By . Textbooks are an increasing cost to students. Some textbooks cost $200 or more, and in North America a university undergraduate may be required to spend between $800-$1,000 a year on textbooks. An open textbook on the other hand is an openly-licensed, online publication free for downloading for educational or non-commercial use. You are currently reading an open textbook. More...
By . 1. There is a continuum of technology-based learning, from ‘pure’ face-to-face teaching to fully online programs. Every teacher or instructor needs to decide where on the continuum a particular course or program should be.
2. We do not have good research evidence or theories to make this decision, although we do have growing experience of the strengths and limitations of online learning. What is particularly missing is an evidence-based analysis of the strengths and limitations of face-to-face teaching when online learning is also available. More...
By . Open educational resources cover a wide range of formats, including open textbooks, video recorded lectures, YouTube clips, web-based textual materials designed for independent study, animations and simulations, diagrams and graphics, some MOOCs, or even assessment materials such as tests with automated answers. OER can also include Powerpoint slides or lecture notes. In order to be open educational resources, though, they must be freely available for at least educational use. More...
By . In recent years, there has been a resurgence of interest in open education, mainly related to open educational resources and MOOCs. Although in themselves OER and MOOCs are important developments, they tend to cloud other developments in open education that are likely have even more impact on education as a whole. It is therefore necessary to step back a little to get a broader understanding of open education. This will help us better understand the significance of these and other developments in open education, and their likely impact on teaching and learning now and in the future. More...
By Cathy Davidson. Much has been written lately about the rise in quality of CUNY over the last two decades. Some have assumed that its rising quality means CUNY must have lost track of its honored populist commitments to New York City's diverse population. That turns out not to be true, according to the careful demographic research published last week by Futures Initiative Fellow and Graduate Center doctoral student, Michael Dorsch. Read more...
By Phil Hill. After yesterday’s “sources say” report from TechCrunch about Instructure – maker of the Canvas LMS – raising a new round of financing and entering the corporate LMS space, Instructure changed plans and made their official announcement to today. The funding is to both expand the Canvas team and to establish the new corporate LMS team. I’m not a fan of media attempts to get a scoop based purely on rumors, and in this case TechCrunch got a few items wrong that are worth correcting. More...
By Phil Hill. And I’m going old school and sticking to the previous saying.
Today I’m participating in the EDUCAUSE meeting on Next Generation Digital Learning Environments, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. More...
By Phil Hill. This past week I had the opportunity to provide the keynote at the Instructional Technology Council (ITC) eLearning2015 conference in Las Vegas. ITC is a great group that provides leadership and professional development to faculty and staff in community and junior colleges in online education, and increasingly in hybrid course models. To save time on individual sharing, I have included most of the material below. More...
By Michael Feldstein. Speaking of underpants gnomes sales pitches, Phil and I spent a fair amount of time hearing about Unizin at the ELI conference. Much of that time was spent hearing friends that I know, trust, and respect talk about the project. At length, in some cases. On the one hand, it is remarkable that, after these long conversations, I am not much clearer on the purpose of Unizin than I was the week before. On the other hand, being reminded that some of my friends really believe in this thing helped me refill my reservoir of patience for the project, which had frankly run dry. More...
In Köln kämpft die Uni für bezahlbare Wohnungen. In Göttingen küssen alle frisch Promovierten dasselbe Mädchen. Und die Uni Bremen übt die Schwerelosigkeit. Drei Porträts. Mehr...
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