Stanford’s new grant program seeks to provide internal financial support for innovative uses of technology in learning, including course design or re-design.
The goal of the new grant program is to support future-facing, faculty-driven innovation.
Read more at Campus Technology (January 27, 2016), or read the official announcement.
Details are scant, but MIT is venturing more firmly into the world of online continuing education for professionals (including but not limited to their own alumni). They are beginning with a four-course (certificate?) systems engineering program in partnership with Boeing and NASA.
Given the pace of innovation, really, if you got a computer science degree 10 years ago, are you still prepared for the real world?
Many campuses do a great job of documenting what needs to be done to ensure that courses and campus resources are accessible, but few of us step back and take the time to figure out how we can mount a campus-wide campaign to get buy-in from faculty, staff, and students.
In my opinion, the most successful campaigns have a common thread: they promote accessibility as a civil right and explain how accessibility fosters diversity and inclusiveness.
Art Morgan. “Accessibility as a Civil Right.” EDUCAUSE Review. January 25, 2016.
Stanford’s CS + X joint major program allows undergraduate students to marry computer science skills with an interest in the humanities. The CS +X degrees include specialized courses that involve both aspects of the student’s chosen educational path.
CS+X degrees may not be meant for students who want to do deeply technical work as programmers, but rather for those who want to use data collection to analyze topics such as politics, society, and the environment, says Jim Kurose, assistant director for computer and information science and engineering at the National Science Foundation.
See:
as well as Stanford’s description and listing of these joint majors.
What if you could start a university from scratch for today’s needs and with today’s technology? MIT Dean Christine Ortiz is hoping to answer this question through a new venture–but unlike other efforts, hers will be not-for-profit.
Ms. Ortiz says she plans to create a nonprofit institution so that “all of the revenue can be reinvested in the enterprise to serve the public.”
EQUIP, or Educational Quality Through Innovative Partnerships, is a new program from the U.S. Department of Education. The department will provide access to Title IV funds to chosen partners (both traditional and non-traditional), while waiving the rules about the use of content from other entities.
The goal of this experimental program is to allow traditional schools to lower educational costs and increase access by partnering with nontraditional providers, such as MOOCs or code academies or boot camps, by creating hybrid programs that are eligible for enrolled students to access financial aid.
Introductory PowerPoint slides created by the Department of Education are embedded below:
[embeddoc url=”https://blogs.uoregon.edu/edtechknowledge/files/2016/02/EQUIP112315-1x8kedp.pdf” download=”all” viewer=”google”]
Want to know more? Here are some starting points:
Three key organizations in the field of online learning have partnered together to produce a two-page handout that summarizes emerging issues, in the hopes that those concerns can be addressed in the upcoming reauthorization of the Higher Education Act. This partnership hopes to create “a unified voice on pending federal regulations for today’s higher education students.”
Read more on the WCET blog, or view the handout below.
[embeddoc url=”https://blogs.uoregon.edu/edtechknowledge/files/2016/01/HEA-Paper-Infographic-2016-1wzqfxz.pdf” download=”all” viewer=”google”]
A professor at Penn State reflects on trends in engagement among the 49,000 registered students in his MOOC. A blog post by one of his graduate students goes into more detail and breaks down engagement by various demographic factors.
The map shows places in South Asia where engagement was low but people earned passing grades, which signals a different type of motivation for taking the course in that part of the world compared with other locales. We also see places in the United States and Europe where people were engaging with the course and not earning a passing grade — so these would be the folks who were interested in the topic but probably didn’t care about earning the credential at the end.
Fish, Carolyn. “Making Maps of a MOOC.” The CartoFish Blog. August 14, 2015.
Excerpts from a conversation between Michael Rodgers (Southeast Missouri State) and Carl Lashley (UNC Greensboro), on Lashley’s experiences teaching in an online doctoral degree program.
UNCG’s doctoral program is attractive because it is sensitive to the needs of working professionals. The strong online component saves commuting time. From the relative comfort of home, students are fresher and more relaxed when it is time to log into the online course after a very busy day of work. Even so, most of Lashley’s students live relatively nearby (less than a 2 hour commute), which affords them the opportunity to come to campus from time to time for face-to-face courses, meet with faculty, and attend advising sessions and seminars. Lashley’s awareness of his students’ need for a sense of belonging motivates him to use the on-campus events to establish relationships that Lashley characterizes as “accidental cohorts,” which create connections and lend authenticity to the virtual relationships born of online interactions within discussion boards and group activities.
The authors of this paper–a condensed version of which was the top post on eCampus News for 2015–articulate and debunk several myths about mobile learning, including the idea that mobile learning is limited to phones, that it is only applicable in distance education, or that it fails to make use of existing good pedagogical practice. They also discuss its pedagogical affordances.
mLearning is appropriate for designing learning environments for a variety of learning contexts.
