Google offers 15,000 online scholarships to new and seasoned African devs

By Alissa McAloon, Gamasutra
Google is acting on a pledge made last year to provide digital skills training to African citizens by launching the Africa Web and Android Scholarship program to support software developers in the country. Through a partnership with Udacity and Andela, Google is offering free access to a 2-month long single course on Udacity’s online platform to 15,000 African developers in addition to 500 6-month long ‘nanodegree’ scholarships to some who complete the first program.

https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/315837/Google_offers_15000_online_scholarships_to_new_and_seasoned_African_devs.php

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from Educational Technology http://people.uis.edu/rschr1/et/?p=38169

Top 10 TED talks for EdTech

by Matthew Lynch, Tech Edvocate

TED (Technology, Entertainment, and Design) formed in 1984, and since then, its series of short videos have revolutionized motivational speeches and the technology. With the click of a button, you can access powerful speeches that will make you help you embrace change and new ideas. Are you looking for some inspiration? TED-Ed offers tons of great educational content, and it has a significant amount of comment aimed at the EdTech industry. By watching these talks, you will gain insight into how students think and what teachers want in the classroom.

http://www.thetechedvocate.org/top-10-ted-talks-edtech/

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from Educational Technology http://people.uis.edu/rschr1/et/?p=38154

Microsoft Education and Open Up Resources announce partnership to deliver top rated math curriculum

by Microsoft
Today we are announcing the integration between Open Up Resources curricula and Microsoft Education for Back to School 2018. Open Up Resources is a nonprofit working to develop the highest quality full-course OER curricula, standards-aligned, and provided for free to promote instructional equity. This curriculum was developed by Illustrative Mathematics, and currently covers 6th – 8th Grade Math. Recently, EdReports rated this curriculum with their highest ever rating. Any teacher can now easily sign up to use the Open Up Resources curriculum. With today’s announcement, Microsoft Education is offering this curriculum through OneNote , Forms and custom dashboards. This solution is free and can be used by teachers and students on any platform and device.

 

Microsoft Education and Open Up Resources announce partnership to deliver top rated math curriculum

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from Educational Technology http://people.uis.edu/rschr1/et/?p=38144

Jump-Start a Career With an Online Graduate Degree

By Courtney Rubin, US News

New online master’s degree options offer students paths to business, engineering and more. Online graduate education, once a caveat emptor Wild West of questionable quality, has come a long way. “The online degree market is pretty well established, especially in terms of acceptance in the employer community,” says Sean Gallagher, executive director of the Center for the Future of Higher Education and Talent Strategy at Northeastern University and author of “The Future of University Credentials,” published last year. The ability to deliver instruction online has opened up a world of possibility beyond traditional degrees. Both for-profit companies and universities – including elite ones – are racing to market with a range of options, from traditional academic degrees to occupational credentialing and professional development.

https://www.usnews.com/higher-education/online-education/articles/2017-03-29/jump-start-a-career-with-an-online-graduate-degree

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from Educational Technology http://people.uis.edu/rschr1/et/?p=25727

Online courses serve to promote higher education

by Feng Shuang, Ed., ECNS

Su Dekuang, a math professor at Zhejiang University, became an online celebrity in China recently after he started a calculus class online and attracted more than 13,000 participants. According to some reports, Su was already very popular among the students in Zhejiang University. When his calculus class opened for registrations, over 3,000 students lined up even though there were only 150 places. So we can see it is quite natural that the professor’s online course would appeal to a lot of students. However, the popularity of his online course reveals the difficulty university students have in taking the courses they are interested in. Such open online courses offer the opportunity for students to take a course they would otherwise not be able to take.

http://www.ecns.cn/voices/2017/03-30/251460.shtml

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from Educational Technology http://people.uis.edu/rschr1/et/?p=25742

Online education — it’s happening

by Ashley Hiruko, Lynden Tribune

The internet continues to transform various areas of our day-to-day life, from online banking to cable-free television streaming. Add online education to the list. Washington Connections Academy is one of many providers of online learning. This is the program’s first year in the state, with grades 9 and 10 to be added next year. Enrollment for 2017-2018 just began. Among the reasons for enrolling children in an alternative form of education, flexibility is always high on the list.

http://www.lyndentribune.com/news/online-education-it-s-happening/article_57d13d96-1488-11e7-b58e-cf144e6c9f45.html

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from Educational Technology http://people.uis.edu/rschr1/et/?p=25712

Coursera is offering a way to get a real master’s degree for a lot less money

by Amy X. Wang, Quartz

Coursera announced a new program that curiously departs from its prior offerings: a MOOC curriculum that leads to an actual degree. Starting this fall, users will be able to earn a computer-science master’s degree in data science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign—whose computer-science graduate program is ranked fifth in the US—through a series of “stackable” online courses on Coursera’s site. It’s this “stackability” that’s intriguing. Users can test out the program by taking some courses for free and earning specialization certificates. Then, they’ll decide whether they want to pursue additional classes—which include direct contact with the university faculty—for the full degree, at a cost of $20,000 (less than either an on-campus degree or a traditional online degree). There’s no need to commit to anything from the start, as there is with most graduate programs physical or digital.

http://qz.com/650283/coursera-is-offering-a-way-to-get-a-real-masters-degree-for-a-lot-less-money/

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from Educational Technology http://people.uis.edu/rschr1/et/?p=15493

You Can’t Build a Wall High Enough

By Reihan Salam, Slate

In the near future, technology will allow foreigners to work in the United States without ever setting foot on our soil. What is holoportation? Basically, the mad scientists at Microsoft Research have cooked up a way to transmit pretty convincing three-dimensional holograms of friends, family, and (here’s the important part) co-workers in real time across vast distances. Most impressively, you can interact with these holographic projections, almost as though you were physically in the same place. If I were capable of explaining it any better than that, I would be in a garage building my own holoportation device. The video below gives you some sense of the technology’s potential, and how it works in practice.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2016/03/holoportation_and_virtual_immigration_will_transform_the_global_economy.html

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from Educational Technology http://people.uis.edu/rschr1/et/?p=15492

Penn’s Al Filreis Wins a Coursera Outstanding Educator Award

by Jeanne Leong, Penn News

Al Filreis, an English professor at the University of Pennsylvania, is the recipient of an inaugural Coursera Outstanding Educator Award. Filreis was honored with the Transformation Award, given to an instructor who has contributed the most to the platform’s vision of enabling anyone, anywhere to transform their life through its massive open online courses, or MOOCs. Filreis’ Modern and Contemporary American Poetry, known as ModPo, was among the first humanities courses on the Coursera platform. The introduction to poetry class emphasizes experimental verse, from Dickinson and Whitman to the present.

https://news.upenn.edu/news/penn-s-al-filreis-wins-coursera-outstanding-educator-award

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from Educational Technology http://people.uis.edu/rschr1/et/?p=15489

The 4 C’s of Technology Integration

By Julie Davis, THE Journal

If you Google “four c’s of technology integration” you’ll get links to a myriad of “c-words” including Creativity/Creation, Consumption, Curation, Connection, Collaboration, Communication and Critical Thinking. All of these are important elements of learning and can be enhanced with the use of technology, but for the sake of this article, I am going to focus more on what devices themselves can do, so my four C’s are the following.

http://thejournal.com/articles/2015/04/02/the-4-cs-of-technology-integration.aspx

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from Educational Technology http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/uis/edtech/~3/zVgSri1kbeQ/

How to Integrate Live Tweets Into Your Presentation

By Pamela DeLoatch, Edudemic

Outside of the classroom, Twitter is huge, with 284 million users logging in each month from around the globe. Each one of those users follows and tweets 140-character messages on a regular basis. But can—and should—this real-time social media be used during a classroom presentation? More teachers are beginning to incorporate Twitter into their lesson plans. Educators who use Twitter say it increases classroom interaction and keeps students tuned in.

http://www.edudemic.com/how-to-integrate-live-tweets-into-your-presentations/

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from Educational Technology http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/uis/edtech/~3/krgI_ELL4g0/

Group urges checks on online learning at MIT

By Leon Lin, the Tech – MIT

Concerned about the pace of change brought about by online learning, an Institute subcommittee is now preparing to recommend a “face-time” degree requirement, strong oversight of on-campus MITx experiments, and a “conservative initial approach” to awarding credit for edX classes. “We’re not against it. Just go slow, and see what’s going to happen,” Professor Susan S. Silbey said of digital learning experiments in MIT classes. Silbey, who heads the anthropology department, is the chair of the subcommittee.

http://tech.mit.edu/V134/N15/mitx.html

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from Educational Technology http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/uis/edtech/~3/Ox6XUjBDCZc/

Social Media Vital to Professional Development

By Debra Beck, Evolllution

Formal degree and training programs provide the foundation for our career paths, but long-term professional success depends largely on the quality of our personal learning networks (PLNs). We all have basic PLNs, whether or not we recognize them as such. They typically encompass a diverse set of relationships that provide information, understanding and context for personal and professional development questions. Many of our key PLN relationships are with individuals we know and interact with on a regular basis. But adult learners are no longer limited to face-to-face interactions, thanks to a range of technology-driven environments that facilitate international networking and sharing.

http://www.evolllution.com/opinions/social-media-vital-professional-development/

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from Educational Technology http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/uis/edtech/~3/oBv-ZUngVUE/

Libraries Test a Model for Setting Monographs Free

by Jennifer Howard, Chronicle of Higher Ed

Librarians love to get free books into the hands of scholars and students who need them. Publishers love it when their books find readers—but they also need to cover the costs of turning an idea into a finished monograph. Now a nonprofit group called Knowledge Unlatched is trying out a new open-access model designed to make both librarians and publishers happy. Here’s how the “unlatching” works: Participating libraries pick a list of scholarly books they want to make open access. They pool money to pay publishers a title fee for each of those books. The title fees are meant to cover the cost of publishing each book; publishers calculate what they think is fair and share those estimates with the Knowledge Unlatched group.

http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/libraries-test-a-model-for-setting-monographs-free/51455

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