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Synchronous Online is About To Get Much, Much Better | Hapgood
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Find time for courage - The Ed Techie
"Amy Collier "
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Thrun Enters Burgeoning Sieve Market | Hapgood
- Move to a market segment where innovator-preneurs are free to innovator-preneuriate
- The move now is to return to the original idea: high failure rates and dropouts are features, not bugs, because they represent a way to thin pools of applicants for potential employers.
- Thrun is moving to an area where he is unaccountable, because accountability is hard.
- Despite giving up on equality of outcomes, Thrun still believes he is in the education business. Fast Company still believes he’s in education. So do a lot of policy makers.
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- The U.S. Education Department must experiment with alternative models, such as stackable credentials and competency-based programs, as part of broader reforms of the nation’s postsecondary-education system, according to a report published on Wednesday by the Center for American Progress
- It calls for the development of standards and measures—based on job placement, earnings, and other factors—to assess the productivity of such alternative models. It also advocates engaging employers in order to better align higher education with workplace needs
- The call for reform comes two weeks after the Education Department announced it would accept proposals for experiments to test alternative ways of administering student-aid programs, with special interest in ideas that would allow “students to advance through educational courses and programs at their own pace by demonstrating academic achievement.”
- Competency-based education also received special attention from the department in March, when it said that it would award federal student aid for competency-based programs, throwing open the doors for learning credited by demonstrated knowledge and skills rather than hours spent in a class.
- According to the report released on Wednesday, the current quality-assurance system in higher education—accreditation—is poorly aligned with work-force needs
- “Providing employers with information about a graduate’s demonstrated knowledge, skills, and abilities through a portfolio or competency-based transcript could make the human-capital system operate more efficiently,
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White House science council recommends U.S., accreditors support MOOCs | Inside Higher Ed
- federal government not interfere with vendors and providers experimenting with massive open online courses and other forms of distance education.
- That message extends further to accreditors, which are encouraged to waive some of the standards required of institutions seeking approval for traditional programs.
- As a third recommendation, the council suggests establishing grant programs to spur research into online education and the effectiveness of MOOCs.
- "national exchange mechanism" such as a "center for high-scale machine learning."
- Recently, however, MOOCs are being used by students to earn credits and certificates -- although the credit often comes from an institution, not a MOOC provider
- complexity of the accreditation process.”
- There seems to be some worry about MOOCs, but I have not heard of a single MOOC that has suffered at the hands of accreditation
- Nonetheless, it is important to keep in mind that ‘innovative’ and ‘good’ are not necessarily synonyms, and innovation cannot serve as a cloak of immunity to criticism: Accreditors must reserve the right to call out poor quality whether it be innovative or stodgy.
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Rethinking Online Community in MOOCs Used for Blended Learning (EDUCAUSE Review) | EDUCAUSE.edu
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Managing Online Education 2013: practices in ensuring quality
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- One is that human-resources departments at the companies still look for traditional college experience when vetting job candidates
- After that experiment, edX decided to abandon its ambitions as a headhunter.
- “a revenue-generating solutions division,”
- fee-based services for different kinds of clients—not just colleges, but also government agencies and private companies.
- The organization has also started licensing some courses to institutions outside the edX consortium, including several California State University campuses.
- At the same time, the “small cohesive feel” of edX’s consortium is important to the organization
- The solution could be a “tiered-membership approach,” where existing members of the consortium become “charter members” and edX admits a second category of partner universities, who would pay annual fees and have less access to student data
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The Interaction Equivalency (EQuiv) Website | The Equivalency Theorem information sharing space
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Massive, Open, and Course Design |e-Literate
- Martin is focusing primarily on course goals and how those should determine metrics, he’s beginning to raise the question of how individual learner goals should influence course design. And once you start asking that question, it changes everything.
- Students always have different reasons for taking the class, and therefore different goals, different support needs for achieving those goals, and different behaviors that they adopt in order to achieve their goals.
- o the degree that good teachers distinguish among the different goals of their individual students, they generally don’t do so through course design.
- At design time, we assume homogeneity of goals, even as we (hopefully) work hard to account for heterogeneity of abilities.
- Because the barrier to entry is so low—zero cost, zero travel or scheduling demands, and zero consequence for dropping out in the middle—you will get students in the class with substantially different goals, including many that do not care about certification at all
- The good news is that massive, technology-enabled courses not only enable us to create different paths for different students; they almost force us to do so.
- these modalities challenge us to look for pedagogically effective alternatives to the control that faculty can assert in a face-to-face class that they can’t assert online.
- But in order to really learn from this forcing function, we need to go beyond designing solely for course goals and explicitly design for student goals.
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Use a Plagiarism Checker to Get References for a Research Paper
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MOOCs, Myths and Misconseptions
presentation
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http://www.col.org/PublicationDocuments/Basic-Guide-To-OER.pdf
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Unbundled: Reimagining Higher Education | Anant Agarwal
- today's students want a broad education, taking courses in languages, engineering, history, literature, math and science.
- They also want to fold in industry experience and international travel.
- Should we require university students to obtain a degree in a specialized field? Should we expect students to know at the age of 18 what they want to do for the rest of their lives? Should universities limit their degree programs to four-year spans? Should the concept of a degree as the defining credential itself be revisited? Shifting from this traditional approach may significantly affect the affordability, efficiency and quality of a college education.
- concept of unbundling many of the components that make up the traditional approach to higher education: time, function and content.
- Why not imagine an alternative path of lifelong continuous education, where students come into college after having taken the first-year subjects through MOOCs or other AP courses, study for two years to experience what my MIT colleague Sanjay Sarma calls the "magic of campus," then enter the workforce to gain real-world skills, taking MOOCs, community college courses or other online courses as needed throughout their career, in place of the traditional final year?
- Universities are responsible for admissions, research, facilities management, housing, healthcare, credentialing, food service, athletic facilities, career guidance and placement and much more.
- Which of these items should be at the core of a university and add value to that experience? By partnering with other universities, or by enlisting third parties to manage some university functions, could schools liberate resources to focus on what they value most?
- Such options unbundle the functions of competency testing and in-class seat time.
- However, I must caution that unless our competency testing approaches get a lot more sophisticated, they are unlikely to capture the holistic set of skills we expect our students to acquire in college.
- Finally, there is the potential of unbundled content.
- Professors do this all the time and MOOC technology may provide a new resource in online content for professors to do more of this in the future
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A New Architecture for Learning (EDUCAUSE Review) | EDUCAUSE.edu
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The Trouble with Snooze Buttons (and with Modern Sleep) : The New Yorker
- Another study, published earlier this year and focussing on medical-school performance, found that sleep timing, more than length or quality, affected how well students performed in class and on their preclinical board exams
- It didn’t really matter how long they had slept or whether they saw themselves as morning people or not; what made a difference was when they actually went to bed—and when they woke up. It’s bad to sleep too little; it’s also bad, and maybe even worse, to wake up when it’s dark.
- I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
- And taking our waking slow, without the jar of an alarm and with the rhythms of light and biology, may be our best defense against the thoughtlessness of a sleep-addled brain, a way to insure that, when we do wake fully, we are making the most of what our minds have to offer.
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Team Optimization: 4 Expert Tips for Group Leaders and Participants
- Fun plays a vital role in team building. To get people to change the way they work together often requires some “un-freezing.” Jostling hearts and minds through designed, purposeful play gets people to relax and makes them willing to look at their own shortcomings, be more objective and open to change.
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Saturday, December 21, 2013
Weekly Sporto bookmarks (weekly)
Sunday, December 15, 2013
Daily Randomly Sporto 12/16/2013
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MOOCs, Myths and Misconseptions
presentation
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http://www.col.org/PublicationDocuments/Basic-Guide-To-OER.pdf
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A New Architecture for Learning (EDUCAUSE Review) | EDUCAUSE.edu
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The Trouble with Snooze Buttons (and with Modern Sleep) : The New Yorker
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Team Optimization: 4 Expert Tips for Group Leaders and Participants
Saturday, December 14, 2013
Friday, December 13, 2013
Daily Randomly Sporto 12/14/2013
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The Seduction of the Leader in Higher Education | Academic Impressions
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MOOC Research Institute Panel on Supporting Learners ~ Stephen's Web
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Competency-Based Learning at Northern Arizona University (& New USDOE Rules) « WCET Frontiers
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Georgia Tech admits first cohort ahead of online master's degree program launch | Inside Higher Ed
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EdNet White Paper - Interoperability: Definitions, Expectations and Implications
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LMS? SIS? SIF? LTI? Alphabet soup and blended learning | ZDNet
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MOOCs as neocolonialism – Who controls knowledge? - University World News
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Publications | Jenny Connected
"http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fss/organisations/netlc/past/nlc2010/abstracts/Mackness.html"
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A Comprehensive List of MOOC (Massive Open Online Courses) Providers
"With"
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Learner support in MOOCs. An alternative perspective | Jenny Connected
"here"
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Experiences with Military Online Learners: Toward a Mindful Practice | Distance-Educator.com
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Massive List of MOOC Resources, Lit and Literati | Sonic Foundry Blog
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Faculty Professional Development: Advancing Integrative Social Pedagogy Using ePortfolio
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The Design of Learner-centred, Technology-enhanced Education — English
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A Visual Guide To Every Single Learning Theory - Edudemic - Edudemic
A blurry future for LMSs
"The LMS landscape has changed dramatically in recent years, with old players having had their doomsday announced continuously, new players stepping in and climbing up, waves of mergers and acquisitions and changes in LMS architecture, feature sets and aesthetics. The conundrum of systematic complexity and user-side simplicity remains, much as a consequence of the growth and evolution of the online learning market. " Read More
Thursday, December 12, 2013
Wednesday, December 11, 2013
Daily Randomly Sporto 12/12/2013
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Social Learning Handbook (2011) « Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies
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A New Pedagogy is Emerging...And Online Learning is a Key Contributing Factor | Contact North
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Five Ways Online Learning is Enabling Change in Post-Secondary Education | Contact North
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Women and Academic Leadership: Leaning Out - Commentary - The Chronicle of Higher Education
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To Measure a MOOC's Value, Just Ask Students - Commentary - The Chronicle of Higher Education
Tuesday, December 10, 2013
Saturday, December 7, 2013
Daily Randomly Sporto 12/08/2013
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Reaching Out to a Tutor in an Online Class - Making the Online Grade (usnews.com)
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The A to Z Guide To Top Online Learning Trends - Edudemic - Edudemic
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About those U Penn MOOC results reported at MRI13 |e-Literate
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IT University Online Reports Success in Technical Distance Learning - Technorati Technology
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