Read more news from Around the Web. Fourteen-year-old Gabi Directo is technically in the middle of her freshman year. But in bursts of learning, hunched over her laptop in her Summit Shasta High School classroom, she has managed to zoom at her own rapid pace to the completion of all of her ninth-grade English, history, science, and math classes. More...

Read more news from Around the Web. Therefore, students and employees will seek instant gratification when it comes to studying for a test or professional certification. To meet their needs, educators must design tutorials or teaching materials that are mobile friendly and can be downloaded on tablets, phones, and the variety of smart devices available on the market. Read more. More...

Read more news from Around the Web. When he was just 15, the Mongolian wunderkind Battushig Myanganbayar earned a perfect score in MIT’s first massive open online course, or MOOC. Designers of the course touted him as a poster boy for the power of free courses to spread high-quality education to the farthest reaches of the globe, and the New York Times hailed his story. More...

Read more news from Around the Web. Recent funding in Hadoop vendors underscores how venture capitalists see big bucks in managing Big Data. Last month, Hadoop providers Cloudera Inc., Hortonworks Inc. and Platfora Inc. received a collective $1 billion from investors convinced that they are onto something big. More...

Read more news from Around the Web. On one recent night, the Intelligence Squared U.S. debate series put forth a motion on Columbia University’s campus: “More Clicks, Fewer Bricks: The Lecture Hall Is Obsolete.”
This is heavily contested territory, as both the setting and the style of the debate reflected, The New Yorker reports. Columbia itself is the owner of quite a few nice-looking bricks, but, only last month, the university signalled its intention to start producing online courses. More...

Read more news from Around the Web. Baseball’s opening day is behind us, but if you can’t get enough of this spring ritual, you can savor another opening day of sorts May 29, when a baseball-centered class debuts as BU’s first MOOC, BU Today reports. Sabermetrics 101: Introduction to Baseball Analytics kicks off what ultimately will be five MOOCs (massive open online courses) BU will offer via edX, the online platform spearheaded by Harvard and MIT. MOOCs allow students around the world to take university classes free, for no credit. More...

Read more news from Around the Web. A draft report detailing the committee’s recommendations was presented at a faculty meeting on March 19. The subcommittee saw “incomparable value” in face-to-face engagement between faculty and students, suggesting that without such interaction, students would struggle to develop social skills like “turn-taking” and the use of “visual, bodily cues.” More...

Read more news from Around the Web. Debates are raging about whether big data still holds the promise that was expected or whether it was just a big bust, The Huffington Post reports. The failure of the much-hyped Google Flu Trends to accurately predict peak flu levels since August 2011 has heightened the concerns. More...

By Jake New - eCampus. Kyle Bowen, director of education technology at Pennsylvania State University, said he thinks credentials, be they traditional grades or digital badges, are little more than symbols. And symbols mean different things to different people, Bowen said Thursday at U.S. News and World Report’s STEM Solutions conference. To illustrate his point he brought up several well-known symbols, including the icon found on most hand dryers — the one that shoes three red, wavy lines floating above a hand. More...

By Jake New - eCampus. The massive open online course (MOOC) platform Udacity will no longer offer completion certificates for free, the company announced this week. While students can still take the courses for free, Udacity is discontinuing its “non-identity-verified” certificates. Anyone hoping to earn a certificate proving they mastered material in a MOOC must instead pay for a verified certificate. More...