By Azer Bestavros
Boston College joins 2U
Boston College has joined six other leading teaching and research universities in forming Semester Online, the first education consortium to offer for-credit online courses to academically qualified undergraduate students.
Blending for flexibility
Dazzled by the potential of free online college classes, educators are now turning to the gritty task of harnessing online materials to meet the toughest challenges in American higher education: giving more students access to college, and helping them graduate on time.
Duke opts out of 2U
Duke University faculty decided to back out of a deal with nine other universities and 2U to create a pool of for-credit online classes for undergraduates. [Read More]
The MOOC Ecosystem
Millions of students have signed up for massive open online courses, and hundreds of universities are offering some form of Web-based curriculum. Most students aren’t paying much for these classes, if they’re paying anything at all. So where is all that knowledge—and all the cash—coming from? Check the graphics below!
CETLI Symposium: Program
The advance program for the CETLI Symposium on Online Technology & the Future of Higher Education is now available from https://www.bu.edu/edtechcouncil/symposium.
Grading The MOOC U
This NYT article summarizes the experience of the author with 11 MOOCs, primarily on Coursera. The author concludes the article with this note
Online & Liberal Art Education
The trial and error and rapid innovations associated with online education may be expensive in the short term, but advocates say the efforts will eventually yield a compelling argument to explain the relevance of a liberal arts education.
Online Learning is Different!
This article in the Harvard Gazette presents results of research on the effectiveness of online learning. It notes that "By interspersing online lectures with short tests, student mind-wandering decreased by half, note-taking tripled, and overall retention of the material improved." The research was motivated by a simple question: Can virtual classes cut through the maze of distractions — such as email, the Internet, and television — that face students sitting at their computers? The solution, as the research results have unveiled is to test students early and often, suggesting a slightly different (and perhaps more effective) approach to online learning.
Stanford folds Class2Go into edX
EdX will be available as an open source learning platform on June 1. In support of that move, Stanford will integrate features of its existing Class2Go open source online learning platform into the edX platform.
Role of the future University
David Brooks asks: "The best part of the rise of online education is that it forces us to ask: What is a university for?"
