay in the second edition of Blackwell's Companion to Digital Humanities deals with these questions in depth. This chart offers one way to consider a typology for digital scholarship in the humanities. These characteristics are offered as a beginning point. They are not meant to exclude or restrict the definition of digital scholarship. Indeed, I hope these definitions might provoke some further discussion about how to undertake reviews of digital scholarship. "

"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"."

"GPAs don't predict anything about who is going to be a successful employee. "One of the things we've seen from all our data crunching is that G.P.A.'s are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless - no correlation at all except for brand-new college grads, where there's a slight correlation,"" "After two or three years, your ability to perform at Google is completely unrelated to how you performed when you were in school, because the skills you required in college are very different," he said. "You're also fundamentally a different person. You learn and grow, you think about things differently. Another reason is that I think academic environments are artificial environments. People who succeed there are sort of finely trained, they're conditioned to succeed in that environment. 

Tuition hikes are fine when someone else pays the real cost, and in this case, it's typically other students at a college who end up footing the bill for some professor's kid to go there free or at a reduced price. As tuition rates have increased, tuition remission has evolved from a nice extra to a big-ticket benefit, surpassing health care for those workers who take advantage of it in a particular year.

As a follow-up to "Come see me at EDUCAUSE," I wanted to share out some resources from my presentations as well as some resources that I gathered at the conference.

"At Harvard Business School, we're getting disrupted by online learning," Christensen said recently at the World Business Forum in New York City. "It truly isn't as good, but does this technology, over time, get good enough to meet the needs of our customers? The answer is yes."

"Instead of being an unstoppable force disrupting the faculty profession, MOOCs can be an opportunity to empower faculty to explore, create, and express themselves in new ways through open and digital education. To do this requires establishing the proper institutional context, one that allows for experimentation and grassroots, faculty-led initiatives to flourish. We have argued in this article that a focus on soft infrastructure - the resources, values, and affirmations that support faculty agency in experimenting with digital learning - has helped us create this context at Stanford. Our research suggests that this approach has given faculty the opportunity and autonomy to manifest their desires to share intellectual work more broadly, experiment and take pedagogical risks, express their unique teaching philosophies in new ways, and thoughtfully engage in the MOOC phenomenon on their own terms. As a result, a great number and variety of open and digital learning approaches have flourished at our institution."

"My time is worth more than said bombardment. Everyone's is. The other day, a friend of mine who teaches at a tony private university in the South messaged me in a huff: "I posted my grades at 10:00, and by 10:04 I had two hysterical complainers. OMG. I hate grades."