E-Learning and Online Teaching

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Massachusetts Institute of Technology Professor Anant Agarwal has been named director of a new unit of MIT created to advance the school’s online-learning initiative. Agarwal will soon step down as director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory to devote himself more fully to the online learning unit with the working title Open Learning Enterprise. He will continue to lead CSAIL until a successor is identified by Ian Waitz, dean of the school of engineering.

"The development of the capabilities needed to make MITx a reality will require substantial ongoing effort," MIT Provost L. Rafael Reif said. "Professor Agarwal's initial goals are the rapid organization of the enterprise, the rapid development of a technology platform for online courses and the development of high-quality MITx subjects.

What Blackboard has done is position itself to grow its list of services and extend the shelf life for its current LMS customers (especially the ones that were slowly edging their way towards another LMS) while shoring up its client base and reach.

Rice University's Connexions project is about to make it cheaper to attend college by publishing free textbooks online for five of the nation's most-attended undergraduate courses. If Connexions' new OpenStax College captures even 10 percent of the market for these first five courses, 1 million college students in the United States will save in excess of $90 million over the next five years. The initiative, which is backed by the Hewlett Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the 20 Million Minds Foundation and the Maxfield Foundation, will publish introductory physics and sociology books in March and three more titles this fall.

MIT today announced the launch of an online learning initiative internally called “MITx.” MITx will offer a portfolio of MIT courses through an online interactive learning platform that will:

organize and present course material to enable students to learn at their own pace

feature interactivity, online laboratories and student-to-student communication

allow for the individual assessment of any student’s work and allow students who demonstrate their mastery of subjects to earn a certificate of completion awarded by MITx

operate on an open-source, scalable software infrastructure in order to make it continuously improving and readily available to other educational institutions.

CAMBRIDGE, MA, February 29, 2012 – MIT OpenCourseWare and textbook publisher Flat World Knowledge have teamed up to provide free, high-quality textbooks to learners accessing OCW’s innovative OCW Scholar courses. This is among the first collaborations between an OpenCourseWare publisher and an open textbook publisher and highlights the growing opportunity for open education efforts to reinforce one another in creating rich learning experiences

Each of these textbooks is now available under a CC-BY license, and the authors are receiving a $20,000 award for each accepted textbook.

Dr. David Wiley is Associate Professor of Instructional Psychology and Technology at Brigham Young University. He is also the Chief Openness Officer of Flat World Knowledge and Founder and board member of the Open High School of Utah. He was formerly Associate Professor of Instructional Technology and Director of the Center for Open and Sustainable Learning at Utah State University.

The writers envision a time when students access an entire college education online. But which model will prevail?

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We talk a lot about 21st century skills in education. One skill that comes with learning to think, learn, and teach online is the ability to cope with change in a creative way. Are those of us learning to work online actually gaining 21st Century Survival Skills? ~Dennis

BadgeStack is an innovative system with a game-like approach that assesses skills, recognizes learner achievement, sparks community, and excites learners of all ages.

BadgeStack recognizes achievements that usually go unrecognized when learning happens outside of traditional venues and settings. It's rare to get official acknowledgment for the things we do every day, like: learning from or helping peers in a favorite online community, picking up or sharing new skills during an online conference or workshop, or working with others to solve real-world problems in a multiplayer online game. BadgeStack changes that

Moodle is the popular open source Learning Management System (LMS) that has taken the training market by storm in recent years. The Elearning Guild LMS Survey in 2010 showed that of the top 3 LMS applications (Moodle, Blackboard and TotalLMS), Moodle had the highest satisfaction ratings for ease of installation, cost, reporting capabilities, time to implement, living up to vendor promises and assessment capabilities.

However, in evaluating Moodle the newcomer could easily become confused by a proliferation of releases: Moodle 1.9 or Moodle 2, various distributions such as Totara and Joule, and packages called Moodle Flavours which comprise standard Moodle with the author's favourite plug-ins. So where do you start if you’re considering a Moodle implementation? If you’re not sure whether to use Standard Moodle, a Moodle Distribution or a Moodle Flavour, then this article is for you