EDUC 439/639 Social Networking - Fall 2012

"If you are thinking of getting out, my advice to you, for what it's worth, is: get out. Even if you get that tenure track job, it's not the thing you thought it was going to be. When you are getting paid this little, you might be able to wiggle the freedom to walk away"

"Do-It-Yourself usability testing for online courses (eLearning) and learning management systems."

"Just over ten years ago, Karl Fisch wrote a blog post that has stuck with me through the years. In it, he asked if it was OK to be a technologically illiterate teacher. Even though we've learned greatly in the last decade about the merits of using technology to replace teachers, I think Karl's arguments back then are even more relevant today."

"Over 6 Million Students Now Enrolled in Distance Education. The Distance Education Enrollment Report 2017, produced by Digital Learning Compass, in partnership with OLC, Pearson and Tyton Partners, points to continued growth in distance education, even as overall higher education enrollments decline."

20 states can revoke licenses for unpaid students loans.

"One strategy for these colleges to avoid extinction is to diversify-to avoid a precarious reliance on residential students. And one way to do that is by adding online programs to the mix. The challenge for many small colleges is that they see online courses as at odds with their very identity. After all, these institutions embrace intimacy as central to their mission, with close, mentoring relationships between faculty and students, and deep, comradely connections among students-essential ingredients of highly engaged learning. For many, online fails to meet these crucial education ambitions. Instead, they reject virtual instruction as alienated learning, with isolated faculty and students coldly facing inert computer screens-not one another."

Be prepared for a slow-lane Internet unless you can pay up...

"Campus Technology just published an article of mine about my futures work and methods.  I introduce trend analysis, environmental scanning, scenarios, and science fiction, then tie it all together with practical tips for campus technology offices."

(Also read the comments) "When I ask the faculty whose courses require onsite testing why they require it, the answer is nearly always a concern about cheating. In a classroom or a proctored testing center, they argue, most cheating can be either deterred or caught; online, though, students can get away with a lot.  Academic integrity matters, so they just can't bring themselves to go fully online."

Web accessibility online courses.

The Fox Video Vault is a collection of videos used in Online MBA courses.

"it appears that the rise of free or low-cost online learning and professional education content is reducing the demand for some continuing-education courses offered by universities. In some cases, it may be reducing demand for executive education offerings, and even for degree programs like the traditional MBA. While individual workers remain interested in credentials-which are portable from job-to-job-companies often prefer to invest in targeted learning opportunities that relate directly to their business needs and has a clear business return on investment. "My people already have degrees, they need something more specific," says Bradley. "Academic credit is not always the selling point that universities think it is.""

""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."

"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."

"Contextual awareness, peripheral vision, design thinking and a multi-disciplinary approach - these are all terms that are trending in modern office-speak. And deservedly so. A project-based and titles-free organization - where yesterday's team member is today's team lead - can deliver the flexibility and agility that businesses yearn for."

"If you're an optimist, you're excited to use these advancements to complement your teaching style. On the other hand, you might be a little concerned that a robot will replace you in the next 3-10 years. In any case, the time to prepare for these changes is now. By practicing and sharpening our human strengths (in other words - robots' weaknesses), we can improve our chances of thriving in a world where AI is ubiquitous in every classroom, school and home. Here are 3 skills to start honing today that give educators an advantage over AI."

"What will online education look like if students' access to the internet is more compounded by their structural inequalities than it is already? How can we, in good conscience, use online technologies to increase access to higher education if the cost of using the internet rises while corporate control of the internet increases?"

"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."

"Approaches to critical digital literacy vary considerably depending on their expectations of internet users' abilities and knowledge, their age and the context. I recommend ten readings which in different ways contribute to an understanding critical digital literacy in our distrustful media age."