Wearable Teaching? College to Experiment With Apple Watch as Learning Tool

Even before the Apple Watch was released, professors and pundits began speculating on whether it and other wearable devices might play a role in college classrooms. On Monday researchers at Pennsylvania State University’s main campus announced that they would be among the first to test the device’s usefulness in the classroom.

The experiment will begin this summer, with eight Apple Watches the university purchased for the project. Penn State plans to expand the research to more students in the fall. We caught up with Kyle Bowen, director of education-technology services at Penn State, to hear more about the project, and his thoughts on the possible role of wearables in teaching and learning. Following is an edited version of the conversation.

By Jeffrey R. Young

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http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus

Tools That Limit Distraction May Raise Student Performance in Online Classes

For students taking courses online, the endless distractions of the Internet can be a hindrance to success. But using software to limit those diversions can make a big difference.

That’s the takeaway from a new study, which found that limiting distractions can help students perform better and also improve course completion.

A paper describing the study, “Can Behavioral Tools Improve Online Student Outcomes? Experimental Evidence From a Massive Open Online Course,” was published by the Cornell Higher Education Research Institute this month.

By Casey Fabris

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http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus

Digital storytelling - Attention Grabbers

I'm currently reading Bryan Alexander's The New Digital Storytelling book. Bryan writes about engagement and attention grabbers.

This 1948 “Knock” book by Fredric Brown has a fantastic attention grabber.

"The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door..."

How ‘Elite’ Universities Are Using Online Education

After years of skepticism, higher education’s upper class has finally decided that online learning is going to play an important role in its future. But what will that role be?

Recently, conversations about "elite" online education has revolved around the free online courses, aka MOOCs, which Stanford, MIT, Harvard, and dozens of other top universities started offering several years ago. But it soon became clear that high marks in those courses would not translate to academic credit at the institutions offering them (or anywhere else).

By Steve Kolowich 

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LinkedIn Will Buy Online-Learning Company For $1.5 Billion

LinkedIn announced Thursday it has agreed to acquire the online-learning company lynda.com for $1.5 billion, The Wall Street Journal reports. It is the social-networking giant’s largest acquisition to date, and signals its continued expansion into the education realm. lynda.com offers more than 2,900 courses online, which include video tutorials for various skills.

By Andy Thomason

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New Offering From Noodle Will Help Colleges Build Online Programs

The education site Noodle is putting a new twist on helping colleges create online degree and certificate programs with its creation of Noodle Partners, announced on Wednesday.

Noodle Partners, the brainchild of the Princeton Review founder John Katzman, is an enabler — a company that helps colleges build online-education programs. Several other companies provide similar services, one of them being 2U, also founded by Mr. Katzman.

But Noodle Partners is different from other enablers, said Jodi Rothstein, the company’s chief product officer . It helps colleges to assemble, rather than build, platforms, collaborating with a variety of vendors to develop online-education programs, Ms. Rothstein said.  

By Casey Fabris

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http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus

Why My MOOC is Not Built on Video

The participants of #NumericalMOOC will have noticed that we made only one video for the course. I thought that maybe I would do a handful more. But in the end I didn’t and I don’t think it matters too much.

Why didn’t we have more video? The short answer is budget and time: making good-quality videos is expensive & making simple yet effective educational videos is time consuming, if not necessarily costly. #NumericalMOOC was created on-the-fly, with little budget. But here’s my point: expensive, high-production-value videos are not necessary to achieve a quality learning experience.

By Lorena A. Barba

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https://www.class-central.com

The digital divide: laptop equity at the University

College is expensive: tuition, rent and social expenses can add up to tens of thousands of dollars per year. Smaller expenses, including the cost of buying a laptop, can get lost in this grand total.

News outlets often write broadly about the effects of socioeconomic status on success in school, but more specifically, how does restricted access to technology impact a student at the University?

Students are not required to own laptops in the majority of schools and programs at the University. According to the University’s Computer Showcase website, the University maintains computing sites on both Central and North Campuses equipped with both Macs and PCs for student use. However, the site also advises students “to consider a laptop computer.”

By SAMANTHA WINTNER

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http://www.michigandaily.com

Who’s Taking MOOCs? Teachers

In free online courses offered by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, teachers are increasingly the students. A study by the two universities has found that teachers are enrolling in their MOOCs in high numbers.

The study examines data from some one million MOOC students who enrolled in courses at edX, the nonprofit learning platform started by Harvard and MIT. Some one-fifth of participants answered a survey about their background in teaching, and 39 percent of them said they were current or former teachers.

By Casey Fabris

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http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus

Digital and Analogue Writing with LiveScribe

I still love to write thing by hand, on paper, in a notebook. Call it a holdover from my days (and nights) spent writing in journals and diaries and notebooks. I always had a notebook and pen with me. I was always writing.

Now I have my iPhone with me, and I tweet a whole lot.

But writing out drafts, or brainstorming, or jotting down ideas, those are activities that I miss doing. What I don’t miss doing in transcribing them, or not having access to them if I don’t happen to have the right notebook (or, more often than not these days, post-it note) with me when I needed it.

By Lee Skallerup Bessette

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http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker

edX to Improve Access to MOOCs for People With Disabilities

Under a settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice announced on Thursday, edX, the nonprofit MOOC provider created by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has agreed to make its offerings more accessible to people with disabilities.

The settlement agreement, which marks the department’s first effort to challenge the accessibility of massive open online courses, affects the colleges that are members of edX as well as the nonprofit consortium itself.

By Casey Fabris 

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http://chronicle.com