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Are MOOC’s really about FREE education? Coursera reveals how it intends to generate revenue off of “freely” available MOOC’s. In fact, many MOOC companies are launching business models where students and institutions will pay.Competition heats up between MOOC’s and traditional LMS companies. To be clear Coursera, Udacity and others are simply learning management systems bundled with high quality content. In fact “It’s an LMS [learning management system] that’s wrapped around a very high-quality course,” says Daphne Koller, a Coursera co-founder. “It’s not just the box, it’s a course in a box.”
IRRODL (the International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning) has once again produced a fascinating themed edition, this time about the application of information science approaches to online learning.
You love to learn. Your students, colleagues, and parents love to learn. But what kind of styles of learning are most effective for each party? Surely there is no one-size-fits-all approach to learning. After all, we’re seeing a dramatic increase in the number of learning tools made available and they cover an array of learning styles. Read through the following infographic to get a detailed look at the 7 styles of learning. Which is the most effective style for you? What about what works for your students or peers? It might be time to consider that the learning style that works for you may not be the best style for others!
"Rather, it is going to be about recognizing that in this day and age, in order to keep up with the speed of business, we can no longer try and organize and manage everything everyone needs to learn (ie by training or “blending”), so we need think more about supporting individuals and teams as they organize and manage their own learning and performance needs." Comment: how true! But how do we do that? Jane's chart gives some indications about roles to be fulfilled. The hard work is of course fleshing this out. (peter sloep, @pbsloep)
Via Peter B. Sloep
This project sought to identify effective strategies that teachers can use within a blended learning environment to enhance learner engagement and achievement. A mixed-method approach was used to collect and analyse data. In total, 541 participants from two North Island universities participated in this project. Ten effective engagement strategies were identified, covering engagement at the beginning of a course, during a course, and re-engaging learners.From the project findings, five conclusions were reached...
Via Kim Flintoff
Robin Good: If you are looking for ways to expand your horizon of content sources that you can use to find valuable content for your curated news channel, Pawan Deshpande, founder and CEO of Curata, has done an excellent job of listing and describing the many alternatives available to you.
While many beginner curators rely on their set of RSS feeds and on simple web searches to find new and interesting stuff on their topic of interest, there are a dozen more content source types that can be tapped to find relevant stuff. This article helps you start learning where to look to find them.
Useful. Resourceful. 8/10
Full article: http://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2012/12/sources-content-curation-inspiration/
Via Robin Good, gdecugis, Gilbert Faure au nom de l'ASSIM
Want to know if you're correctly integrating technology into your classroom? This matrix and insight will help you get a firm grasp on what to do. The Technology Integration Matrix (TIM) incorporates five interdependent characteristics of meaningful learning environments: active, collaborative, constructive, authentic, and goal directed (Jonassen, Howland, Moore, & Marra, 2003). The TIM associates five levels of technology integration (i.e., entry, adoption, adaptation, infusion, and transformation) with each of the five characteristics of meaningful learning environments. Together, the five levels of technology integration and the five characteristics of meaningful learning environments create a matrix of 25 cells.
Via Anne Whaits
A recent study suggests that our modern lifestyles are making us “less intelligent” than our ancestors, at least at a genetic level. This research echoes concerns Einstein had when he supposedly said, “I fear the day that technology will surpass our human interaction. The world will have a generation of idiots.”
The immediate availability of information has created a particular conundrum in our modern society. When it takes a mere few seconds to find information about almost any topic, the value of knowledge and expertise is being devalued as information becomes cheaper and more accessible. This is despite the fact that information, knowledge and expertise are fundamentally different entities.
Despite the tremendous growth of online education programs, student retention for online courses remains problematic. The attrition rate from online universities is often cited as 20% to 50% (Diaz, 2002). With startling percentages of students leaving online educational programs, the question becomes “What should an institution do to encourage, inspire, and retain students in its online educational programs?” The responses will vary; however, there is no denying the importance of the foundation course. The foundation course is a student’s first taste of online learning and therefore must provide students with a positive learning experience. To help ensure a successful first experience, I offer this baker’s dozen of recommendations.
As the cyclical and seemingly never ending debate about education rages on, the topic - somewhat ironically, often poses more questions than it provides answ.er. Education is about inspiring ones mind not just filling their head
I just came across this graphic and thought you might be interested to have a look as well. This is basically a list of 7 habits of effective teachers using technology. I really like how these habits...
Via Maria Margarida Correia, Rui Guimarães Lima
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Youtube has a great tool called Spotlight that lets you make any video interactive. It’s really handy for lessons and quizzes. Essentially, you can ask students a question — or a series of questions — and when they answer show them a personalized video response according to how they did. Quizzes aren’t always the most exciting things in the world, so this adds a bit of adventure to the experience. This kind of personalization works great for our GMAT prep course, but any teacher can use the process to create a fun, interactive Youtube lesson.
"How can we escape this new buzz about MOOCs, since the launch of Coursera? Is there anything else than the bubble effect created by the media that is part of the strategy itself? ... This massive commercial war on education is now launched and everyone is supposed to adopt a strategy to counter it, especially in Europe, and this is what theTimes Higher Education reports for England’s Futurelearn consortium ..."
Via Peter B. Sloep
Good news for open data lovers in the European Union and beyond: the European Commission on Christmas Eve quietly pushed live the public beta version of its all-new open data portal.
Gagne’s theory suggests a sequential, orderly process--the nine steps. And it leads to a desired end place--effective instruction/training. If you’re in the world of instructional design, training, or human performance improvement, effective training is the desired end place you’re interested in. So we don't have to tell you why you’d want to know what those nine events are. So what are these nine events of instruction, you ask?Gain learner's attentionInform learner of the objectiveStimulate learner to recall prior related knowledgePresent material to learnerProvide learning guidance to learnerElicit performance from learnerProvide feedback to learnerAssess performance of learnerEnhance learner's retention and transference of knowledge
"I’m not sure why I have this instinct to defend MOOCs. ... The thing that galls me is this tendency of MOOC critics to criticise problems as being specific to MOOCs whereas in fact, they are problems faced by education in general. Comment: Any innovation - technological, educational, a mix of both - almost invariably meets with both resistance and enthusiasm. In the way its value is assessed, objectively acertainable properties are mixed with the values we as prospective users attach to these properties. Such values may have to do with culture, but they may also be purely utalitarian (does it make my work any easier, and if so when?). When inovations are still in the works, an additional factor needs to be added to the mix, the uncertainty about the future shape of the innovation, which in turn is influenced by our current, neccessarily provisional assessment of it. So if we want to evaluate MOOCs and determine whether they are an important educational innovation or just a rehash of old and not so good ideas, we set ourselves a difficult task. Dominik Lukeš in his blogs has not shied away from doing this (see for example his The Great MOOC Slander? Realities and Narratives of Education and Learning, published September 20th and Scooped in these pages). He has found himself siding with the people who hold off their verdict; indeed, he believes you need to dip you feet into them to see what they are reall worth. I find this laudable, because I tend to believe that killing off something too early, before it has been able to show its full potential, implies that we miss out on a lot of good opportunities. However, with MOOCs the stakes are high, given the involvement of venture capital and the diminishing willingness of goverments and other public funders to foot the educational bill. We stand to chance to loose education as we know it, and only after the fact discover that what we got in return is a lot worse. In such an atmosphere, our arguments must be absolutely spot on. Here Dominik defends MOOCs by essentially saying that they are no more wrong than education as we know it. Motivation is the problem of traditional schooling, so it is for studying with MOOCs. True though it may be, it still is a fallacious argument. Something can't be right because it is equally wrong as something else. If there is something wrong with traditional education, and many would say it is, then we need to look for ways to improve it. Following Ivan Illich (Deschooling Society, 1973!), Roger Schank has a very radical answer: get rid of schools (http://tiny.cc/ryvznw). Other believe the system of schools itself can be improved upon. Whichever, Dominik's argument fails to establish that MOOCs are the answer, or even a serious candidate. But there could of course be other arguments... (peter sloep, @pbsloep)
Via Peter B. Sloep
While there are a ton of essential skills that today's students need in order to succeed in tomorrow's world, learning to efficiently manage -- and to evaluate the reliability of -- the information that they stumble across online HAS to land somewhere near the top of the "Muy Importante" list. Which is why I had a few of my students experimenting with Scoop.it this week: .. Specifically, they put together this collection of resources spotlighting the range of perspectives people have on New York City's decision to ban the sale of sugary drinks in containers larger than 16 ounces. Designed to give users the chance to create curated collections of resources on topics that they are interested in, Scoop.it is a wicked mashup of digital goodness - part feed reader, part blogging tool, and part social bookmarking service. ... Basically, Scoop.it can become a one-stop shop for (1). teaching kids to search, (2). giving kids chances to manage information, to evaluate sources and to build collections and (3). allowing kids to easily publish content on topics that they care about.
Via Heiko Idensen
Technology has changed the way people think, creating "a new brain," two Italian psychology experts say. … Psychologist Maria Beatrice Togo, who collaborated with psychotherapist Tonino Cantelmi on a new book released Friday, "Technoliquidity," postulates entertainment technology, such as video games, "has triggered an evolutionary leap, just like the written word 3,000 years ago." ''It has changed our memory, our brain has lost certain connections," the Italian news agency ANSA quoted Togo as saying. "Some circuits have been lost and others have developed, circuits that are more closely linked to perception.
This post is by Dr Katherine Firth who works in Academic Skills at the University of Melbourne, with a particular interest in research student literacies. Basically, Katherine is a Thesis Whisperer...
Wondering how social media affects your brain? You're not alone. The usage of the top sites has had a measured effect you should know about!
So what exactly would you give up to keep your access to social media free of boundaries? Studies show that more and more often, younger generations will say that having regular access to social media at work is more important to them than what their salary is.
In fact, some would-be employees say that, if they can’t login to Facebook on the job, then the position isn’t worth it. So what’s so important about social media that we value it more than our jobs? The following infographic takes a look at how much we love social media, and why.
Innovative technologies—from smartphones and smart TVs to iPads and even Leap Pads for preschoolers— have launched our children into a digital age, a period in which the average teenager texts 60 times every day, a large majority of teens have a social networking site, and the combined use of media by students averages 6.5 to nearly 10 hours daily, much of it in a multi-tasking environment. This generation of students truly has been born in a time very different from that of their parents, school board members, principals, and most of their teachers.
Via Nik Peachey
If eduTecher founder and FETC presenter Adam Bellow had his way, K-12 educators would jump out of the technology "echo chambers" that many of them are trapped in and test out new tools, implement new applications, collaborate among each other, and...
Via JohnThompson, Dennis T OConnor
Formative assessment began long before blended learning. Teachers have used formative assessment for decades as a method to get feedback about how students are progressing in their learning (see education.com). But formative assessment is particularly in the spotlight now because it features so prominently in emerging blended learning programs. In fact, it's hard to imagine effective blended learning without strong formative assessment at its foundation.
Via Dennis T OConnor
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