Four tips for adult digital learners

by Guy Dixon, Globe and Mail

MOOCs have become another option, along with the plethora of online courses already offered directly by postsecondary institutions, for busy adults looking to dip into online learning, whether for work or pleasure. And as a result, this has led to rapid changes in adult learning. The design of online classes has evolved dramatically in the past five years. And what is required of students online has also changed dramatically. Prospective students who choose to study online have a few key issues to consider.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/four-tips-for-adult-digital-learners/article36984396/

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Udacity’s Sebastian Thrun: ‘Silicon Valley has an obligation to reach out to all of the world’

by Chloe Cornish, Financial Times

Mr Thrun, who stepped down as chief executive in 2016, and is now company president, is a fan of adaptability. “You very carefully analyse what’s happening and you change course,” he says. To date, some 18,000 students have graduated with nanodegrees, ranging from programmes for artificial intelligence and deep machine learning, to robotics and digital marketing. Course prices vary: Udacity’s four-month introduction to self-driving car engineering, for example, costs $800, while a four-month course teaching a programming tool called React is $499. Other, longer courses cost up to $2,400.

https://www.ft.com/content/51c47f88-b278-11e7-8007-554f9eaa90ba

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Accreditation of Online Degree Programs: Frequently Asked Questions

By Jordan Friedman, US News

Accrediting agencies hold online programs to the same standards of quality as those on campus, experts say. Accreditation is a process conducted by an outside authority to ensure that a school and degree program meet certain standards of quality and rigor. Online, blended and on-campus degree programs can all be accredited. While it’s voluntary, accreditation has many benefits and, in many ways, validates a program to employers and other colleges or universities. Legitimate online degree programs are accredited by agencies recognized by either the Department of Education or the nonprofit Council for Higher Education Accreditation, known as CHEA.

http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/articles/2016-11-11/accreditation-of-online-degree-programs-frequently-asked-questions

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What Faculty Need to Know About ‘Learner Experience Design’

By Patrice Torcivia & Whitney Kilgore, EdSurge

The emerging field of Learner Experience Design or LX design is about balancing the need for quality course design with the central role of human interaction in online learning. It’s a collaborative process that engages faculty in the design and improvement of online courses. But LX design doesn’t have to be daunting or complicated. Here are three big LX ideas for faculty who may be new to online learning, and hope to create and facilitate more humanized online learning experiences.

https://www.edsurge.com/news/2016-11-10-what-faculty-need-to-know-about-learner-experience-design

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from Educational Technology http://people.uis.edu/rschr1/et/?p=20446

College leaders identify the top IT challenges

by Jarrett Carter, Educaton Dive

Security, data management and governance, and next-gen enterprise were among the top networking concerns for CIOs at Educause this year. IT impact from affordability, funding and leadership were also among chief concerns. Next generation enterprise and the digital transformation of learning were rated by attendees as the top two themes of importance during one session of the conference.

http://www.educationdive.com/news/college-leaders-identify-the-top-it-challenges/430256/

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from Educational Technology http://people.uis.edu/rschr1/et/?p=20434

HBCUs Developing Online Programs with the University of Phoenix to Survive

by Manny Otiko, Atlanta Black Star

Faced with a changing education landscape, some Historical Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) are looking at online education, reported BuzzFeed. Several HBCUs are partnering with the for-profit University of Phoenix, which seems to have developed a good track record for graduating Black students. According to BuzzFeed, almost a third of the students at the five largest for-profit colleges, who provide mainly online classes, are Black. In 2013, for-profit colleges had 275,000 black students out of a total of 877,000 enrollees. In that year, HBCUs enrolled 311,000 students. Johnny C. Taylor Jr., president and CEO of the Thurgood Marshall College Fund, which supports most of the country’s public HBCUs, said Black schools have been slow to adopt online education, but it’s the future.

https://atlantablackstar.com/2015/11/12/hbcus-developing-online-programs-university-phoenix-survive-changing-education-landscape/

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Why I’m Against the Online Lecture

BY WILLIAM FENTON, PC Magazine

The venerable lecture has few allies today. While many in the humanities have long preferred seminar-style instruction, our friends in the sciences have begun to give the lecture a second look. A growing body of research suggests that lectures simply are not that effective, especially when compared to active-learning models. In a recent meta-analysis of some 225 studies of undergraduate STEM teaching methods, Scott Freeman, principal lecturer in biology at the University of Washington, and his colleagues found that active-learning methods both reduced failure rates and increased exam performance. However, reports of the death of the lecture may be exaggerated, to paraphrase a famous writer. Several recent pieces have advocated for the lecture as a source of active learning. While that might apply to some traditional college courses, it is far from the case among massive open online courses (MOOCs) where video lectures remain ubiquitous, to the detriment of learners.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2494971,00.asp

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Lawrence educator named Blended and Online Learning Teacher of the Year

By Rochelle Valverde, Lawrence Journal-World

After having taught using traditional teacher-led instruction for 30 years, Lawrence elementary school teacher Paula Barr was about to try a different method — called blended learning — that also uses online material and individual or small-group work. “As a traditional teacher, all my 25 sponges sat at their desks and I poured into them everything that I thought they needed to know — I decided when, how and how much,” Barr said. “As a blended learning teacher, I take my sponges and throw them in the pool.”

http://www2.ljworld.com/news/2015/nov/12/lawrence-teacher-named-blended-and-online-learning/

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from Educational Technology http://people.uis.edu/rschr1/et/?p=14330

Purdue offers free online computer programming course to Indiana high school students

by Purdue

Purdue University is offering a popular introductory computer science and programming course for free to high school students in Indiana. The online course, “Introduction to Object-Oriented Programming,” offers an introduction to computer science and the Java programming language. The course will not be graded or count toward credit requirements, but it covers material similar to the computer science Advanced Placement course and could prepare a student to test out of Purdue’s or another institution’s freshman programming class.

http://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/releases/2014/Q4/purdue-offers-free-online-computer-programming-course-to-indiana-high-school-students.html

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Will online learning melt snow days?

By Allie Gross, Education Dive

In the 2013-14 school year, Indiana implemented a “virtual option” for inclement weather, allowing 40 schools to continue learning as the polar vortex bore down upon the heartland. The plan worked so well that Indiana is going to try it out again. Of course, not every school can implement a virtual alternative. Indiana’s Department of Education ultimately required districts providing the option to meet tech criteria.

http://www.educationdive.com/news/will-online-learning-melt-snow-days/330714/

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Why I Am Teaching a Course Called “Wasting Time on the Internet”

BY KENNETH GOLDSMITH, the New Yorker

Come January, fifteen University of Pennsylvania creative-writing students and I will sit silently in a room with nothing more than our devices and a Wi-Fi connection, for three hours a week, in a course called “Wasting Time on the Internet.” Although we’ll all be in the same room, our communication will happen exclusively through chat rooms and listservs, or over social media. Distraction and split attention will be mandatory. So will aimless drifting and intuitive surfing. The students will be encouraged to get lost on the Web, disappearing for three hours in a Situationist-inspired dérive, drowsily emerging from the digital haze only when class is over. We will enter a collective dreamspace, an experience out of which the students will be expected to render works of literature. To bolster their practice, they’ll explore the long history of the recuperation of boredom and time-wasting, through critical texts by thinkers such as Guy Debord, Mary Kelly, Erving Goffman, Raymond Williams, and John Cage.

http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/wasting-time-on-the-internet

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Survey: Nearly half of schools to move to BYOT in near future

by School CIO

A few years ago, the notion of using a smartphone as a legitimate learning tool seemed improbable, if not out-and-out foolish. Students, in most cases were either prohibited from bringing their mobile phones to school, or at the very least told to leave them in their lockers or turned off and stored in their backpacks during school hours. However, according to a recent survey conducted by MDR’s EdNET Insight research services for Mimio, what many students are going to hear is, “Class, turn on your mobile phone; it’s time to learn.” The nine-question survey polled more than 150 educational professionals, including school district technology, instructional media services, and curriculum directors, coordinators and specialists. Respondents were asked the impact that consumer technology devices and bring-your-own-technology (BYOT) initiatives were likely to have on future interactive classroom planning and purchases.

http://www.schoolcio.com/cio-trends-&-resources/0114/survey-nearly-half-of-schools-to-move-to-byot-in-near-future/52928

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Six laws of tech adoption (part 3 of 7)

By Gary Shattuck, CIO Advisor

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In my last blog, I began explaining the first of what I call the Six Laws of Technology Adoption in Education. This first law was the Law of Scarcity. Today’s blog is about the second of these six laws: The Law of Change. In 1970, Alvin Toffler in Future Shock predicted that in the 21st century accelerating change would become endemic. This eerily prophetic prediction is causing and will continue to cause major disruptions in education beyond any of our imaginations. The best we can hope for is to learn to quickly adapt to our fast-changing societal and educational issues. For example, in 2001, Marc Prensky described what he saw as a different type of student emerging in our society: the digital native. As Prensky articulated, these new type of students were born into the digital age and know nothing else but a digital world. In fact, Jane Healy described in Endangered Minds that these digital natives’ brains have been structurally changed by this digital technology. As a result, 90% of today’s students are visual learners. This is an example of the accelerating change that is disrupting education.

http://www.schoolcio.com/Default.aspx?tabid=136&entryid=6667

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Being digitally naked—are we too connected?

By Carl Hooker, CIO Advisor

You ever have that heart-stopping feeling of fright when you leave the house without your phone? What about that feeling of exposure when you are the dentist office and realize you don’t have your favorite tablet to help you pass the time while catching up on episodes of Orange is the New Black? Isn’t it amazing how quickly we’ve become attached to our devices? They’ve become more than an accessory, they’ve become part of our clothes. You wouldn’t leave the house without clothes on would you? In September, I attended the Mobile 2013 Experience in Arizona and was faced with quite a conundrum. My phone was about to die and we were heading into the networking reception part of the event. I didn’t want to carry an iPad or laptop around with me, but didn’t want to be disconnected. It dawned on me the irony that I was about to head into a networking event and felt the need the to carry my phone with me to stay connected. Much like Linus of Peanuts fame, my iPhone is my security blanket. I figured I had two options at that point: either stay in my room and communicate and connect digitally with folks or actually go into the event without my device.

http://www.schoolcio.com/Default.aspx?tabid=136&entryid=6726

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