Moocs-- quotes EDC MOOC The End of the University as We Know It - Nathan Harden - The American Interest Magazine Pipelines and Dragons and Bears Oh My Eyeing China, Russia Risks its European Energy Market Cutting off natural gas supplies would hurt Russia as well as Europe, but a potential deal with Beijing could give Moscow even more leverage in its standoff with the West. The End of History? How America Forgot Geopolitics Since the end of the Cold War, many Americans have operated under the assumptions that old-fashioned geopolitics were a thing of the past. Essay Race, Democracy and the Constitution Roger Berkowitz Deciding that preferential admissions to universities on the basis of race is impermissible if not unconstitutional. Polar Shares US Unprepared For Arctic Rush A new report finds that the United States is woefully underprepared for oil and gas drilling in the Arctic. Student Debt Bubble Middle-Aged Americans Haunted by Student Debt Americans still rank student loans as their greatest financial problem well into their forties. Energy Security The Persistence of Modern Piracy Greener Pastures
Massive Open Online Courses, aka MOOCs, Transform Higher Education and Science When campus president Wallace Loh walked into Juan Uriagereka's office last August, he got right to the point. “We need courses for this thing — yesterday!” Uriagereka, associate provost for faculty affairs at the University of Maryland in College Park, knew exactly what his boss meant. MOOCs had exploded into the academic consciousness in summer 2011, when a free artificial-intelligence course offered by Stanford University in California attracted 160,000 students from around the world — 23,000 of whom finished it. Similar conversations have been taking place at major universities around the world, as dozens — 74, at the last count — rush to sign up. Image: Courtesy of Nature magazine The ferment is attributable in part to MOOCs hitting at exactly the right time. There is reason to hope that this is a positive development, says Roy Pea, who heads a Stanford center that studies how people use technology. Thrun announced his company Udacity in January 2012.
A MOOC is not a Thing: Emergence, Disruption, and Higher Education | Open Education A MOOC is not a thing. A MOOC is a strategy. What we say about MOOCs cannot possibly contain their drama, banality, incessance, and proliferation. The MOOC is a variant beast — placental, emergent, alienating, enveloping, sometimes thriving, sometimes dead, sometimes reborn. There is nothing about a MOOC that can be contained. “There is a relational aspect to learning.” MOOCification: to harness (in an instant) the power of a nodal network for learning. Chris Friend writes, in “Learning as Performance: MOOC Pedagogy and On-ground Classes”, “The promise of MOOCs lies not in what the format lets us do, but in what the format lets us question: Where does learning happen? Are organized attempts to harness learning always and necessarily frustrated? True stability results when presumed order and presumed disorder are balanced. The MOOC is a dialectic. We are all schoolmasters, and our schoolhouse is the universe.
E-Learning and Digital Cultures MOOC - Discussion Clayton Christensen: Why online education is ready for disruption, now. Let’s have a little exercise. Walk me through this school you’d create. What do the classrooms look like? What are the class sizes? What are the hours? Earlier this year we discussed how the Internet is revolutionizing education and featured several companies and organizations that are disrupting the online education space including Open Yale, Open Culture, Khan Academy, Academic Earth, P2PU, Skillshare, Scitable and Skype in the Classroom. In October, Knewton, an education technology startup, raised $33 million in its 4th round of funding to roll out its adaptive online learning platform. According to the 2010 Sloan Survey of Online Learning, approximately 5.6 million students took at least one web-based class during the fall 2009 semester, which marked a 21% growth from the previous year. But with its tremendous growth, online education has brought up much debate between deans, provosts and faculty. Christensen is well-known for his academic work on disruptive innovations.
MOOC Graphic1 The Problems with Coursera's Peer Assessments Cross-posted at Inside Higher Ed When I wrote about the launch of online education startup Coursera back in April, one of the things that most intrigued me most was the description that founders Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng gave of their plans for a peer-to-peer grading system. I’ve been a critic of the rise of the robot-graders — that is, the increasing usage of automated assessment software (used in other xMOOCS and online courses, as well as in other large-scale testing systems). So Coursera’s plans for peer assessment sounded pretty reasonable. The plans sounded reasonable too, I admit, as I’m someone who’s used peer review a lot in my own classes. I found my students to be pretty fair with the assessments they gave their peers. The variability of feedback: Many students are unprepared to give solid feedback to one another, and the course has done little to prepare them for such. The lack of feedback on feedback: The anonymity of feedback: The lack of community:
resourcelinkbce | Just another WordPress.com site Teaching about cybersafety is the responsibility of every teacher. Here in Australia, we are fortunate to be able to access the fantastic services of the Australian Communications and Media Authority, the government authority which has responsibility for the regulation of broadcasting, the internet, radio communications and telecommunications. Part of ACMA’s role is providing cybersafety education through the Cybersmart Program, which is designed to support and encourage participation online by providing information and education which empowers children to be safe online. It does this by providing information and resources for children, teens, parents, schools and libraries, as well as running seminars and workshops free of charge for all of these groups. This is just one example of the terrific high quality video resources available on the Cybersmart Facebook Page. The potential to connect, share, create and partake of a world of information is at student’s fingertips. Instagram – Keek –
Creatividad e innovación en el proceso de diseño | Sofia Luna Al crear un objeto, todo diseñador aspira a que sea un éxito; pero para lograrlo, es necesario llevar a cabo un buen proceso de diseño. Pero, ¿qué es un proceso de diseño adecuado? Lamentablemente es posible encontrar infinidad de variantes que en lugar de orientar, confunden aun más. John Heskett1 define al «diseño» distinguiendo las distintas funciones que la sola palabra per se puede referir: «diseño es diseñar un diseño para producir un diseño». Parsons2 menciona que cuando se buscan referencias de procesos de diseño en el campo profesional, se encuentra, por un lado al diseñador estrella —que en unos cuantos minutos boceta en un trozo de papel que entrega a su asistente (es un ejemplo extremo que no se da en todos los caso)—, y en el otro extremo al departamento de diseño de una gran empresa que realiza investigaciones, fabrica prototipos y lleva a cabo pruebas. El proceso de diseño requiere de intuición, de acción predictiva. Author Sofia Luna Monterrey Edition Mario Balcázar D.F.
Despite courtship Amherst decides to shy away from star MOOC provider After months of wooing and under close scrutiny, edX was rejected this week by Amherst College amid faculty concerns about the online course provider's business plans and impact on student learning. Amherst professors voted on Tuesday not to work with edX, a nonprofit venture started by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to provide massive open online courses, or MOOCs. In interviews, professors cited a wide range of reasons for rejecting edX -- which currently works with only 12 elite partner colleges and universities -- starting with edX's incompatibility with Amherst’s mission and ending with, to some, the destruction of higher education as we know it. Amherst – an elite liberal arts college where seminars are the norm and professors pride themselves on spending an hour on each student’s paper – has been looking for companies with which it could experiment with online education. Some faculty wanted to expand Amherst’s repertoire and experiment online.