By . ACT (2105) Unpacking “Career Readiness” Iowa City IA: Act Inc.
ACT Inc, the organisation that designs and administers the most widely used high school standardised tests in the USA, has just published a short but interesting document. More...
Problems with the use of images in open textbooks
By . If you have downloaded my open textbook, ‘Teaching in a Digital Age’ in pdf or Modi format for the iPad or Kobo, you may have noticed that many of the images I have liberally used throughout the book do not fit on the page or have become separated from their ‘frame’ (the green and black lines before and after the images), in the downloaded versions. More...
Futures Initiative at CUNY Inspires New Teaching Styles (originally posted on CHE)
By Cathy Davidson. In a science course underway this semester at City University of New York’s Lehman College, the instructor used a teaching technique called "think-pair-share" one week. Each student took 90 seconds to write on an index card three ideas about an assigned reading. Then the students paired up, took turns reading aloud to each other what they had written, and decided on the single most important idea to share with the class. Later students wrote one another follow-up questions using the website for the course, "Anatomy and Physiology of the Speech Mechanism." More...
If You Can't Change Higher Ed Overnight, Change Your Classroom. Here's How! #FuturesEd
By Cathy Davidson. In “Mapping the Futures of Higher Education,” the first Futures Initiative course, co-taught with President Emeritus William Kelly, we focused on pedagogy, on what you can do tomorrow in your classroom to redress the kinds of inequity that persist in society and that are exacerbated by higher education. On the first day of class, Bill and I entered, pointed to giant post-it notes set around the room with dates, and asked our students to work together to organize themselves into four groups of three, decide together what learning they wanted to take charge of, and in other ways design a graduate course. More...
Is Educational Freedom and Choice Always Free? Structure, Pathways, and More #FuturesED
By Cathy Davidson. This week our "Mapping the Futures of Higher Education" course had the honor of hosting Dean John Mogulescu, Founding Dean of the CUNY School of Professional Studies for an interview with President Emeritus (and "Mapping" co-teacher), Bill Kelly. They are old friends--and two of my CUNY colleagues whom I most admire. More...
ASU, edX and The Black Knight: MOOCs are not dead yet
By Phil Hill. In 2012 I wrote a post during the emergence of MOOC mania, pointing out some barriers that must be overcome for the new model to survive. Since that time, of course, the MOOC hype has faded away, partially based on the above barriers not being overcome.
Today, Arizona State University (ASU) and edX announced a new program, Global Freshman Academy, that takes direct aim at all four barriers and could be the most significant MOOC program yet. More...
Cisco’s Collaborative Knowledge: Further blurring of higher ed & professional dev lines
By Phil Hill. Cisco, which at one time was the most valuable in the world, made an announcement that apparently got no one’s attention (outside of the venerable e-Literate). Cisco[1] released a new product, Collaborative Knowledge (CK), that is designed to allow companies to access real-time expertise and enable collaborative work based on employees’ expertise, or in another word, competencies. More...
2U Learning Platform Update: Removal of Moodle, addition of accessibility options
By Phil Hill. 2U has now been a public company for over a year, and that had what is easily the most successful education IPO in recent history. Shares have almost doubled from $13.00 at IPO to $25.50 last week. At the same time, there is a swirl of news around their new partner Yale and the Physician Assistant’s program – first the announcement of program from one of the elite of elite schools, second the news that accreditation approval for the new program is not going to be as easy as hoped. More...
Interesting Comment on Pearson’s LMS Plans From Customer
By Phil Hill. On April 1, long-time eCollege (aka Pearson’s LearningStudio) customer Texas Christian University (TCU) gave an update on their LMS selection process to the student newspaper TCU360. In this article there was an interesting statement[1] worth exploring [emphasis added]. More...
Ellucian Buys Helix LMS, But Will It Matter?
By Phil Hill. At this year’s Ellucian users’ conference #elive15, one of the two big stories has been that Ellucian acquired the Helix LMS, including taking on the development team. I have previously described the Helix LMS in “Helix: View of an LMS designed for competency-based education” as well as the subsequent offer for sale in “Helix Education puts their competency-based LMS up for sale”. More...