Noteworthy
This forum is to post tidbits about noteworthy news, articles, events, studies, etc. You can do so by adding comments to the forum.
This forum is to post tidbits about noteworthy news, articles, events, studies, etc. You can do so by adding comments to the forum.
October 17, 2012
Azer and I will post notices of various webinars as they show up in our inboxes. Some of these can be quite good, some not, so these come to you with no guarantees. There’s no obligation to participate, but if you do and feel so moved, you might post a brief overview. Here’s the first one:
The Accelerated Movement to Digital Course Materials
Wednesday, October 31, 2012 at 11 a.m. PT, 2 p.m. ET.
Sponsored by The Chronicle of Higher Education on behalf of Cengage.
October 17, 2012
The University of Edinburgh is offering a course on Coursera that might be of interest: E-learning and Digital Cultures .
Begins January 28, 2013 (5 weeks long)
October 21, 2012
Earlier this summer Stanford president John L. Hennessy delivered a provocative keynote speech, “The Coming Tsunami in Educational Technology,” about the uncertain future of higher education at CRA’s 40th Anniversary Conference at Snowbird. [Read a Summary]
According to the article: Stanford’s primary goals with educational technology is (1) to improve education for Stanford students; (2) reduce the cost of education for non-Stanford students, in both high school and college, by making online classes available; (3) be a provider of high-quality content; and (4) experiment with online education to create quality classes and certification for more students in a cost-effective manner.
October 25, 2012
Will MOOCs Destroy Academia?
In this editorial, Moshe Vardi expresses his concerns that “financial pressures will dominate educational consideration”.
October 26, 2012
Brown University’s plans for MOOCs and online offerings:
I was at Brown’s parents weekend and attended a talk by the new president, Christina Paxson. She announced Brown’s plans as follows:
1. They are joining Coursera and putting up 3 classes, all liberal arts, taught by leading faculty, scheduled for next summer with the goal of advancing the brand of Brown with great faculty on interesting topics.
2. They are planning on on-line courses for Brown students, mostly focused on basic material, and to allow Brown students to place into higher level courses and (my opinion) to qualify their prior work, whether AP or regular courses in high school, or to switch majors or catch up.
-Bennett
October 27, 2012
The WSJ published an article on efforts by some schools to explain to students the economics of higher education. Check it out!
October 30, 2012
Ernst & Young published an interesting report on “The University of the Future”. The report is focusing on higher education in Australia and International Research Institutions.
November 3, 2012
The NYT published an interesting article “The Year of the MOOC” , which I thought was a good read to get up to speed on the feverish development of MOOCs.
November 4, 2012
This “Show me your badge” short NYT article discusses the use of badges for assessment.
November 5, 2012
Here is the link to the “The Virtual Highschool” that Rick Murray mentioned in an email: http://www.theVHScollaborative.org
Quoting Rick: “It looks akin to what we’re talking about, just at a different level. This is interesting not only in and of itself, but because I think it shows that future high school students will be doing this sort of thing already, by the time they make it to college. Thus, what we old folks think is ‘new’ will really be old hat to them.”
November 5, 2012
The point that Rick brings up is very important as it relates to the pre-conditioning of high-school students in the US (and also international students) along three dimensions: (1) Use of on-line resources as a complement (if not a substitute) to “the lecture”; (2) Use of badges as proof of mastering skills (dominant in on-line games); (3) Lower threshold for privacy and higher capacity for connectedness (blurring of physical and cyber presence)
November 5, 2012
Note: Educause is making some of the presentations at this week’s national conference available as webcasts, including presentations on edX and Coursera MOOCs. There are links to these webcasts and others at:
http://www.educause.edu/annual-conference/agenda-and-program/public-webcasts
November 6, 2012
Catherine pointed to the following articles and blog posts about MOOCs, which she found to be helpful:
http://www.onlinecolleges.net/2012/10/17/the-4-biggest-problems-with-moocs/
http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/hack-higher-education/problems-peer-grading-coursera
http://satia.blogspot.com/search?q=coursera
http://livinginthetubes.blogspot.com/2012/09/online-courses.html
November 6, 2012
BU Today published an article entited “A Lecture Heard Around the World” about our committee’s work — check it out!
November 6, 2012
An interesting blog on How technology is helping students teach themselves?! One quote from the blog: “None of these students had met one another in person. The class directory included people from 125 countries. But, after weeks in the class, helping one another with Newton’s laws, friction and simple harmonic motion, they’d started to feel as if they shared the same carrel in the library. Together, they’d found a passageway into a rigorous, free, college-level class, and they weren’t about to let anyone lock it up.”
November 8, 2012
How ‘Open’ Are MOOCs? discusses the “fine prints” in the terms of service for MOOCs that may restrict the extent they may be used in a formal education setting.
November 8, 2012
Interesting seminar at MIT: Taking Educational Technology Worldwide: Challenging the Assumptions of Personalized Learning, Friday 11/16
November 8, 2012
This essay from Inside Higher Ed discusses ways in which MOOCs might be used to reduce costs at U Texas.
November 9, 2012
The Crisis in Higher Education is an article published in MIT Technology Review which attempts to answer the question of whether on-line courses are a fad or a transformative development.
November 11, 2012
Do online courses spell the end for the traditional university? is an article published by the Guardian that asks the question of whether campus life is going to be revolutionized by the Internet (and MOOCs) in the same way that the Internet revolutionized music, shopping, and journalism. The article is written from a UK perspective but brings up a number of good points.
November 11, 2012
A start-up called the Minerva Project is setting up an online university in which students live together in “dorm clusters” so that they will benefit from the social aspects of university life. An article entitled A True Elite Education at Half the Price examines the Minerva Project and its potential. It implies that the university will accept the first class in 2014.
November 13, 2012
MIT Technology Review discusses how Online Courses Put Pressure on Universities in Poorer Nations.
November 13, 2012
The clearest path to college credit for massive open online courses may soon be through credit recommendations from the American Council of Education (ACE), which announced that it will work with Coursera to determine whether as many as 8-10 MOOCs should be worth credit. The council is also working on a similar arrangement with EdX. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is funding that effort as part of $3 million in new, wide-reaching MOOC-related grants.
Read more from Inside Higher Ed
November 14, 2012
American Council On Education To Evaluate Coursera Courses For College Credit.
The AP (11/14, Pope) reports, “Nearly 2 million students could be a step closer to getting credit for their work in free, online classes, under an agreement announced Tuesday.
Mountain View, Calif.-based Coursera – an online platform for about 200 classes from 34 universities such as Princeton, Duke and Stanford – said the American Council on Education would begin evaluating about five Coursera classes initially for possible credit recommendations, and the number could grow.” ACE “said the credit evaluation would be part of a broader effort financed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to study so-called ‘Massive Online Open Courses’ – MOOCs – and ‘answer questions about the disruptive potential of this new and innovative approach to higher education.'”
The New York Times (11/14, Lewin, Subscription Publication) reports, “The council’s credit evaluation process will begin early next year, using faculty teams to begin to assess how much students who successfully complete Coursera MOOCs have learned. Students who want to take the free classes for credit would have to pay a fee to take an identity-verified, proctored exam. If the faculty team deems the course worthy of academic credit, students who do well could pay for a transcript to submit to the college of their choice. Colleges are not required to accept those credits, but similar transcripts are already accepted by 2,000 United States colleges and universities for training courses offered by the military or by employers.”
Bloomberg News (11/13, Lorin) reports, “The ACE evaluation will focus on whether the courses can improve educational outcomes – college completion rates and learning productivity, council President Molly Corbett Broad said in the statement. ‘MOOCs are an intriguing, innovative new approach that holds much promise for engaging students across the country and around the world, as well as for helping colleges and universities broaden their reach,’ Broad said. ‘As with any approach, there are many questions about long-term potential.'”
The Washington Post (11/13, Anderson) reports, “In the meantime, the Gates Foundation is awarding the council more than $895,000 in grants to coordinate research on MOOCs and convene university presidents for an “innovation lab” to discuss strategies to capitalize on the potential of the free online courses. The foundation also announced Tuesday awards of more than $2 million to other organizations and schools for projects related to MOOCs.”
The Chronicle of Higher Education (11/14, Young) reports, “Tristan Denley, provost at Austin Peay State University, outside of Nashville, said that if MOOC’s proved an equivalent replacement for traditional courses, he would expect his institution to embrace them. ‘It is already the case that about half of the graduates from Austin Peay State University did not begin with us. They bring transfer credit,’ he said. ‘So we are not averse in any way to transfer credit-this is just another source of that.'” According to Josh Jarrett, deputy director for postsecondary success at the Gates foundation, “‘MOOC’s may be the next generation of AP courses.’ Many students already arrive at campuses with credit they earn by passing Advanced Placement tests in high school, and MOOC’s may simply prove another way for students to get a jump on college.”
USA Today (11/13, Marklein) notes, “Some universities already are incorporating MOOCs into their programs. Last month, Antioch University in Los Angeles announced it had entered into a contract with Coursera” to “offer course credit for certain courses. In addition to taking the online Coursera course, students also would work with a faculty member on campus who also took the course.”
Inside Higher Ed (11/13, Fain) reports, “Not everybody is thrilled about MOOCs, however. Some faculty members fear that colleges might rush to use the courses without attention to academic quality or before much is known about how well they work. And automated testing and peer grading remain unproven substitutes for professors, who may also worry about MOOCs being a way for technocrats to cut faculty” positions. “ACE will need to do selling among its members if it is to issue credit recommendations for MOOCs. With more than 1,800 member institutions, the umbrella group represents many colleges that have a chilly take on what the council calls the ‘disruptive potential’ of MOOCs.”
The Los Angeles Times (11/14, Gordon) “LA Now” blog noted, “Coursera, a for-profit organization, was founded by two Stanford University computer science professors last year and now offers about 200 courses for free, many from such schools as Caltech, Princeton and UC Irvine. A spokeswoman for the American Council on Education said it is also in talks to possibly evaluate classes for Coursera’s nonprofit rival called EdX, a smaller online consortium that includes Harvard, MIT and UC Berkeley.”
The Slate Magazine (11/13, Oremus) “Future Tense” blog and other media sources also covered the story.
November 14, 2012
CHE published an article entitled: American Council on Education May Recommend Some Coursera Offerings for College Credit
November 15, 2012
A consortium of top-tier universities are banding together to offer credit-bearing fully online courses. The initial set of universities (expected to be expanded by a handful more before the consortium is up and running by Fall 2013) include: Duke, Emory, Washington U, Brandeis U, Northwestern U, U North Carolina at Chapel Hill, U Notre Dame, U Rochester, Vanderbilt U, and Wake Forest U. Read more: Here is the article from Inside Higher Ed. and here is the article from the NYT.
November 15, 2012
The model adopted by 2U called “Semester On Line” of a consortium of colleges that accept credits for each other’s on-line courses is surprisingly similar to what we were discussing in our meeting on 11/14 in conjunction with strawman #2 and strawman #3, re: consolidation of high-quality courses across a self-selected set of universities.
November 18, 2012
Here is an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education that provides some more details, implying that the on-line courses are meant primarily for students in study abroad programs.
November 16, 2012
CHE published an article about yet another Dot-Com aiming to “drive education costs to zero”. The model is that of curated free content packaged as self-paced, for-credit courses.
November 16, 2012
Beth made a short presentation at the November University Leadership meeting about CETLI and its progress so far. Here are the PPT slides.
November 18, 2012
This article in the Chronicle of Higehr Education discusses how e-Textbooks could be used to report back to instructors the reading habits of their students. Also, here is a blog that raises concerns about such capabilities labeling them as “spying” on students.
November 18, 2012
An article by NYU’s Clay Shirky (writer, consultant and teacher on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies) entitled Napster, Udacity, and the Academy makes parallels between the Music Industry and the Higher Education “industry”. Quoting from the end of the article: “In the academy, we lecture other people every day about learning from history. Now its our turn, and the risk is that we’ll be the last to know that the world has changed, because we can’t imagine—really cannot imagine—that story we tell ourselves about ourselves could start to fail. Even when it’s true. Especially when it’s true.”
November 19, 2012
This article portrays 2U’s “Semester On Line” offering as a MOOC alternative (small, on-line, and expensive) — interesting contrast. And here is another article contrasting “Semester On Line” to MOOCs — calling it: “the polar opposite” of MOOCs.
November 19, 2012
Technology Review published an article entitled The Most Important Education Technology in 200 Years which poses the question: “Students anywhere are being offered free instruction online. What will that do to the trillion-dollar education business?
November 21, 2012
Another article on MOOCs, the first in a series the NYTimes is doing, this time featuring a Sociology professor at Princeton. This features the professor’s sense of the experience and his assessment of where this experiment is.
November 23, 2012
I recently found a meta-analysis of studies comparing online learning to traditional classrooms and blended classrooms (attached). This was focused only on learning outcomes (didn’t discuss economics). The conclusion is no difference in learning except in a few cases an advantage for blended classrooms over all online or traditional, but this may have been due to blended classrooms offering more content. [Read it here]
November 23, 2012
I have to admit that, as I comb through these many articles being published by NYTimes, the Chronicle of Higher Ed, blogs, etc., I’ve been a bit frustrated by a lack of depth and concreteness. I’ve been wanting to get my head around the basic issues more than I currently do, to get a better sense of how (at some basic level) the economics works out under various scenarios, and what if any hard data there are at this early stage for the effectiveness of MOOCs, hybrids, etc. in comparison to traditional teaching. I know that’s a tall order and there isn’t the information available yet, for many of these issues I mention, to be found. But this report by the Ithaka group was quite interesting. It was reported on in the spring in the newspapers, if I recall correctly, but this is the actual report (which I hadn’t taken the time to track down and read until now), detailing the results of a multi-institutional, randomized trial study looking at the effectiveness of a traditional statistics course versus a hybrid version. There is LOT of experience and reflection being poured into this report. And they also have what they themselves describe as very preliminary, conjectural simulations of the economic savings that a hybrid might yield over traditional, which I think nonetheless are helpful just for beginning to structure what parameters might be involved in a discussion of this nature. They still leave more questions open than answered, I think, which is fine since that appears to be where we’re at right now nationally. But I found the reasoned and structured discussion in the report a breath of fresh air.
November 27, 2012
I agree that it’s good to see some real analysis of these issues. There are lots of data our there about the learning aspects of online and blended learning (we have a fair amount of experience with that here at BU), but the speculation about the cost structures is all over the place — and even though these authors are careful to point out that the results of the models vary widely depending on the assumptions, it’s useful to see an attempt to quantify.
December 6, 2012
Inside Higher Education published an article that shows the open, exploratory way that liberal arts colleges and faculty are approaching MOOCs. [Read the article]
December 12, 2012
It can be difficult for veterans to explain the skills and training they received in the military to potential employers. A new website, BadgesforVets.org, attempts to bridge that gap by giving veterans digital “badges” that recognize their skills.
[Read more]
December 12, 2012
Here is an interesting publication from the Lumina Foundation on “Working credentials”, which focuses on the value of sub-baccalaureate credentials. [Read more]
December 12, 2012
The Chronicle of Higher Education has an interesting article about yet-another model for on-line courses, which lets Professors set prices for their on-line courses and commit to some level of engagement and interaction with students. [Read more]
December 14, 2012
Launching Friday a group of U.K. universities, lead by the Open University (O.U.) — the U.K.’s distance learning establishment — have collaborated to form what is believed to be Europe’s first massive open online course following in the footsteps of prestigious U.S. colleges like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
[Read more]
December 17, 2012
Georgetown joins edX [Read more]
December 18, 2012
This Chronicle of Higher Education contrasts the technology and business perspective of MOOCs. Quoting: “Making courseware “massive” may dangle the eventual possibility of trillion-dollar profits (even if they have yet to materialize). But it does not “fix” what is broken in our system of education. It massively scales what’s broken.”
[Read more]
December 23, 2012
Noteworthy had a story about UK universities formaing a consortia. Here is a BBC 90 second good interview on that. Here is the URL: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-20729043
January 1, 2013
Salman Khan, founder of the Khan Academy, discusses his view of College of the Future in this article in Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery.
[Read the full article]
January 1, 2013
An article in the January/February issue of The American Interest Magazine argues that “the higher ed revolution is coming”, predicting that in just a few decades, half the colleges and universities in the United States will have disappeared, but schools like Harvard will have millions of students.
[Read the full article]
January 2, 2013
New Criterion magazine published an article entitled “Higher Ed: An Obituary” which discusses the economic/financial challenges facing Higher Education and the future in light of Internet technologies.
[Read the article]
January 2, 2013
The Wall Street Journal published an article that examines the ways in which MOOCs may generate revenue from content licensing, exams or job-referral services.
[Read the article]
January 8, 2013
The New York Times has an article that looks at the business models of MOOCs: “More top colleges are offering free massive open online courses, but companies and universities still need to figure out a way to monetize this tool for democratizing higher education.” [Read More]
January 8, 2013
This article presents a point of view (provocative as it may) about the need for disciplines — English in this particular case — to adjust the subjects they cover to match the paradigm shifts due to the increasingly digital world surrounding our society. Quoting “The English professoriate should embrace, accompany critically, and shape the new discourses its students sorely need to communicate and compete: blogs, video essays, Web comics, digital archives, data visualization, and the like.”
[Read More]
January 10, 2013
Providers of free online college courses are experimenting with academic security measures that will enable students who successfully complete the courses to obtain credentials, for a small fee, that convey some of the cachet of a premier university.
[Read More]
January 14, 2013
The tenth annual survey, a collaborative effort between the Babson Survey Research Group and the College Board, is the leading barometer of online learning in the United States. Based on responses from over 2,800 academic leaders, the complete survey report, “Changing Course: Ten Years of Tracking Online Education in the United States” is now available. For the first time in its history, the survey covers MOOCs.
[Check the Report]
[Download the Report] (Authentication Required)
January 15, 2013
A plan to offer an array of online college classes at a California state university “could open the door to teaching hundreds of thousands of California students at a lower cost via the Internet,” according to the NYT.
[Read More]
January 18, 2013
The Education Board of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) — the main professional organization for computer science — published a report addressing the use and impact of emerging on-line technology (including MOOCs) on computing curricula.
[Read the Report]
January 18, 2013
Cathy N. Davidson is co-founder of HASTAC, a 10,000+ network committed to new modes of collaboration, research, learning, and institutional change, provides four compelling reasons for why the time is now for academia to reform itself, lest it be reformed (“and we won’t like it”). She starts the article with the quote: “If we profs can be replaced by a computer screen, we should be.”
[Read the Article]
January 19, 2013
The Minerva project which aims to “offer ivy-caliber education at half the price” launches the Minerva Institute for Research and Scholarship, with former Senator Bob Kerry as Chairman.
[Read More]
January 19, 2013
Details about the envisioned operational model for the Minerva project are unveiled in this Business Insider article — most notably the caliber of faculty they plan to attract (seemingly those who cannot get tenure or promotion!)
[Read More]
January 22, 2013
An article in Inside Higher Ed shines the light on the various efforts by non-US institutions along the on-line/MOOC directions.
[Read More]
January 27, 2013
Universities face a serious threat from free online degree courses, the vice-chancellor of the University of Cambridge has warned.
[Read More]
January 27, 2013
How prepared are incoming freshmen for an on-line experience/education? Check this PBS program (video) from over a year ago about how students learn on-line.
[Check it out]
January 28, 2013
This article is a summary of what transpired at Davos on the subject of disruption of Higher Ed. This topic seems to have been a “hot topic” at Davos with participation from all the main players.
[Read More]
January 28, 2013
Digital Media: New Learners of the 21st Century – What are students doing with digital media and emerging technologies? This video from PBS addresses this vital question, taking viewers to the frontlines of what is rapidly becoming an education revolution.
[Read More and Watch the Video]
January 28, 2013
This NYT article illustrates how disciplines that may have been considered “immune” from transformation due to new technologies are indeed changing in ways that allow for interesting new pedagogy and blended course offerings, e.g., involving students experimenting with Digital Humanities “big data”.
[Read More]
February 6, 2013
Following up on the Educause learning Initiative’s “7 Things” series comment I made today, to view a full list of these documents, visit: http://www.educause.edu/research-and-publications/7-things-you-should-know-about/
Of particular interest given our current list of topics:
1. Evolution of the Textbook: http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ELI7083.pdf
2. Crowdsourcing/Social Content Curation: http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ELI7089.pdf
3. Mobile learning (a bit old): http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ELI7060.pdf
5. Process ed/Collaborative Learning Spaces: http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ELI7092.pdf
7. Badges: http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ELI7085.pdf
Other topics:
Flipped Classrooms: http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ELI7081.pdf
Gamification: http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ELI7075.pdf
Microlectures: http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ELI7090.pdf
February 6, 2013
A survey from the Chronicle of Higher Education on the “Public Perception of Higher Ed”. Survey suggests that newer models (such as prior learning assessment and competency-based education) that place less weight on learning tied to a specific place and time are gaining more acceptance due to flexibility they afford.
[Read More]
February 6, 2013
This one is funny — a Coursera on-line course on “fundamentals of on-line education” goes awry!
[Read More]
February 7, 2013
For Making the Most of College, It’s Still Location, Location, Location!
[Read More]
February 8, 2013
Yet another “School is broken and everyone knows it” blog (and on-going debate)… [Read More]