Ulrich Schrader's Website

By Paul Fain, Inside Higher Ed

Public colleges without deep pockets can face challenges as they seek to ramp up online course offerings. For one thing, it’s not easy to quickly recruit the teaching assistants or “coaches” needed to help faculty members manage larger classes and keep students on track.

Enter Instructional Connections, a relatively new venture attempting to tap into this market. Launched in 2010, the nonprofit firm grew out of a for-profit company that offers online services to public universities. It has brought in a pool of academic coaches to offer support to fast-growing online degree programs at public institutions, with a focus on education and health care.

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/05/16/public-colleges-outsource-online-teaching-coaches-new-service

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by Thomas Friedman, the Economic Times

Welcome to the college education revolution. Big breakthroughs happen when what is suddenly possible meets what is desperately necessary. The costs of getting a college degree have been rising faster than those of health care, so the need to provide low-cost, quality higher education is more acute than ever. At the same time, in a knowledge economy, getting a higher-education degree is more vital than ever. And thanks to the spread of high-speed wireless technology, high-speed Internet, smartphones, Facebook, the cloud and tablet computers, the world has gone from connected to hyperconnected in just seven years. Finally, a generation that has grown up on these technologies is increasingly comfortable learning and interacting with professors through online platforms.

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international-business/thomas-l-friedman-online-courses-by-mit-harvard-is-a-revolution/articleshow/13161799.cms

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by the Julliard Conservatory

Starting in the 2012-2013 school year, The Juilliard School is launching JUILLIARD eLEARNING, for K-12 students and educators everywhere. Juilliard eLearning is the world-famous conservatory’s first-ever group of online courses, presenting an exciting new option for teaching music and related courses, with distribution and implementation by leading provider of online learning solutions, Connections Education, part of the global education company, Pearson.

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-juilliard-school-and-connections-education-launch-juilliard-elearning-the-conservatorys-first-ever-online-courses-2012-05-16

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Jenny Mackness, Jenny Connected, May 18, 2012.

Now I'm not sure how a course you don't have to take and can leave at any time could be called a "tyranny" but I'll deal with the question raised in this post head on: "Are we are attempting to impose our values (of openness, sharing, online learning as the future of education, etc) without a critical examination of what that means for practice and for individuals who are part of social organizations?" And the short answer is: no. For two reasons. First, nobody's imposing anything here; if you want to go back to your structured formal education, where you pay a substantial fee, there are thousands of institutions who would be happy to help you. Second, the openness (and the rest of it) is the result of a critical examination. As I have argued with respect to the principles of successful networks, if you want your social organizations to be effective at all, you need to embrace things like autonomy, openness, interatcivity and diversity. We select these principles, not because we're arbitrary, but because the best evidence tells us they work.

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David Wiley, iterating toward openness, May 18, 2012.

As david Wiley reports Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is facing bankruptcy "as it faces a lagging textbook market due to drops in educational funding." And he asks, "Why are we surprised this bankruptcy is happening? Anyone who’ s been paying attention isn’ t. The shake up in educational publishing we’ ve long anticipated is beginning… and students will be the benefactors." Of course, one bankruptcy isn't a trend. But my thinking is with Wiley's. It's the beginning of the end for these guys.

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Joe Brockmeier, ReadWriteCloud, May 18, 2012.

I have been thinking of setting up a hosted version of gRSShopper but things like storage pose daunting challenges once you get into large numbers of sites. A solution like this, though, points to an innovative way of solving the problem. One one site, you provide access to the software - WordPress, an LMS, gRSShoppper, whatever. And the actual storage is  handled by a service - like Amazon's AWS - which specializes in that. Of course, for my money, speed remains a major concern - AWS isn't exactly fast. But that, with time, will change.

[Link] [Comment]

Scott Gilbertson, WebMonkey, May 18, 2012.

One of the (few) really neat things about OpenPublish on Drupal is the image system. Here, you upload an image once, and the system creates several versions of the image, which can be used by a device-aware system (which OpenPublish isn't) to put small images on small screens and bigger images on the large screens. As Webmonkey says, "web authors use a variety of hacks to (incompletely) work around this problem, but to really solve it the web likely needs new tools." Using HTML, for example, that will read information from the head of the document to serve the right image.

[Link] [Comment]

Grace Wyler, Business Insider, May 18, 2012.

Normally people with these sorts of views would never be allowed near a TED stage. But a millionaire slipped through the cracks and as the National Journal reports, TED's Chris Anderson is refusing to publish a talk given on its stage by venture capitalist Nick Hanauer. As Time reports, Anderson's explanation is that the talk was “ too political” to be posted during an election year, and that "a lot of business managers and entrepreneurs would feel insulted" by some of Hanauer’ s arguments. Alas for Anderson, the video has surfaced at YouTube, so the rich will be insulted no matter what. Anyhow, you can read Hanauer's radical arguments on that beacon of socialism, Bloomberg. Or read the full text of the talk here. Meanwhile, you can read the discussion at TED where members are shocked - shocked! - to discover that TED wasn't the open marketplace of ideas they thought. People who read me know I have been critical of this aspect of TED for a long time. Maybe now, a few more eyes will be opened.

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Dan Hon, Flickr, May 18, 2012.

OK, this doesn't exist, but it is imaginable that we could read something like this in the near future: "Klout is trialling a beta program with the Department of Homeland Security and Customs and Border Protection to provide fast-track entrepreneur visa entry to individuals with high Klout scores in specific areas." Now - I know the first reaction is to say how bad this is. But is it unreasonable for government to have as much information on you as some company? Is it unreasonable for us to use it in some practical way, like crossing borders? And maybe - just maybe - if it becomes used in this way, maybe we'll have some rights to access it, use it ourselves, and ensure it is correct. Because right now none of that is the case.

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Kim Zetter, Ars Technica, May 18, 2012.

Via Metafilter: "In a surprising letter (PDF) sent on Monday to attorneys for the Baltimore Police Department, the Justice Department also strongly asserted that officers who seize and destroy such recordings without a warrant or without due process are in strict violation of the individual’ s Fourth and Fourteenth Amendment rights." It really is time that governments (or at least those that defend civil liberties) were clear on the rights of citizens to make digital media, to store digital media, and to share digital media, without unreasonable interference from the state (or for that matter those individuals who don't want to be seen, discussed or filmed doing things they should not be doing in public).

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Harold Jarche, Weblog, May 18, 2012.

The  Automattic (WordPress) company creed is funny - it starts out really strong, weakens through the middle, and by the end relies on a tired old cliché as though the author ran out od ideas even as he or she was typing it out. Also on the same page, some strong words from Lawrence Lessig: "We’ ve lost a decade of competitive innovation in ways to spur and spread content in ways that would ultimately benefit creators, because the dinosaurs owned the lobbyists."

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Stephen Downes, Stephen's Web, May 18, 2012.

I somehow lost the first version of this eBook (and I think I might never have actually posted it online) but as all the individual papers will exist it was pretty easy to recreate in more or less its original form. Hence, reposted (possibly for the first time) an eBook containing the papers and talks leading to the development of the concept of learning networks in 2004. It's the latest addition to my eBooks page (and I'm in the final stages of a preparing a major new eBook for release possibly next week).

[Link] [Comment]

by David J. Hill, Singularit Hub

Online education is witnessing its own Avengers-like uniting of superhero forces as Harvard University and MIT recently announced “edX”, a combined $60 million joint initiative to offer their college-level courses online for free. Launching in the fall of 2012, edX is a not-for-profit organization formed by the two universities to bring each institution’s free online course offerings to a broader global audience. Courses will be delivered through the open source MITx platform in development to host courses that were previously part of the OpenCourseWare program.

http://singularityhub.com/2012/05/14/harvard-and-mit-join-forces-to-become-juggernaut-of-free-online-education/

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Steve Kolowich, Inside Higher Ed

As librarians and lawyers continue to pore over the 350 pages of a long-awaited federal court decision involving copyright claims levied against Georgia State University’s library by academic publishers, one thing everybody seems to agree on is that, all things considered, the university “won.” But what victory looks like at this stage remains to be seen and may not become clear for some time, experts say.

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/05/15/court-ruling-landmark-e-reserve-leaves-unanswered-questions

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By PAMELA LEWIS DOLAN, Amed News

There is a demand among physicians for continuing medical education training that can be accessed on the go. A survey by ON24 and MedData Group found that 84% of physicians would prefer attending CME events online. Among the benefits physicians expect from Web-based CME is the ability to view the content “on demand” while avoiding the hassles and costs of traveling. ON24, a virtual communication technology vendor with headquarters in San Francisco, and MedData Group, an interactive content and database marketing services company based in Topsfield, MA., surveyed 971 physicians across a variety of specialties about their digital behaviors. The survey found that physicians are “more mobile than ever before,” and that is impacting the way they want to access educational materials.

http://www.ama-assn.org/amednews/2012/05/14/bisc0514.htm

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Margaret Andrews, Inside Higher Ed, May 17, 2012.

If you're watching closely, what you're seeing is a concerted attack on the traditional university model, from thinly disguised advocacy journalism calling on the government to end student support to overt proposals for the dismantling of higher education.

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Jenny Mackness, Jenny Connected, May 17, 2012.

The Change MOOC has come to an end, but if you need your weekly MOOC experience you may want to check out #fslt12 which has just started. "We have set up an Arrivals Lounge  where people can introduce themselves. And there is also a Course Questions forum, where we will try to answer any queries as soon as we can... in  the  Week 0 (Supporting Learning) area of Moodle  (which is this run up week to the course), George has posted a great question to get us warmed up – 'What is Learning for you?'"

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Lee D. Ballantyne, leelearning, May 17, 2012.

"I finally finished my research study," writes Lee D. Ballantyne. "This is a summary of the outcomes: a framework for e-portfolio implementation. Full pdf paper here. The result is a good 52-page study of the subject. "Fundamental to these ideas of digital identity and a personal learning environment is the ability to create a personalised space. The benefits of personalisation are twofold. Firstly, a guiding principle behind reflective e-portfolio development – learner control – should apply to the tools learners use as well as to the content. The ability to customise the e-portfolio (process), to integrate the learner' own choice of tools (tools or systems), and, ultimately, create a digital identity (product) is incredibly important to learners. Secondly, personalisation allows learners to take responsibility for their own learning: developing metacognitive skills and promoting autonomy."

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Linda Rening, e-Learning Leadership Blog , May 17, 2012.

I supposed I should say something about the irony of a 960 word column expressing the proposition that nobody reads online, especially as I read through to the end of it (to make sure there wasn't some trick ending that would prove I hadn't read the piece - there wasn't). But the point is well-taken: "You read what you are interested in and, further, only when you are interested in it." That's why a search feature for a site like this is at least as importance as brevity, and they're both more important than adding that extra hundred words that simply must be added.

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by LAFAYETTE JOURNAL & COURIER

Leveraging its high-powered cloud computing system, campus leaders said Friday they will start offering for-credit courses to the world. The announcement comes a week after Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology said they started a nonprofit company to offer free courses by its faculty. Stanford, Princeton and other universities also have formed a similar company that is boosted by millions in venture capital. Purdue officials hope its online attempt, called PurdueHUB-U, will not only become a force in advanced distance education, but turn into a money maker as students from other countries seek learning opportunity from Purdue’s renowned faculty.

http://www.thestarpress.com/article/20120512/NEWS06/120512007

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