OnlineLearning
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A Paris school is using AI to monitor distracted students
For those of us who zone out during university lectures, the temptation multiplies when you taking classes from home. Next fall, a business school in France will try to stop online students from getting distracted with an AI app called Nestor. To judge your level of attention, it can track your face and eyes and even detect when you pull out a phone. If you start to slack off, it can warn you via pop-up messages or emails, and tell you roughly when you may drift away again.
Online learning improves when you feel like you belong
Completing online courses can be daunting, but that's particularly true if you're in a developing part of the world. It's too easy to feel like you don't belong. Researchers may have a solution, though: giving you activities that help you fit in. An MIT and Stanford study has shown that brief psychological "interventions" can dramatically increase the completion rates for online courses in less developed regions. One of these boosts involved reading testimonials from earlier students who overcame that lack of belonging, while another involved writing a short explanation of how the course reflects and serves their values.
LinkedIn Learning arrives to build out your 'skills' section
With the ink still drying on Microsoft's purchase of LinkedIn, the social network everyone loves to hate is now looking to break into the online education with today's launch of LinkedIn Learning. After all, what could be better for your career than adding a couple new skills and areas of expertise to your online resumé?
MIT's online master's courses sound like an incredible deal
Move over University of Phoenix, MIT has announced that you can now obtain a highly-regarded Masters degree in Supply Chain Management (mainly) online. The new 14-week credential is called a MicroMaster's and will be open to anyone and once completed students can get a verified certificate documenting their hard work for a small fee. Undertaken via edX, it is the first MITx course that can be put towards the full masters program, meaning the remainder of the course is only one on-campus semester. "The new combination of online courses and one residential semester will open the SCM program to many more learners," said Professor Yossi Sheffi who runs the SCM program and its online components. By making it open to anyone for free the college is recruiting those who are determined and driven, but aren't sure they can afford a traditional Master's program.
Google teams up with edX to create the YouTube for online education
Google's big list of open source projects just grew by one -- the company has introduced a new online learning platform called MOOC.org. Despite the name, it's not a website about cows -- MOOC stands for "massive open online courses," and it's a product of the marriage between Mountain View and edX, an educational website by MIT and Harvard. However, while edX only features free courses from affiliated universities, MOOC.org will accept material submitted by other institutions, governments, businesses and even individuals. In short, just about anyone can pitch in -- edX's president even revealed that they want the site to eventually become the "YouTube for MOOCs." The companies have yet to reveal how they'll screen submitted courses for quality and how contributors can earn money, but we'll likely find out when the site launches in mid-2014. Self-motivated folks eager to learn will have to hang out around libraries, campuses and TED talks until then. [Image credit: University of Salford, Flickr]
SUNY partners with Coursera for massively open online course experiment
Massive open online courses have the potential to alter how we teach and learn as a society, but unlike other methods that are steeped in centuries of trial and error, the MOOC concept remains experimental and unproven -- often criticized as better suited for edification than rigorous education. Like edX, Coursera is working to challenge that assumption, and today the online course provider announced partnerships with ten public university systems that'll integrate lessons from Coursera into the classroom. Most notably, The State University of New York is participating, which boasts 64 campuses and an enrollment of nearly half a million students. While its implementation remains up in the air, SUNY aims to introduce Coursera materials this fall and over the next few years as part of its Open SUNY initiative. Like SUNY, all partner schools may adapt lessons from Coursera as they see fit, and professors will have the opportunity to develop online courses for Coursera. Most significantly, the pilot programs will give universities an opportunity to evaluate the effectiveness of Coursera material, which could go a long way toward legitimizing the MOOC concept. As another happy consequence, universities may choose to offer for-credit courses from Coursera to non-matriculated students. For a greater understanding of this grand experiment, just hit up the source links. [Image credit: Dave Herholz / Flickr]
Universities to offer free online courses with credit, let us try before we learn
It's not really practical to give universities a meaningful test drive. Not without ample amounts of money and time to throw at a practice semester, at least. It's about to become comparatively trivial. Arizona State, the University of Cincinnati and 38 other institutions are teaming up with Academic Partnerships to offer the first course from certain online degrees for free -- and, more importantly, to make it count as credit. Money only matters to participants (and Academic Partnerships) if they move on to the full program. Prospective students will have to wait until the spring to sign up for what's ultimately a freemium education, but patience could be a virtue if it means understanding the workload before committing to what may be years of higher learning. [Image credit: Dave Herholz, Flickr]
Google releases Course Builder, takes online learning down an open-source road
Google is well-known for projects with unexpected origins. It's almost natural, then, that the code Google used to build a web course has led to a full-fledged tool for online education. The open-source Course Builder project lets anyone make their own learning resources, complete with scheduled activities and lessons, if they've got some skill with HTML and JavaScript. There's also an avenue for live teaching or office hours: the obligatory Google+ tie-in lets educators announce Hangouts on Air sessions. Code is available immediately, although you won't need to be grading virtual papers to see the benefit. A handful of schools that include Stanford, UC San Diego and Indiana University are at least exploring the use of Course Builder in their own initiatives, which could lead to more elegant internet learning -- if also fewer excuses for slacking.
MIT to launch MITx learning platform, offer free teaching materials in 2012
Want a degree from MIT without the expense or notoriously selective application process? Well, you're still out of luck, we're afraid, but the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's new MITx online learning system will at least give you a chance to access a variety of course materials for free. The institution will also make the MITx platform available to other schools for publishing their own content, and will even offer assessments with the option of earning a certificate of completion -- issued by a not-for-profit entity with a "distinct name to avoid confusion," of course. Naturally, "online-only non-MIT learners" will not have the same level of access as MIT students, who will also use the platform to access their own course material, but won't have the option of replacing an on-campus experience with exclusively online classes. MITx is scheduled to go live next spring, but you can get a head start on that fictional MIT degree by checking out OpenCourseWare, which has been serving up similar content for the better part of a decade.
TUAW'S Daily iPad App: Lynda.com
Lynda.com is an online learning library filled with instructional videos for computer users. It's geared primarily for developers and designers, but it does have a growing library of content for introductory computer users. Most people access the content through the Lynda.com website, but those with an iPad have the pleasure of browsing, watching and learning on their favorite tablet. The Lynda.com iPad app mimics the Lynda.com website by letting you browse or search for instructional video courses. Once you find a course of interest, you can view a table of contents which lists all the videos associated with that course. Most videos are less than 10 minutes long and grouped together in topics. Each topic would be equal to a chapter in a book. All the videos can be watched easily on your iPad in portrait or landscape view. When you watch the videos, they count towards your completion of a course. As you would expect, the app ties into your Lynda.com online account so any video you watch on your tablet will show up as watched when you log in using your browser. The iPad app also lets you view your account details so you can see how many courses you have completed, which videos you have watched, and what training certificates you have earned. The iPad app is not meant to replace the website, but it is a nice companion for when you have some spare time and don't want to lug around your laptop. The Lynda.com iPad app is available for free, but requires a monthly or yearly subscription to fully use the resources of this online learning library. If you just want to check it out, you can download the iPad app and browse select content for free. There's also an iPhone version as well. %Gallery-128950%
