Google's Open Course Builder: A Giant Leap into 21st Century Online Learning
"Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." -- About Google Google is the most powerful nonhuman teacher ever known to actual humans. Implicitly and ceaselessly, Google performs formative assessments by collecting the following data: the content, genre and media that interests you most; when and for how long you access your external cloud brain; what your hobbies and routines are; with whom you work and communicate; who will get your November vote; and whether you prefer invigorating clean mint or enamel renewal toothpaste. By continuously refining the nuance of your sociogram, Google has already customized your next web exploration and taught itself to teach. You Are Now Entering the Learning Management System If you are an advanced geek, you will be able to author and publish your own e-learning space using Open Course Builder. With his gray beard and soothing demeanor, Senior Research Scientist Daniel M. Credit: Google
How to Succeed in a Massive Online Open Course (MOOC) by Apostolos Koutropoulos & Rebecca J. Hogue
“MOOCs provide a new methodology and modality for teaching and learning. This newness does pose some problems for learners, but also provides for exciting new possibilities. MOOCs require learners to be more proactive in their education and in building their personal learning networks (PLNs). Everyone can be successful in a MOOC, provided that certain steps are taken and strategies devised before, during, and after a MOOC.” In the past couple of years, massive online open courses (MOOCs) have become a trend among many members of the educational online community. The course Connectivism and Connective Knowledge (CCK), by Stephen Downes, has been offered at least three times since 2008, and additional MOOCs have been offered that cater to a variety of learning topics including digital storytelling, mobile learning (mLearning), learning analytics, the future of education, and instructional ideas for online success, just to name a few. The structure and design of each MOOC varies. Questions
Smoke and mirrors mask corruption at Pennsylvania’s largest cyber-charter school
By Carmel DeAmicis On August 26, 2013 For the last decade, cyber charter schools have been springing up all over the country. Cyber schools give classes over the Internet to students in grades K-12, who get their education entirely online instead of in a brick-and-mortar location. Despite the lack of research into these schools’ educational quality, in recent years some states have removed limitations to their growth. Pennsylvania is one such state pioneering cyber charter schools. On Friday, the founder of Pennsylvania’s bigger charter school — PA Cyber — was charged with fraud, for funneling $8 million of the school’s funds into his personal companies and holdings. The indictment raises questions about whether regulatory bodies need to monitor cyber schools more closely. Youth cyber school programs are controversial in education. Critics have also pointed to the for-profit motive behind many cyber charter schools that distorts the educational purpose and leads to inflated costs.
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Understanding MOOCs from the perspective of Actor Network Theory (ANT): Refraiming pedagogy and unmasking power | markusmind
(Nach zwei erfolglosen Versuchen, das Paper bei einer Zeitschrift zu platzieren, stelle ich es nun hier zur Verfügung.) Understanding MOOCs from the perspective of Actor Network Theory (ANT) Refraiming pedagogy and unmasking power Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are without any doubt currently one of the hottest developments in open and flexible learning as indicated by a broad mass media coverage and several scholarly events (conferences, special issues in academic journals etc). Many of the aspects that are on top of controversial debates (drop-out rates, accreditation, quality) re-echo claims and arguments being made over forty years during the time when distance education hit the educational landscape (Peters, 2010). In this sense, MOOCs are portrayed as a “closed technological offering” to be utilized and acted upon according to personal learning goals. With regards to MOOCs, ANT offers a tool to understand how the social and technological are embedded in each other.
Applying Cognitive Psychology to Enhance Educational Practice
Edssential article from Robert Bjork : The primary goal of this research, which is funded by the James S. McDonnell foundation, is to promote learning and memory performance within educational contexts through the investigation of principles in cognitive psychology. Studies address issues of transfer-appropriate and material-appropriate processing between encoding and retrieval. Applying tests in order to enhance learning and determining the desirable amount and timing of feedback regarding an individual’s memory performance are methods that are currently under investigation. The overlying theme of “desirable difficulties,” first introduced by Robert Bjork (1994), is also explored through manipulations in the spacing of learning events and the study schedule produced by interleaving various to-be-learned items, such as English-Swahili translated word pairs or prose materials. Read More About the Author Social Share
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Ten Useful Reports on #MOOCs and Online Education
Supported by the Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research, the International Council for Open and Distance Education (ICDE) is the leading global membership organization for open, distance, flexible and online education, including e-learning, and draws its membership from institutions, educational authorities, commercial actors, and individuals. ICDE was founded in 1938 in Canada as the International Council for Correspondence Education and today has members from over 60 countries worldwide. Recently, ICDE had provided a digest of reports and papers published over the past year on MOOCs and online education. To check out these useful reports on MOOCs and online education, here is the link. Tagged as: massive open online courses, Mooc, online education, online learning
Don’t Go Back to School: How to Fuel the Internal Engine of Learning
by Maria Popova “When you step away from the prepackaged structure of traditional education, you’ll discover that there are many more ways to learn outside school than within.” “The present education system is the trampling of the herd,” legendary architect Frank Lloyd Wright lamented in 1956. Half a century later, I started Brain Pickings in large part out of frustration and disappointment with my trampling experience of our culturally fetishized “Ivy League education.” I found myself intellectually and creatively unstimulated by the industrialized model of the large lecture hall, the PowerPoint presentations, the standardized tests assessing my rote memorization of facts rather than my ability to transmute that factual knowledge into a pattern-recognition mechanism that connects different disciplines to cultivate wisdom about how the world works and a moral lens on how it should work. People who forgo school build their own infrastructures. I learned how to teach myself.
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