The Problem With EdX

Published on May 14, 2012 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

Bonnie Stewart | Inside Higher Ed | Original Article

Since it started last fall, I’ve heard the 36-week experimental #change11course referred to – half tongue-in-cheek – as “the Mother of All MOOCs.”

Back when the course started in September, it seemed like a reasonable description. #change11 was designed and run by Massive Open Online Course pioneers George Siemens, Stephen Downes, and Dave Cormier, and had 36 separate facilitators lined up to cover everything from soup to nuts in the grand scheme of instructional technologies and 21st century learning.

Apparently, however, George and Dave should have kept the crystal ball from their Edfutures MOOC a few years back.

Because in thinking about the Mother of All MOOCs, it seems none of us in #change11 were thinking big enough.

Today, the New York Times announced that Harvard has paired up with MIT in a new non-profit partnership called EdX, which will offer free online courses from both universities, following the MITx model begun over the winter. More…

The Campus Tsunami

Published on May 9, 2012 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

David Brooks | The New York Times | Original Article

David Brooks

Online education is not new. The University of Phoenix started its online degree program in 1989. Four million college students took at least one online class during the fall of 2007.

But, over the past few months, something has changed. The elite, pace-setting universities have embraced the Internet. Not long ago, online courses were interesting experiments. Now online activity is at the core of how these schools envision their futures.

This week, Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology committed $60 million to offer free online courses from both universities. Two Stanford professors, Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller, have formed a company,Coursera, which offers interactive courses in the humanities, social sciences, mathematics and engineering. Their partners include Stanford, Michigan, Penn and Princeton. Many other elite universities, including Yale and Carnegie Mellon, are moving aggressively online. President John Hennessy of Stanford summed up the emerging view in an article by Ken Auletta in The New Yorker, “There’s a tsunami coming.” More…

Image by Josh Haner for the New York Times

The Stanford Education Experiment Could Change Higher Learning Forever

Published on April 25, 2012 in News. 0 Comments

Steven Leckart | Wired.com | Original Article

Stanford doesn’t want me. I can say that because it’s a documented fact: I was once denied admission in writing. I took my last math class back in high school. Which probably explains why this quiz on how to get a computer to calculate an ideal itinerary is making my brain hurt. I’m staring at a crude map of Romania on my MacBook. Twenty cities are connected in a network of straight black lines. My goal is to determine the best route from Arad to Bucharest. A handful of search algorithms with names like breadth-first, depth-first, uniform-cost, and A* can be used. Each employs a different strategy for scanning the map and considering various paths. I’ve never heard of these algorithms or considered how a computer determines a route. But I’ll learn, because despite the utter lack of qualifications I just mentioned, I’m enrolled in CS221: Introduction to Artificial Intelligence, a graduate- level course taught by Stanford professors Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig.

Last fall, the university in the heart of Silicon Valley did something it had never done before: It opened up three classes, including CS221, to anyone with a web connection. Lectures and assignments—the same ones administered in the regular on-campus class—would be posted and auto-graded online each week. Midterms and finals would have strict deadlines. Stanford wouldn’t issue course credit to the non-matriculated students. But at the end of the term, students who completed a course would be awarded an official Statement of Accomplishment.

People around the world have gone crazy for this opportunity. Fully two-thirds of my 160,000 classmates live outside the US. There are students in 190 countries—from India and South Korea to New Zealand and the Republic of Azerbaijan. More than 100 volunteers have signed up to translate the lectures into 44 languages, including Bengali. In Iran, where YouTube is blocked, one student cloned the CS221 class website and—with the professors’ permission—began reposting the video files for 1,000 students. More…

Image via wired.com 

2.5 Million Laptops Later, One Laptop Per Child Doesn’t Improve Test Scores [STUDY]

Published on April 21, 2012 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

Sarah Kessler | Mashable.com | Original Article

At $200 per computer, One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) has sold or facilitated donations of about 2.5 million laptops to classrooms in 42 different countries.

A new study suggests those laptops do not, however, have any effect on achievement in math or language.

The study, which was conducted by development funding source in Latin America called Inter-American Development Bank, looked at 319 public schools in Peru. It found that although OLPC students were more likely to use computers than their non-OLPC counterparts, the two groups scored about the same on math and language assessments 15 months after laptops were deployed.

Furthermore, the laptop program did not affect attendance, time allocated to school activities or quality of instruction in class. Even though the laptops came loaded with 200 books, reading habits of recipients matched those of their control-group peers — 74% of whom have five or fewer books in their homes. More…

Image via Mashable.com

Intel Releases Rugged Education Tablet for the Developing World

Published on April 15, 2012 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

Zoe Fox | Mashable.com | Original Article

Intel has launched the latest device in its line of classroom computers: a tablet, Intel studybook.

The Intel studybook is built to be both a rigorous education tool and a sturdy playmate. It comes loaded with Intel’s Learning Series software, including an interactive ereader and LabCam applications. The rugged water and dust-proof design is constructed from a single piece of plastic, with shock absorbers surrounding the screen. It’s also drop tested from 70 centimeters, the height of a child’s desk, onto concrete.

“Students today live in a virtual world and this device can give a valid scientific experience for students in emerging economies, ” says Wayne Grant, director of research and planning for Intel’s Education Market Platforms Group, as he throws the tablet across the table to demonstrate its robustness. “Representations of knowledge are changing. Tools are now based in tablet environments.” More…

Image via Mashable.com

What’s More Expensive Than College? Not Going to College

Published on April 4, 2012 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

Derek Thompson | The Atlantic | Original Article

If you want to feel optimistic about the state of things for unemployed, disengaged, and dissatisfied youths in America, here’s a way. Spin a globe. Stop it with your finger. If you touch land, the overwhelming odds are that the young people in that country are doing much worse.

There are 1.2 billion people between 15 and 24 in the world, according to the International Youth Foundation’s new Opportunity for Action paper. Although many of their prospects are rising, they are emerging from conditions of widespread poverty and lack of access to the most important means of economic mobility: education. In the Middle East and North Africa, youth unemployment has been stuck above 20 percent for the last two decades. And in the parts of the world where youth unemployment has been low, such as south and east Asia, young people are overwhelmingly employed in the agriculture sector, which leaves them vulnerable to poverty.

The report is a crackerjack box of interesting facts — e.g.: the probability that a 15-year-old Russian male will die before he is 60 is higher than 40 percent, the highest in Europe; among women 15 to 24 years old, only 15 percent are working in the Middle East — but some of the most surprising stats are the closest to home. More…

Image via The Atlantic

Tablet Ownership Triples Among College Students

Published on March 22, 2012 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

Nick DeSantis | Chronicle of Education | Original Article

The number of college students who say they own tablets has more than tripled since a survey taken last year, according to new poll results released today. The Pearson Foundation sponsored the second-annual survey, which asked 1,206 college students and 204 college-bound high-school seniors about their tablet ownership. The results suggest students increasingly prefer to use the devices for reading.

One-fourth of the college students surveyed said they owned a tablet, compared with just 7 percent last year. Sixty-three percent of college students believe tablets will replace textbooks in the next five years—a 15 percent increase over last year’s survey. More than a third said they intended to buy a tablet sometime in the next six months.

This year’s poll also found that the respondents preferred digital books over printed ones. It’s a reversal of last year’s results and goes against findings of other recent studies, which concluded that students tend to choose printed textbooks. The new survey found that nearly six in 10 students preferred digital books when reading for class, compared with one-third who said they preferred printed textbooks. More…

[Creative Commons licensed Flickr photo by sridgway]

Online Learning: By the Numbers

Published on March 9, 2012 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

Chronicle of Higher Education | Original Infographics

In 2010, the Chronicle of Higher Education posted a series of infographs of the progression of online-only education and enrollment. In these times of increasingly ubiquitous knowledge and access to education, as well as the rising cost of education almost world-wide, online education may seem a logical next step.

Are these courses as effective as in-person classrooms and collaborations? Are they actually less expensive?  And have these infographics proved accurate over the last year?

To see more…

Is Lecture Capture the Single Worst Example of Poor Educational Technology Use in Higher Education?

Published on February 29, 2012 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

Mark Smithers, masmithers.com

Licensed CC by The Reith Lectures

Many institutions seem to be completely obsessed with lecture capture technology as a method of generating flexibly accesible learning content. For me though the large scale implementation of lecture capture is probably one of the costliest and strategically misguided educational technologies that an institution can adopt. Now before I go on let me say that I wouldn’t be here now if not for lecture capture. I used nascent lecture capture technology at a UK university in 1994 to record myself and then used the recording as part of a succesful job application to be an academic at an Australian university. In fact I don’t have a deep seated dislike of the technology itself, just the way that it gets used. It certainly has some uses, like getting a job.

Furthermore I don’t believe that the lecture is dead. I just think that it is vastly overused in higher education and that most learning can be delivered in better ways. So just mostly dead. I do, for example, believe that there is a place for capturing important presentations given by a visiting subject matter expert. This means having one or two venues equiped to record a presentation. What many HE institutions have done is to invest heavily in technology (not usually in staff development) to record in large numbers of venues.

The other thing I should say before telling you why I think lecture capture is so bad is to say that I think that associated technologies such as desktop capture actually have great promise and, with appropriate staff development and leadership, can lead to much higher quality material that leverages off the existing skills of academics. More…

Image via masmithers.com

 

Thinking Forward: Vivek Wadhwa on Singularity University

Published on February 25, 2012 in News. 0 Comments

Daniel Araya, HPC Wire

Daniel Araya is a  Research Fellow at the Institute for Computing in the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (I-CHASS)

Vivek Wadhwa, Vice President of Academics and Innovation at Singularity University

Vivek Wadhwa is Vice President of Academics and Innovation at Singularity University, an institution that educates a select group of leaders about exponentially growing technologies. He is also a Visiting Scholar, School of Information, UC-Berkeley; Director of Research, Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization, and Exec in Residence, Pratt School of Engineering, Duke University; Senior Research Associate, Labor and Worklife Program, Harvard Law School; Distinguished Visiting Scholar, Halle Institute of Global Learning, Emory University. Outside of academia, Wadhwa is a regular columnist for The Washington Post, Bloomberg, and BusinessWeek, and writes occasionally for several international publications. His work has been cited in more than 2,000 national and international media outlets over the past five years and has garnered the attention of policy makers.

In this interview for HPCwire, conducted by Daniel Araya of the Institute for Computing in the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, Wadhwa describes his thoughts on the culture of Silicon Valley, Singularity University, the rising costs of education, and the rapid evolution of technology.

Daniel Araya: Thanks for sitting down with me Vivek. Could I ask you to describe your background, particularly your current role at Singularity University?

Vivek Wadhwa: I am a tech entrepreneur turned academic. I built two software companies before joining academia in 2005. As Vice President of Information Services for CS First Boston, I spearheaded the technology development of new computer systems that became the product of Seer Technologies. As Seer’s Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, I helped grow the nascent startup into a publicly traded company. Subsequently, I founded Relativity Technologies. At Singularity University, I am Vice President of Academics and Innovation, overseeing faculty and curriculum development and international outreach. More…