Archive for the 'Newsletter' Category

David Brooks | The New York Times | Original Article

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

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

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]

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

Kevin Carey, Chronicle of Higher Education

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has invented or improved many world-changing things—radar, information theory, and synthetic self-replicating molecules, to name a few. Last month the university announced, to mild fanfare, an invention that could be similarly transformative, this time for higher education itself. It’s called MITx. In that small lowercase letter, a great deal is contained.

MITx is the next big step in the open-educational-resources movement that MIT helped start in 2001, when it began putting its course lecture notes, videos, and exams online, where anyone in the world could use them at no cost. The project exceeded all expectations—more than 100 million unique visitors have accessed the courses so far.

Meanwhile, the university experimented with using online tools to help improve the learning experience for its own students in Cambridge, Mass. Now MIT has decided to put the two together—free content and sophisticated online pedagogy­—and add a third, crucial ingredient: credentials. Beginning this spring, students will be able to take free, online courses offered through the MITx initiative. If they prove they’ve learned the materi­al, MITx will, for a small fee, give them a credential certifying as much. More…

Image: James Yang for The Chronicle