Tutoring to grow, go online at UA

By Jaime Adame, Arkansas Online

Expanded tutoring and other academic support are in the works for UA’s Center for Learning and Student Success, said Charlotte Lee, the center’s director. Two full-time assistant directors will be hired soon to help manage and train students like Khang to help their peers. This spring, a pilot program will begin offering online tutoring support for online classes, Lee said. The university may also expand academic coaching, which involves one-on-one sessions between students and professional staff members to improve study habits and deal with anxiety. Currently, the center employs two part-time academic coaches, Lee said.

http://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2015/dec/25/tutoring-to-grow-go-online-at-ua-201512-1/

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Chinese classes go online following pollution red alert

by GBTIMES BEIJING

As part of the smog red-alert in Beijing, and now Tianjin, online platforms have been helping to keep thousands of students in Beijing learning. “Li Ruohan, could you tell me how to solve this question?” “My answer is…” This back-and-forth has taken place during an online class between teacher Li Qiaomei and her student Li Ruohan, who are both from Beijing Jingshan School. Though the teacher has been unable to give guidance face-to-face over the past two days, it’s not a problem for Li Qiaomei, who is helping her students prepare for the upcoming college entrance exams in June.

http://gbtimes.com/china/classes-go-online-following-pollution-red-alert

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Computers now a qualified higher ed expense for 529 plans

by Stefanie Botelho, University Business

Congress passed and the President is expected to sign the “Protecting Americans from Tax Hikes (PATH) Act of 2015.” The passage of this legislation qualifies computer equipment and related technology and services as “qualified higher education expenses” when purchased for use primarily by the beneficiary of a 529 college savings plan during any years the beneficiary is enrolled at an eligible educational institution. The Protecting Americans from Tax Hikes Act of 2015 was created to extend or permanently renew a variety of federal tax provisions, along with a number of new tax changes. “For years, CollegeAdvantage, along with other 529 plans around the country, has lobbied legislators to establish the purchase of computers as a qualified 529 expense.

http://www.universitybusiness.com/news/congress-approves-computers-qualified-higher-ed-expense-529-plans

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Online learning enjoys a surge in China

By Zhao Xinying (China Daily)

Online education has been developing rapidly in China in the past few years, with both the number of programs and the amount of financing growing at a high speed, a blue book has reported. The number of educational science and technology enterprises has been growing at 50 percent since 2013, a year dubbed by sources in the Chinese education industry as the first year of the online education era, according to the Blue Book on the Current Situation in China’s Educational Science and Technology which was released in early December. Compiled jointly by online education media jiemodui.com, Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent as well as WaleyWorks Career Center, a company that provides services to job seekers and businesses, the blue book said the number of online education programs has surpassed 3,000 as of September. By November, financing in China’s online education rocketed to $1.76 billion in total.

http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/bizchina/tech/2015-12/18/content_22741412.htm

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The Next-Gen IT Leader

by Brandon Bernier, EDUCAUSE Review

The old saying is true: What got us here won’t get us there. Higher education is experiencing significant disruption, and those of us in the profession are watching as institutional models that have existed for centuries are coming into question and as colleges and universities look to adapt to an ever-changing landscape. Accountability demands from legislators, taxpayers, parents, and students have risen to new levels while costs for institutions continue to rise as well. In his EDUCAUSE Review article “The New Leadership Challenge,” Michael Kubit, deputy CIO at Case Western Reserve University, highlights the collision course ahead for the IT field: the higher education landscape is changing radically at the same time that a large number of CIOs are planning to retire in the next five to ten years.

http://er.educause.edu/articles/2015/10/the-next-gen-it-leader

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Schools to offer full-time virtual learning

by Rhonda Siebecker, Baraboo News Republic

Some Baraboo students will have the option of attending classes online after the Baraboo School Board approved a full-time virtual learning program Monday. Part-time online courses have been offered for several years at Baraboo schools, but the district is prepared to take it a step further. “The state now provides new flexibility that allows us to go full-time,” District Administrator Lori Mueller said. She said the full-time online education component is a “tiny sliver” of the school’s personalized learning strategic plan. Participants will be chosen by a “problem solving team” that will include online coordinator Shelly Gillmore, other school district officials and the student’s parents. They will be required to apply for the full-time virtual learning program by filling out a questionnaire.

http://www.wiscnews.com/baraboonewsrepublic/news/local/article_b94aa23d-5ef0-5eb4-a9cf-3da0ac130b4b.html

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21 education technology recommendations for 2016

By Converge Staff

The new National Education Technology Plan offers a vision and roadmap for technology-supported learning.  A new federal National Education Technology Plan reveals 21 recommendations for policymakers, administrators, teachers and teacher preparation professionals. The 2016 Plan, Future Ready Learning: Reimagining the Role of Technology in Education, articulates a vision of equity, active use, and collaborative leadership to make everywhere, all-the-time learning possible, according to the plan’s website. While acknowledging the continuing need to provide greater equity of access to technology itself, the plan goes further to call upon all involved in American education to ensure equity of access to transformational learning experiences enabled by technology.

http://www.eschoolnews.com/2015/12/15/education-technology-recommendations-749/

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College Campuses Are The New Test Facilities For Emerging Technology

by Melissa Tait, Tech Crunch

Consider, for instance, the University of Michigan is using VR technology to offer prospective student-athletes a behind-the-scenes look at the facilities and exciting game-day environment. This includes glimpses into fall camp, the stadiums and footage of the Oregon State football game — all of which offer an accurate and inclusive representation of a football player’s life at UM for a would-be student-athlete weighing his (perhaps numerous) college options. While some colleges use new technology to strategically draw prospective students, others use it purely as a means to generate buzz and lay the foundation for its potential application to the real world. By setting an aggressive pace for technology adoption, colleges around the country are pioneering the ways in which we will work and live. Students, having grown accustomed to using virtual reality, driverless cars and Google Glass in their college lives, will inevitably carry these tools to future jobs and their personal lives.

http://techcrunch.com/2015/12/12/college-campuses-are-the-new-test-facilities-for-emerging-technology/#.o1vp04r:gXtg

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Did you love watching lectures from your professors?

by JILL BARSHAY, Hechinger Report

Online course data show that video lectures are not the best way to learn. Koedinger didn’t study live lectures, but recorded ones that were part of a free online psychology class produced by the Georgia Institute of Technology. He and a team of four Carnegie Mellon researchers mined the data from almost 28,000 students who took the course over the Coursera platform for Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). They found that video lecturers were the least effective way to learn. Students who primarily learned through watching video lectures did the worst both on the 11 quizzes during the 12-week course and on the final exam. Students who primarily learned through reading, or a combination of reading and video lectures, did a bit better, but not much. The students who did the best were those who clicked on interactive exercises.

http://hechingerreport.org/data-mining-shows-that-recorded-video-lectures-are-the-least-effective-way-to-learn/

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Online school: The way out for bullying victims?

By Charity Lindsey, Desert Dispatch

With one out of every four students reporting being bullied during the school year, according to StopBullying.gov, online school has become an ideal option for some families. Such was the case for one Hesperia family. Hiers said that after many meetings with Joel’s teacher, the principal and school district officials, all that she was told was that “they’d investigate it.” “I told the school I started paperwork to get him in CAVA,” Hiers said, referring to Joel’s current online school, California Virtual Academies. “A child cannot learn anything if they’re worried about someone trying to hit them.” Joel began at CAVA this school year, and Hiers said that since then he’s become “a much happier kid.”

http://www.desertdispatch.com/article/20151212/NEWS/151219978

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A state-by-state look at software skills

By Laura Devaney, eCampus News

A new look at the most in-demand software skills by state could help students hone the skills most needed by employers in their area. A survey from MidAmerica Nazarene University used data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics to identify the most common occupations in the country. The investigative team used listings from Capterra, a free service that matches businesses to appropriate software, to find the 10-15 most commonly used computer programs in each industry. The team searched for those software keywords across millions of resumes and job postings on Indeed, and then found the biggest gaps between posted job listings and posted resumes.

http://www.ecampusnews.com/technologies/state-software-skills-742/

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Oswego District 308 To Offer Evening, Online Classes For High School

By Bernie Tafoya, CBS Chicago

Many school districts have altered their start times to better coincide with times students learn better, but a far west suburban school district is taking things one step further without raising taxes. Starting in the second semester next month in Oswego District 308, some high school students will be able to take classes like Algebra II and English IV starting at 5:30 in the evening. And they can take U.S. History and Geometry online. “The concept is around meeting the needs of students,” says District 308 Superintendent Matthew Wendt.

http://chicago.cbslocal.com/2015/12/11/oswego-schools-to-offer-evening-online-classes/

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Humans take note: Artificial intelligence just got a lot smarter

by Amina Khan, LA Times

Today’s artificial intelligence may not be that clever, but it just got much quicker on the uptake. A learning program designed by a trio of researchers can now recognize and draw handwritten characters after seeing them only a few times, just as a human can. And can do it so well that people can’t tell the difference. The findings, published in the journal Science, represent a major step forward in developing more powerful computer programs that learn in the ways that humans do. “For the first time, we think we have a machine system that can learn a large class of visual concepts in ways that are hard to distinguish from human learners,” study coauthor Joshua Tenenbaum from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said in a news briefing.

http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-computers-learn-new-concepts-20151110-story.html

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Startup University’s Disruption Plan: an Old-School Master’s Degree

by Christina Passadriello, Wall Street Journal

Minerva Project Inc., a startup university program with no lectures and no final exams, welcomed its first full freshman class this fall with the promise of a different kind of education. All courses take place online, and the students live in a different country each year. “We’re trying to give students cognitive tools for jobs that don’t exist yet,” says Ben Nelson, Minerva’s founder and chief executive. ​“There’s a shift from a perspective on focusing on grades to actually learning.…​We’re not here to give you a degree; we’re here to educate you.” Soon, though, Minerva will begin offering a more conventional tool: a master’s degree, so that its students can graduate with two degrees in four years, an overlap that also exists at schools like Stanford University and Yale​ University.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/education-startup-minerva-project-to-offer-masters-degree-program-1449679243

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Advance Your Career As a Web Developer With Udacity and Google

by Sue Gee, i-programmer

Enrollment opens today for Udacity’s latest nanodegree. If you want to get hired as a Senior Web Developer, join the first cohort of students to follow a curriculum devised in conjunction with Google. The Senior Web Developer Nanodegree was announced at last month’s Chrome Developer Summit. It can be seen as a follow-on to Udacity’s very first Nanodegree, Front-End Web Developer. The summary of the program which is expected to require 9-12 months if you devote 10 hours per week to it.

http://www.i-programmer.info/news/150-training-a-education/9195-advance-your-career-as-a-web-developer.html

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We Don’t Need No Stinking Badges… Or Do We?

by Edward Abeyta, Evolllution

“Badges without taxonomies, without some shared understanding, without rubrics, are meaningless,” notes Matthew Pittinsky, an assistant research professor in the school of social and family dynamics at Arizona State University and founder of Parchment, a credentials-management company. The notion of a student obtaining one large qualification rather than offer an array of micro-credentials (badges) is a thing of the past. From an employer’s point of view, the value of hiring a person with numerous mini-qualifications and a diploma provides a higher confidence in their investment as opposed to the risk involved in hiring a “blue chip” student from a brand name university.

http://evolllution.com/programming/credentials/we-dont-need-no-stinking-badges-or-do-we/

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Pearson Announces 2016 Online Learning Excellence Award Finalists

by Pearson

Pearson today announced the 20 finalists for the 2016 Online Learning Excellence Awards for outstanding K-20 leaders working in online or blended learning environments. The awards honor educators and administrators who have demonstrated measurable best practices and innovation in online education. Two award winners in each category will be announced on February 10 at Pearson’s online learning conference, Cite 2016, in Amelia Island, Florida. As part of Pearson’s commitment to inspiring and supporting excellence in online education, the company will donate $1,500 to the scholarship fund of each winner’s choice.

http://www.virtual-strategy.com/2015/12/07/pearson-announces-2016-online-learning-excellence-award-finalists#axzz3tegAYe6s

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Big trends in digital education: The MOOC is in session

by Joeanna Rebello,TNN

As course providers like edX, Coursera and others look to offer more rigorous, certificate programmes, university-compatible credits, and specializations tailored for industry, Indians are beginning to see not just knowledge, but better career prospects in MOOCs. In Coursera’s first-ever learner outcome survey in September, it emerged that 53% of the 2,076 Indian online learners polled were looking for career-building benefits, while 35% sought to further their education. Coursera has about 1.2 million Indian registrants. “Our learners may not have the option to structure their lives around their education, but rather need the flexibility to mould their education around the constraints of their life,” says Daphne Koller, Stanford professor and one of the co-founders, along with Andrew Ng, of Coursera.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/sunday-times/deep-focus/Big-trends-in-digital-education-The-MOOC-is-in-session/articleshow/50058430.cms?

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How Do You Deliver Learning?

by Andie Burjek, Chief Learning Officer

More than two-thirds of those surveyed said they would be more likely to participate in training if it were interactive and engaging. Incorporating multimedia tools such as videos, Q&A sessions or quizzes into training could promote engagement. Forty-five percent of survey respondents said being able to interact with other learners is valuable. Customization and flexibility are other important factors that could improve the effect of corporate training. When asked what qualities are important in a training program, nearly half of the respondents (47 percent) said freedom to go at their own pace. Some 48 percent said customizing training to their job function was important. “The best practice for our customers with the most effective training programs is when they deviated from the one-size-fits-all model and adopted the one-size-fits-department or one-size-fits job function model,” Ramirez said.

http://www.clomedia.com/articles/6598-how-do-you-deliver-learning

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Campus Computing Project takes pulse of higher ed IT

by  Tim Goral, University Business

The migration to the cloud among higher education and government institutions has been slow, with survey participants citing security concerns as the chief roadblock.  Nearly a third of the participants say cloud computing is “no more secure than their own, on-campus management of technology and data. And less than a fifth of institutions expect to be running mission-critical finance and student information systems on the cloud by fall 2020.”

http://www.universitybusiness.com/article/campus-computing-project-takes-pulse-higher-ed-it

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