Free online courses for the masses are all the rage—and many are being run by start-ups hoping to profit by selling related materials and services. Jim Groom thinks that’s too commercial, so he’s raising money for the online course he co-teaches at the University of Mary Washington using Kickstarter, the popular “crowd funding” service.
In a campaign released today, the professor makes his plea in an irreverent video that mixes in clips from a 90s true-crime show, and video interviews with students and professors shot from unusual angles. He explains that last year he ran the course, which is on digital storytelling and is called DS106, using his own equipment. But the class has grown so large that he needs a new server to keep it going, and he estimates that will cost him $2,900.
He’s asking for contributions ranging from $1 to $3,000, and those who give will get…
For years, colleges looking for course-management software considered a choice between Blackboard’s dominant commercial product or an open-source alternative such as Moodle or Sakai. Now Blackboard essentially owns the open-source alternatives as well.
On Monday, Blackboard officials announced that the company has purchased two leading supporters of Moodle, Moodlerooms and NetSpot. Both deals are complete, though officials would not disclose the sale prices. The company also hired one of the founders of the Sakai project to lead its efforts to support colleges using that open-source software. The moves are part of the company’s newly announced Blackboard Education Open Source Services group.
In the past Blackboard has purchased competitors and then either disbanded them, as it did with Prometheus, or merged the competing product with its own, as it did with WebCT. This time…
The Silicon Valley billionaire and higher-education critic who offered young entrepreneurs money to leave college is returning to Stanford University, his alma mater, to teach a course of his own.
Peter Thiel, the PayPal co-founder whose “20 Under 20” fellowship last year awarded a group of budding entrepreneurs $100,000 each to drop out and develop innovative companies, will teach a class called “Computer Science 183: Startup” at the elite university this spring, according to Reuters. Mr. Thiel submitted his course proposal last year, after approaching Stanford professor-turned-commercial-educator Sebastian Thrun about teaching at the university. The 250-student course is already oversubscribed, according to Reuters.
It’s an odd move for the famously libertarian businessman, who has lashed out at universities for creating a higher-education bubble that saddles students…
The nonprofit group called TED, known for streaming 18-minute video lectures about big ideas, today opened a new YouTube channel designed for teachers and professors, with videos that are even shorter.
The new channel, called TED-Ed, was announced a year ago, but its leaders are only now unveiling the project’s first videos. There are only 11 as of today, but the goal is to add new ones regularly. Within three months from now, a new video could appear each day, said Chris Anderson, TED’s curator, in a conference call with reporters late last week.
To produce the new videos, the group is connecting content experts with professional animators to create highly illustrated productions. The average length of these videos is about five minutes, and Mr. Anderson said he envisions a teacher playing one in class at the start of a lesson “to ignite excitement” about the topic.
Atlanta — Higher education’s spin on the Silicon Valley garage. That was the vision laid out in September, when the Georgia Institute of Technology announced a new lab for disruptive ideas, the Center for 21st Century Universities. During a visit to Atlanta last week, I checked in to see how things were going, sitting down with Richard A. DeMillo, the center’s director and Georgia Tech’s former dean of computing, and Paul M.A. Baker, the center’s associate director. We talked about challenges and opportunities facing colleges at a time of economic pain and technological change—among them the chance that many universities might follow Borders Bookstores into oblivion.
Q. You recently wrote that universities are “bystanders” at the revolution happening around them, even as they think they’re at the center of it. How so?
Philadelphia—Professors can choose from a growing palette of Web-based tools to make their online courses more interactive. But a new study suggests that many community-college instructors aren’t taking advantage of those options. Instead, the professors are relying on static course materials that aren’t likely to motivate students or encourage them to interact with each other.
The study, presented here at the annual technology conference of the League for Innovation in the Community College, observed 26 high-enrollment online courses at two community colleges in Virginia last spring. It found that most professors relied on text-based assignments and materials. In the instances when professors did decide to use interactive tools like online video, many of those technologies were not connected to learning objectives, the study found. The findings could help explain how community …
When voters in 10 states participate in primary elections or caucuses for Republican presidential candidates on Tuesday, some pundits will try to place the winners’ victories in context by looking ahead to the campaign’s shrinking schedule. But bloggers at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center of Public Affairs will do the opposite—by looking at the events of campaigns past to offer insights on the day’s contests.
Their new blog, Riding the Tiger: The Presidential Election in Context, draws on a trove of material to “apply the lessons of history to the election today to put it in a broader perspective,” says Anne Carter Mulligan, the center’s coordinator for academic programs.
The blog takes its name from a passage in President Harry S. Truman’s memoirs: “Within the first few months I discovered that being a president is like riding a tiger. A man has to keep…
The growing badge-based-learning movement, which provides students with digital credentials that challenge traditional measures of achievement like college degrees, got a boost yesterday. Winners of the Badges for Lifelong Learning Competition, which began in September, were announced at the Digital Media and Learning Conference, in San Francisco.
The contest is run in collaboration with Mozilla, developer of the Web browser Firefox, which is working on a digital “backpack” that will allow learners to collect and display the skill patches they earn. It’s part of the fourth Digital Media and Learning Competition, supported by the John T. and Catherine D. MacArthur Foundation.
Submissions were judged by criteria including the effectiveness of the assessment process and the likelihood that the badges will be accepted by institutions and employers.
Many colleges look to online education as the path to growth, but it is often a bumpy road. At the Higher Ed Tech summit in January, a dean from the University of Southern California told me how she avoided the potholes. Karen Gallagher, dean of the university’s Rossier School of Education, took her school’s master’s degree in teaching online with the help of 2tor, a company that builds digital teaching platforms for traditional universities. “It’s our degree,” she says, “and our faculty.” That faculty had to learn a new way to teach for online students, however, and 2tor helped with that, as well as recruiting and placing students in teacher-training positions. The company had to learn that “we are not the Wild West and we have rules,” Ms. Gallagher says. But the partnership is a…
Want to learn the basics of what goes inside your smartphone and computer?
You can get a better grasp of that gadgetry in a free online course announced today by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—the first class to open in the institute’s closely watched new interactive online learning venture, MITx. And if you pass the course, MIT will award you a certificate for free.
The prototype class, “6.002x: Circuits and Electronics,” opens for enrollment today (sign up here). The course will run from March 5 to June 8. Modeled on an introductory class typically offered to between 100 and 250 undergraduates on campus, the course will help students make the transition from physics to electrical engineering and computer science. Teaching it will be Anant Agarwal and Chris Terman, co-directors of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory; Piotr Mitros, a…
The MIT Press and other critics say proposed legislation to
limit public access to the results of some studies would work
against the open exchange of ideas.
Stay up-to-date on the latest news, information, trends and commentary on new and evolving technologies focusing on classroom teaching, scholarship and research, and admissions management.
The Silicon Valley billionaire and higher-education critic who offered young entrepreneurs money to leave college is returning to Stanford University, his alma mater, to teach a course of his own.
Philadelphia—Professors can choose from a growing palette of Web-based tools to make their online courses more interactive. But a new study suggests that many community-college instructors aren’t taking advantage of those options. Instead, the professors are relying on static course materials that aren’t likely to motivate students or encourage them to interact with each other.
When voters in 10 states participate in primary elections or caucuses for Republican presidential candidates on Tuesday, some pundits will try to place the winners’ victories in context by looking ahead to the campaign’s shrinking schedule. But bloggers at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center of Public Affairs will do the opposite—by looking at the events of campaigns past to offer insights on the day’s contests.
The growing badge-based-learning movement, which provides students with digital credentials that 
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Stay up-to-date on the latest news, information, trends and commentary on new and evolving technologies focusing on classroom teaching, scholarship and research, and admissions management.