infoneer-pulse:

“So the right question to ask is: Who will be the Southwest Airlines of online education – delivering what customers need, but doing so much more cost-effectively? It could be a private-sector university. Or perhaps a very innovative traditional university with a clear vision of educating and granting credentials to millions of qualified students from around the world, along with a willingness to throw aside its existing model. Either way we arrive at a conclusion that refutes the Times: it will not be MIT, Stanford or an Ivy League institution. Their impact is likely to be limited to the extent other universities opt to incorporate their content into new programs – equivalent to today’s textbook publishers. And just as many people who can afford to pay much more actively seek out Southwest over traditional carriers, rather than cementing their leadership, the coming revolution could very well change up the pecking order in higher education for the first time in the history of the Republic.”

— Elite universities won’t upend the online learning market (essay) | Inside Higher Ed

infoneer-pulse:

In what is shaping up as an academic Battle of the Titans — one that offers vast new learning opportunities for students around the world — Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on Wednesday announced a new nonprofit partnership, known as edX, to offer free online courses from both universities.

Harvard’s involvement follows M.I.T.’s announcement in December that it was starting an open online learning project, MITx. Its first course, Circuits and Electronics, began in March, enrolling about 120,000 students, some 10,000 of whom made it through the recent midterm exam. Those who complete the course will get a certificate of mastery and a grade, but no official credit. Similarly, edX courses will offer a certificate but not credit.

But Harvard and M.I.T. have a rival — they are not the only elite universities planning to offer a wide array of massively open online courses, or MOOCs, as they are known. This month, Stanford, Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Michigan announced their partnership with a new for-profit company, Coursera, with $16 million in venture capital.

» via The New York Times (Subscription may be required for some content)

humanscalecities:

Growing Cities: A film about Urban Farming in America

Kickstarter

GROWING CITIES is a feature-length documentary that examines the role ofurban farming in America and asks how much power it has to revitalize our cities and change the way we eat.The film follows two friends on their journey across the country as they meet the men and women who are challenging the way this country grows and distributes its food, one vacant city lot, rooftop garden, and backyard chicken coop at a time. 

shortformblog:

Coursera joins a raft of ambitious online projects aimed at making higher education more accessible and affordable. Many of these ventures, however, simply post entire lectures on the web, with no interactive component. Others strive to create brand-new universities from scratch.

Founders Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng say Coursera will be different because professors from top schools will teach under their university’s name and will adapt their most popular courses for the web, embedding assignments and exams into video lectures, answering questions from students on online forums — even, perhaps, hosting office hours via videoconference.

This sounds like worth keeping an eye on. It seems like it could go a long way towards disrupting the traditional educational model. In case you were wondering which schools, here you go: Stanford, Princeton, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Michigan. Not a bad list.

infoneer-pulse:

Higher education costs have skyrocketed by over 430 percent since the 1980s. Now two startups aim to make college courses more affordable. Coursera offers free online courses from universities like Stanford and Princeton. And a new tool from Akademos helps professors find less expensive — or free — textbooks for their courses.

Coursera, founded last fall by Stanford professors Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng, expands today to include non-Stanford classes and also announces $16 million in Series A funding, in a round led by Kleiner Perkins.

Coursera is adding about 30 online courses from the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton, Stanford and the University of Michigan. (More courses and universities will be added in coming months.) The courses, which cover topics from computer science and medicine to business, history and literature, aren’t just class videos — the company is not “just shoving the video on the web and hoping for the best,” Koller said. Rather, Coursera aims to recreate an on-campus experience for virtual students. Its coursers include video lectures with interactive quizzes, homework, interactive assignments and collaborative online forums.

» via paidContent

infoneer-pulse:

Learning styles—the notion that each student has a particular mode by which he or she learns best, whether it’s visual, auditory or some other sense—is enormously popular. It’s also been thoroughly debunked.

The scientific research on learning styles is “so weak and unconvincing,” concluded a group of distinguished psychologists in a 2008 review, that it is not possible “to justify incorporating learning-styles assessments into general educational practice.” A 2010 article was even more blunt: “There is no credible evidence that learning styles exist,” wrote University of Virginia cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham and co-author Cedar Riener. While students do have preferences about how they learn, the evidence shows they absorb information just as well whether or not they encounter it in their preferred mode.

» via MindShift