MOOCs: Threat or Opportunity? [INFOGRAPHIC Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) continue to gain momentum and prominence among the mainstream. I think I even recently saw someone list a MOOC course under their educational experience on their LinkedIN profile! With the steady rise in MOOCs, they are being considered on a more serious level – and in some cases being seen as a threat as traditional universities are forced into budget cuts. My personal opinion on this matter is that MOOCs will elicit change, even if they are seen as a threat. Everyone knows that competition encourages innovations. Maybe these free elearning courses are what traditional universities need to further entice their offerings. What’s great about MOOCs, or distance learning for that matter, is that it makes continual education more accessible. As I have mentioned before, I think that the MOOC distance learning model is a great way to offer alternative pre-requisite education to early university students. What do you think?
Learning through Earning: Digital Badges and Professional Development 50 Fantastic Open Courses for Small Business Owners If you are a small business owner, forget about going into debt to get an MBA and learn online. Inside Online Learning is on the move! Thank you for visiting OnlineCollege.org and for the support you’ve given the Inside Online Learning blog over the past several years. While the blog will no longer be featured on this site, you can follow it over to OnlineColleges.net where blogger Melissa Venable will continue to provide information about current trends in online education and […] Online Student Verification: Is that you? While online education has come a long way in terms of design and learning assessment, there are still issues related to making sure that the students who enroll in these courses are the ones completing the work. Decoding Accreditation and the Online College On Becoming a First-Generation Grad Student The Power of an Online Career Portfolio It’s not enough in today’s competitive job market to know things.
Schools are doing Education 1.0; talking about doing Education 2.0; when they should be planning Education 3.0 Schools are doing Education 1.0; talking about doing Education 2.0; when they should be planning and implementing Education 3.0. This post seeks to compare the developments of the Internet-Web to those of education. The Internet has become an integral thread of the tapestries of most societies throughout the globe. Education 1.0 Most schools are still living within and functioning through an Education 1.0 model. The foundation of essentialist curriculum is based on traditional disciplines such as math, natural science, history, foreign language, and literature. This description (1) rings true with a lot of schools in this age of standardization, accountability, NCLB, Race-to-the-Top, Common Core Curriculum Standards, and (2) has a lot of similarity to Web 1.0 . . . Web 1.0 was an early stage of the conceptual evolution of the World Wide Web, centered around a top-down approach to the use of the web and its user interface. Derek W. Education 2.0 Steve Hardigan noted the following in 2007:
Ambient Insight | Worldwide Mobile Learning Research By Sam S. Adkins, Chief Research Officer Seattle, WA - August 23, 2011 -The GSMA released two new reports on the academic Mobile Learning market that include research findings contributed by Ambient Insight. Ambient Insight has been working with GSMA for over a year and provided the organization with data from several syndicated reports. The two reports can be downloaded at: GSMA's Mobile Education Landscape Report GSMA's Mobile Education in the United States According to the GSMA Development Fund, "We believe that providing tangible, accessible mobile services to people in developing countries is invaluable to society and can help improve people's lives." "We support the GSMA's efforts to improve people's lives with Mobile Learning," comments Ambient Insight's CEO, Tyson Greer.
How People Really Use Mobile Magazine Article Preview To read the full article, sign-in or register. HBR subscribers, click here to register for FREE access » To marketers, the prospect of reaching shoppers through their smartphones is tantalizing. But mobile doesn't always mean on the go. New data show that 68% of consumers' smartphone use happens at home. Seven primary motivations The reasons consumers use smartphones can be broken down into the goals listed at right, along with the average monthly minutes and percentage of interactions devoted to each. SOURCES "Seven Shades of Mobile" study, conducted by InsightsNow for AOL and BBDO, 2012. Making Bad Assumptions About App Use Apps can have more than one purpose. SOURCES eMarketer, 2011; IAB, 2011 Failing to Connect with Users During "Me Time" Mobile ads that consumers see during "me time" generally do poorly on effectiveness (as measured by the percentage of viewers who click on the ad, search for the product, recall the product, or make a purchase).
Everything you know about curriculum may be wrong. Really. UPDATE: Cool. This post was nominated and made the shortlist for Most Influential Post of 2012 by edublog. I’m really honored! What if the earth moves and the sun is at rest? The educational thought experiment I wish to undertake concerns curriculum. In our own era, this may seem to some as nutty as Copernicus’ idea must have seemed. Well, this works fine if the present is just like the past; if ideas turn into competent action automatically; and if theory, not effects, matters most. So, suppose knowledge is not the goal of education. As odd as that might sound for academics, it makes perfect sense in our everyday lives. In athletics this is very clear: the game is the curriculum; the game is the teacher. So, it would be very foolish to learn soccer (or child-rearing or music or how to cook) in lectures. The Copernican hypothesis eventually made sense because it did two things: made better sense of the data, and dealt with increasingly embarrassing anomalies in the Ptolemaic view.
Online Teaching: 15 Ways Online Educators Can Light Social Engagement Afire : InformED Sorting Students Into Learning Goals for improved student learning and achievement are widely shared among school districts in Canada. Within these goals, the idea of transforming learning environments for adolescent learners to address persistent gaps in student achievement and student disengagement in and from school is taking hold. At the same time, concerns about the ability of current models of schooling to equip all young people for success in contemporary society are also growing. As school systems work at issues inherent in a model of schooling designed for the past, the 21st century learning agenda also challenges them to advance new processes and outcomes for learning. In the context of the transition from an industrial to post-industrial world, educators have been called upon to consider ideas about teaching and learning that once tended to exist on the margins. Increased calls for secondary school redesign may signal a readiness for considering how schooling might be (radically) different. [1] M. [2] J.
"Flow" and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi - Austega Information Services Pronounced "chicks send me high" according to the Professor! This item in based on a public lecture presented by Professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in Sydney on 17 March 1999, organized by the School of Leisure & Tourism Studies at the University of Technology Sydney. I have heard of Csikszentmihalyi's theory of flow in other writings but have not as yet read any of his own works. It is certainly possible that the following does not adequately reflect his views! Csikszentmihalyi opened the lecture with an account of his name which included reference to its Hungarian/Transylvanian roots. He has looked at many different answers to this question in domains as separate as art, religion, and sport, and in the past as well as the present, and sees that there are many different forms of answer. "How to live life as a work of art, rather than as a chaotic response to external events..." He started with artists, or with those that were "creating meaning". How does it feel to be in "the flow"?
Flow – A Measure of Student Engagement When I first heard about Czikszentmihalyi’s “Flow” concept and research, I became quite intrigued with this research. Its face validity immediately resonated with me. I always cherished those times in my own life when I was so fully engaged that I had no other thoughts than the task at hand, with joy coming purely from the engagement. I never had a name for it but Czikszentmihalyi did and conducted research on it. The characteristics of “Flow” according to Czikszentmihalyi are: Completely involved, focused, concentrating – with this either due to innate curiosity or as the result of trainingSense of ecstasy – of being outside everyday realityGreat inner clarity – knowing what needs to be done and how well it is goingKnowing the activity is doable – that the skills are adequate, and neither anxious or boredSense of serenityTimeliness – thoroughly focused on present, don’t notice time passingIntrinsic motivation – whatever produces “flow” becomes its own reward Questions for Thought”
70+ Web Tools Organized For Bloom's Digital Taxonomy The number of web tools currently available to teachers, administrators, and students is downright absurd. You can’t swing an iPad without hitting a free web tool looking to revolutionize your classroom. Luckily, there are a few brave souls out in the world wide web attempting to organize the chaos a bit. We like to take our best shot here at Edudemic but also like to showcase some of the great organizing done by others. The web tools are all listed (and clickable!) NOTE: You can click on any of the web tools listed in the presentation to go to their respective website. Source of top image: Wikispaces
Online Learning: A User’s Guide to Forking Education | Online Learning At exactly this moment, online education is poised (and threatening) to replicate the conditions, courses, structures, and hierarchical relations of brick-and-mortar industrial-era education. Cathy N. Davidson argued exactly this at her presentation, “Access Demands a Paradigm Shift,” at the 2013 Modern Language Association conference. The mistake being made, I think, is a simple and even understandable one, but damning and destructive nonetheless. Those of us responsible for education (both its formation and care) are hugging too tightly to what we’ve helped build, its pillars, policies, economies, and institutions. The discussion forum, currently the holy grail of “engagement” inside most online courses, is particularly problematic. Rather than simply transplanting the Lego castle of education from one platform to another, we need to start dismantling it piece by piece, all the while examining the pieces and how they fit together. [Photo by wizgd]
The Evolution of Online Schooling Embed This Infographic <a href=" src=" width="500"></a><br /><br />An infographic by the team at <a href=" Degree Search</a></br> What humble beginnings begot the massive explosion of online schooling? 1930’s – Radio education was tried, but unsuccessful 1940’s – Military successfully uses TV education during WWII 1950 – Henry Ford begins long-term support of distance learning, starting with televised educational programs 1960 – University of Illinois developed PLATO (Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations) and uses linked computer terminals for remote lectures 1969 – Internet founded, opening the door to more online learning 1971 – Ivan Illich writes Deschooling Society, describing a computer-based education network 1989 – University of Phoenix becomes first online correspondence school 1999 – U.S. References:
Kids can't use computers... and this is why it should worry you - Coding 2 Learn TL;DR? Why not just go watch another five second video of a kitten with its head in a toilet roll, or a 140 character description of a meal your friend just stuffed in their mouth. “nom nom”. This blog post is not for you. The phone rang through to my workroom. It was one of the school receptionists explaining that there was a visitor downstairs that needed to get on the school’s WiFi network. iPad in hand I trotted on down to the reception to see a young twenty-something sitting on a chair with a MacBook on her knee. I smiled and introduced myself as I sat down beside her. ‘I’ll need to be quick. She reevaluated her categorisation of me. I looked at the MacBook. I handed back the MacBook and the woman opened up Safari. I’ve heard this sentence so many times now from students and staff, that I have a stock reaction. I decided that the young woman would probably not appreciate the sarcasm, and took the MacBook off her so I could add in the county’s proxy server settings. Parents Schools