DailyDirt: The Future Of Higher Education Is Online
from the urls-we-dig-up dept
Online education is set to revolutionize higher education, making it more affordable, more accessible, more efficient, and more effective. Of course, online education works only if it's done right. It's not enough to simply lecture to students through a computer. Online courses also need to be dynamic and interactive to compensate for the lack of human contact through a physical classroom. Here are some other considerations about online education.- Online courses have at least two major problems to overcome. First, the student attrition rate for some online courses can be as high as 90% compared to traditional face-to-face classes. Second, online courses aren't a good fit for struggling students who need more contact with instructors to do well. [url]
- Stanford University and Khan Academy are experimenting with different ways to make online education more effective. Stanford has been "flipping classrooms" by making class sizes smaller, setting up interactive versions of classes online (which include pop-up quizzes every 15 minutes), and adding social media elements that let students ask questions of each other. Khan Academy has added a feature that lets students tutor other students to earn badge rewards. [url]
- Udacity, an online education startup founded by Sebastian Thrun, offers many college courses for free. Thrun believes that the key to effective online teaching is to have students solve problems. His teaching philosophy involves giving students quizzes, one every 2-5 minutes, that become the centerpieces of each lesson. [url]
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Filed Under: certification, classrooms, degrees, diplomas, education, online courses, sebastian thrun
Companies: khan academy, stanford, udacity
Reader Comments
The First Word
“Re: What's Next For Credentialing?
Hi! Have you heard of The Open Badges Infrastructure? The open education movement has been looking at the credentialing gap for years, and one of the initiatives that have come out of that effort is the open badges project, led by the Mozilla Foundation.Here's Scott Leslie on why badges represent a disruption that a network of badge issuers and endorsers could present to the credentialing monopoly traditional higher ed has enjoyed.
Of course the community of issuers is so far small. The official release of the 1.0 specification is happening this week, mostly through the Digital Media and Learning conference tomorrow in Chicago.
The number of issuers will grow, and the number of people taking open credentials seriously will grow as well. I think though, that the most important factor in open credentials gaining steam is people like you who bravely assert that yes, my learning and skills have value and here's the evidence.
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distance learning has been around for decades (or more)
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Hot topic in education right now
This fall, they're actually offering the Python course from MIT's OpenCourseWare as an in-class course. The main materials will still be online, but they're also holding in-person classes (which are mostly labs). It's not free (it is cheap), but it counts as a 3-credit course, applicable to a CS/IT degree.
Obviously, this isn't perfect, and there are some kinks to work out. But the fact that the online courses (even free ones) are actually enabling these sorts of courses, is very good news. Especially for lower-income students.
Now, if only they weren't so beholden to Microsoft and the textbook publishers...
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Let Google Try
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2409589,00.asp
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What's Next For Credentialing?
But colleges have a monopoly on that�credentialing. Other than that, things like word of mouth, web reputation and certificate programs could credential me, so to speak. That's not good enough.
Imagine if any achievement could be seen as evidence for a particular competency? And anyone could be a judge of competency?
Obviously, certain achievements are more relevant for showing expertise than others. And certain competency judges would be better than others. But it'd radically change not just who gets to recognize achievement, but what gets recognized.
There's more to this concept and it's called, open p2p credentialing.
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Re: What's Next For Credentialing?
Here's Scott Leslie on why badges represent a disruption that a network of badge issuers and endorsers could present to the credentialing monopoly traditional higher ed has enjoyed.
Of course the community of issuers is so far small. The official release of the 1.0 specification is happening this week, mostly through the Digital Media and Learning conference tomorrow in Chicago.
The number of issuers will grow, and the number of people taking open credentials seriously will grow as well. I think though, that the most important factor in open credentials gaining steam is people like you who bravely assert that yes, my learning and skills have value and here's the evidence.
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You can test if someone knows all the facts associated with a subject quite easily and (on the internet) deliver those facts cheaply and easily.
What is not so easy is imparting and assessing a deep knowledge and understanding of a subject, which is the real aim of education.
What's more, subject knowledge is not composed of dead letters imparted to students like bits over a telephone line, it is a living breathing social animal that at some point requires face-to-face interaction.
Count me a skeptic.
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Face time is a vital component of teaching
To give a trivial example of a conceptual leap, young kids, learning the concept of subtraction for the first time, will often answer "5" when presented with "5 - 3 = ?". Misunderstand the symbols, take away the "3" and you're left with "5". Logical to them. What they are missing is that the numbers are not entities themselves, but represent the count of something else. Drawings on the board make that clear.
In the early 70s I taught two televised distance courses and even though the connection was two-way (I could see the class in a wide-angle view and hear them as well), both they and I found it very unsatisfying. I couldn't focus on any particular student, I couldn't chat with them after class individually, they couldn't reach me off-hours.
In the 90s I tried running a forum on the web site for two courses I taught. They rarely used it -- they always came to my door to ask their questions. Why? Because they didn't want their peers to know that they were not getting it and they wanted a longer more detailed explanation than a forum would provide. Answering a student's question requires understanding why they don't already know the answer.
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then you go on to detail exactly how that is NOT HAPPENING, and outlining the problems and issues that are stopping that from happening.
you say that, then you explain how to date it's essentially a FAILURE !!!!.. (I guess you are a product of that 'education')..
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However, online education is a work in progress, and I see it becoming more and more popular.
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Inexpensive Certificate Courses
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hi
Totally agree that the future of education is online. Already there are a lot of sites like this: https://pro-papers.com/ which one provides tons of information and stuff
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thanks
Being a student is a demanding task. There are many assignments that should be done on time. The vast majority of students seek for writing assistance in order to meed deadlines. To my mind, it is a right decision if you do not want to fall behind with studying. You can always rely on https://elitewritings.com/.
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This is true! I've learned how to get good grades in highschool online and successfully applied to the best college of my country!
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education
I totally agree that the future of education is online. Already there are a lot of sites like this: https://www.certsout.com/HPE6-A66-test.html
w
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No doubt that the future of higher education is online because it's more affordable, efficient, and effective. To learn more about online exchange visit assignments experts uk. But it's not even that easy due to the lack of human interaction. Teachers face issues in delivering lectures online and likewise, students don’t take it seriously.
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Re:
Bass Clef Notes: The modern staff is made up of five lines and four spaces, each of which is reserved for a specific pitch. https://geteducationskills.com/bass-clef-notes/
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Smart Class Online | Digital Teacher
Smart Classroom and online classes are the future of modern educational systems. While the prevailing educational practices could be called ‘appropriate’ 20 years back, it is redundant with respect to the evolving generations. Young India dreams of lucid educational practices that can only be achieved through the developments of smart schools and online classes. https://www.digitalteacher.in/blog/smart-classroom-as-an-active-alternatives-classroom/
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