As MOOCs proliferate, an inevitable byproduct is MOOC review services such as Class Central and CourseTalk.1 The problem, however, is that their results probably have limited generalizability. In an interview a few days ago, Justin Reich2 reminds us that “the people who respond to surveys about their experience are different than people who take the courses broadly.”3
* * *
Kadenze is a new MOOC platform for art courses. Stanford and Princeton are listed among their partners. “According to a company co-founder, Perry R. Cook, an emeritus professor at Princeton, the platform will be ‘multimedia rich’ and allow students to create online portfolios, upload music files and scanned art, watch videos, and participate in discussion forums.”4 The list of features is impressive, but the need for packaged services such as these highlights the glaring weakness of online instruction in general — the lack of media savvy among most professors in the academic disciplines.
In the current best practice model, online courses are divided into two dimensions: content and delivery. The professor provides the content, and the instructional technology department provides the delivery. This approach is a stopgap, and ultimately unsustainable. It’s the equivalent of hiring a professor to produce content for a course and a second professor to deliver it. But it’s even worse considering it involves IT staff and resources. The cost quickly approaches the prohibitive, and the vast majority of cash-strapped colleges will either back off or provide low-maintenance CMS platforms, which guarantee cookie-cutter courses that are uniformly bland and unimaginative. Continue reading →
Young points out that when the Internet first began, 80% of the content was in English. That figure has now dropped to 30%, and out of the 6,000 or so languages in existence, 10 of them make up 82% of all Internet content. These figures prompted her to ask some questions: Does the language you speak online matter? How is your Internet experience different if your first language is not one of those 10? How does language shape your access to information and your ability to communicate globally?
Young asserts that it definitely does make a difference. Just as language in day-to-day life can shape your connections with others and your common interests, the Internet does the same. People often communicate with those who speak the same language, sharing ideas and information that is common for their language group. Research has even shown that bilingual users behave differently on different platforms in their two different languages.
The author makes many other points about the inequality of information, who is represented, and how some groups are represented by others. She also looks at ways to bridge the divide and explores which languages will survive online.
Why should this issue be of interest to us as educators? Young tells us that “[i]n 2011 the UN declared access to the internet as a basic human right.” However, not everyone has equal access, whether due to inadequate infrastructure or the lack of linguistic diversity on the web. We should think about what we and our students are missing if our access is limited by language.
(Published 12 June 2018) Gwen Sinclair
Librarian
Government Documents & Maps Department
University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa Library
She holds master’s degrees in Library Science and Geography from UHM and is an adjunct faculty member in the UHM Library and Information Science Program. Her publications reflect her interest in government documents and federal property in Hawai‘i.
Updated 6/14/15
When was the last time you stepped into a college library? If you’re like most, that time is somewhere in the distant past, and this is true even if your work takes you or keeps you on campus. Just as the textbook was the portal to knowledge for a course, the library was once the portal to primary sources of information for all courses. That is, before the advent of smartphones, tablets, notebooks, and the internet.
The first thing you notice when you enter is the absence of rows and rows of bookshelves. Instead, the space is filled with computer workstations (above), study tables and carrels (see photos below).
Today, all the limitations that we attribute to a hardcopy textbook are reflected in the library. In a world of mobile anytime-anywhere communications and access to information, the library is looking more like a phone booth, a movie theater, a Blockbuster, or, more tellingly, a Borders. Just as the tiny businesses that sprouted along highways faded away when freeways bypassed them, the library is fast becoming a victim of the cyberway, the electronic equivalent of an extreme autobahn.
The library is a study center.
In essence, the smartphone that students carry in their pockets and bags has become the interactive portal to not just library information but to nearly all information. This fact alone probably says more about the future of libraries and, by extension, college campuses than all the articles and books ever written about the impact of technology on higher education. Continue reading →
By Lynn Zimmerman
Associate Editor
Editor, Teacher Education
International students in the United States, whether they are native English-speakers or English Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL), face some unique challenges when attending American universities. Jiongcheng “Arthur” Xu, in “Five Ways to Prepare for Freshman Year at a U.S. College,” encourages incoming freshmen who are international students to take advantage of technology to prepare themselves for their experience. I think two of his ideas are especially relevant for all international students whether they are coming to the US or going elsewhere.
His first suggestion is to practice writing. He rightly points out that the US educational system relies heavily on reading and writing, whether it is traditional classwork or communicating with classmates through FaceBook and texting. Recently, I was at a conference in Croatia, and one young woman shared her experience as an international student who had never used a classroom management system.
She did not realize at first that her instructors expected her to take some responsibility for her learning by logging on regularly and accessing course materials, reading and corresponding either through the site or through email with the instructor and fellow students, and participating in online discussions. Not only is the online learning environment a different paradigm than many international students are accustomed to, but each of these activities requires different writing skills and not always the 5-paragraph essay that students of English are often taught.
Another suggestion that he made was to find university lectures in English online and watch them. Not only will they improve their listening and note-taking skills, they will get an idea of how professors in the US conduct a class. I would also recommend that they try to find recordings of classes in which there is interaction among students. One of the skills that a language learner may need to learn is how much information to give and how long to talk before yielding the floor to another speaker. I have found that sometimes when international students have finally gotten up the nerve to participate in a class, they do not understand the unspoken rules of turn-taking and quantity of speech that is appropriate in certain situations.
What has your experience been with using technology for college preparation, either as an international student or as a teacher of international students?
What is creativity? A typical definition might be “the ability to create new things using your imagination.” Using the word “create” in the definition seems to remove some of the definition, however. Merely changing “create” to “produce” may be more satisfying.
Whichever definition you prefer, it’s clear that imagination is involved as is making something new on the face of the planet, at least new to the creator. Much more important than the what of creativity is the how. How do you become more creative?
Being in a creative job (making new online science lessons that are truly different), having a creative avocation (writing fiction and non-fiction), and having been in creative professions previously for a long time (first scientist and then software engineer), I have some thoughts. Many ideas about being creative have been explained by very many people before. There are endless suggestions ranging from meditation to travel.
To all of these, I’ll add one idea. It’s not a new one, but then none truly are. I happen to like this idea because it fits with my concepts of what a scientist, such as myself, must be able to do. It’s an important part of scientific thinking and of many professions that must see something where others do not. Continue reading →
Amersfoort, 27th May 2015 – Mars One is proud to introduce Inside 360; a series of in-depth articles that present an inside look into the details and feasibility of the Mars One mission. The first article can be found on Mars Exchange. Subsequent articles will be added periodically.
Mars One has taken the first crucial steps in the process of establishing the first human settlement on Mars. In order to address the questions and concerns that have been raised, Inside 360 will foremost provide an in-depth explanation of the individual phases of the mission. Mars One is continuously improving their mission plans based on advice from advisers and suppliers, and Inside 360 will offer the rationale behind decisions made. The ongoing series will additionally feature interviews with Mars One team members and external experts about the different aspects of the mission.
Click image to enlarge.
“Mars One is still in the early stages of organizing this human mission to Mars,” said Bas Lansdorp, co-founder and CEO of Mars One. “We are looking forward to sharing our developments as well as the studies completed by our suppliers. This way, the aerospace community can share their feedback and we can implement suggestions that improve our mission design.”
Astronaut Selection: Inside 360 will describe the Mars One astronaut selection process and include an interview with Mars One’s Chief Medical Officer, Norbert Kraft, M.D., discussing the selection criteria. Dr. Kraft has researched crew composition for long duration space missions at NASA and has also worked for the Japanese Space Agency and collaborated with the Russian Space Agency. Continue reading →
Diets provide a great opportunity to exercise critical thinking. Pick any diet and pick it apart. Do this as a mental exercise or, if you teach, with your classes. Chances are that many of your students’ parents have dieted or are dieting. In this article, I am picking on the currently trendy Paleo diet.
The Paleo diet persists. I have a strange theory about diets. The first part is that people don’t like to diet. They like to eat whatever they choose. I suspect that this is especially true of libertarians. The second part is that many people see their food as a health problem and would like to change their eating patterns.
Many years ago, the Grapefruit Diet was very popular. This was great for people who loved grapefruit but not so much for those who found them too sour or too messy. Then, there was the problem that grapefruits are like the proverbial Chinese dinner that left you hungry shortly after finishing it. “Have another piece of grapefruit” just doesn’t work for most people.
Skeleton and restoration model of Neanderthal (La Ferrassie 1). Exhibit in the National Museum of Nature and Science, Tokyo, Japan.
Anyway, my theory is that diets are successful not if they work but rather when they cater to people’s desires. If you could get away with an ice cream diet, you’d have the world doing it because “everyone likes ice cream.” I haven’t yet seen a broccoli diet even though it would probably work better than grapefruit. Continue reading →
By Lynn Zimmerman
Associate Editor
Editor, Teacher Education
Recently, I was at an education conference in Croatia, and one of the presentations was about using geographic information systems (GIS) and global positioning systems (GPS) technology as teaching tools. The presenters proposed that this technology can be integrated in a variety of ways to create interdisciplinary lessons and projects that are technology-based. Students can learn with the GIS and GPS rather than just learn about it so that they can become producers of knowledge about the physical world around them and not just consumers of information.
One of the connections the presenters made was to the sport of orienteering to promote the development of map-reading skills and navigation. Even though orienteering is usually done low-tech with a compass and a map, higher levels of technology can create a different experience for participants.
“Field-Map birdie” by Claudiusmm – Own work. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.
Of particular interest for me as a teacher of English as Foreign Language are the ways this type of technology can be used to create authentic (real-life) reading, writing, speaking and listening activities for students. The presenters made a specific point that students’ real life knowledge about nature gained with this technology can easily be represented through the medium of digital story telling, which itself integrates reading, writing, and speaking and uses critical thinking skills as students plan and develop their project.
If anyone has had experience with these types of projects, I’d like to hear about them. Post a comment to this article or email me at zimmerma@purduecal.edu
Yet another “robot” movie has appeared, and another Terminator movie is scheduled for release. It’s the robots who should be saying, “I’ll be back.”
Having already written on robots and artificial intelligence, writing about the latest opus, Ex Machina, may seem anticlimactic. This movie certainly has some excellent optics. Just four characters make up the speaking parts. One more is important to the plot, and only ten are listed in the credits. This is a small movie when measured by personalities on screen. The special effects that make Ava look mechanical are almost astounding and, along with the scenery and sets, make this a large movie.
The premise that a lone genius can create an artificial intelligence that passes muster as capable of human thought is an enoromus stretch. That he also can fit it all into a human framework that can walk bipedally and can perform other human-like actions is beyond imagining. You really must suspend disbelief to watch this movie and seek its philosophical underpinnings.
In the end, it’s the same old story that we’ve seen since Mary Shelly wrote Frankenstein. Man should not play god, and creating new life is extremely dangerous. The movie plays on the morality of choosing to be god and on people’s fears of the unknown, especially when created by a “mad scientist.” Continue reading →
Universities seek alternatives to expensive textbooks by Leslie Corbly in Deseret News National 4/25/15
With the increasing cost of textbooks, schools are adopting policies to allow open source textbooks that can be offered free online to students. Research shows that interactive digital texts not only cut costs but improve student engagement.
Some bilinguals use emoticons more when chatting in non-native language in Science Daily 2/17/15
The use of the emoticon (which many people love to hate) by language learners was studied by a research team and compared to the use of nonverbal communication and found a correlation ;-)
New Tablet-Based Interactive ELL Test in Language Magazine 2/20/15
This new tablet-based assessment, which can provide data about ELLs, raises the question about how much information we want a private company to have about our students and whether and how it should be disseminated. These issues are not addressed in the article.
Teachers Mixed on Common Core, Support Blended Learning by Dian Schaffhauser in The Journal 2/9/15
A poll conducted by the Association of American Educators showed that more than 90% of teachers in the US report that they use technology in the classroom and that 67% of them are in favor of blended learning and that students should be required to take at least one online course before graduation. I assume they are talking about high school.
Technology changing teacher’s role in Science Daily 2/16/15
In what should come as no surprise to anyone, a recent Finnish-Swiss-Belgian study showed that “the use of technology changes the role of the teacher from a traditional knowledge provider rather into a facilitator guiding the students’ learning processes and engaging in joint problem-solving with the students. In addition, technology offers a range of new types of learning possibilities.”
Dr. Peter A. Milne and his associates have found an unexpected and, to the cosmological community, startling result from their surveys of supernovae. This result illustrates both the consistent and varying nature of science at the same time.
Dr. Peter Milne
We know from a great many astronomical observations that the universe has been expanding for a little short of 14 billion years and continues to expand. Because of gravity, everyone expected that this expansion was slowing over time with theories and measurements suggesting that this expansion would eventually coast to a very dilute universe drifting apart at ever slower speeds.
In the 1990s, some astronomers separately discovered that the universe is expanding ever more rapidly instead of the expected opposite slowing of expansion using measurements of he brightness of very distant supernovae. They received the Nobel Prize in physics for this work in 2011.
Stars can explode. One common explosion is called a nova. A much more cataclysmic and extremely brighter explosion is a supernova. Supernovae shine with a brightness that can exceed that of all of the hundred billion or so stars in its galaxy. For this reason, we can see them in distant galaxies that are barely visible in our best telescopes. A supernova is a rare event occurring about three times a century in a galaxy the size of our Milky Way. With hundreds of billions of galaxies, however, it’s not too hard to find hundreds each year using modern astronomical equipment.
A special sort of supernova created when the two stars in a binary star system go through a specific series of interactions is known as a type 1a supernova. Because of the steps required to reach supernova status, the brightness of these type 1a supernovae has been considered to be a constant that can be used to estimate distances to very distant galaxies. Brightness declines with distance in a very precise manner.
There remains the possibility that acceleration of very distant bodies in our universe away from each other is a basic property of our space-time structure not detectable at smaller distances of only millions or even tens of millions of light-years, that “dark energy” is just an attempt to recast a phenomenon into understandable terms, just as the caloric theory of heat was long ago. -HK
The measurements of these supernovae were the reason to believe that the expansion of the universe was accelerating. We are seeing these very distant supernovae with light that started its journey over ten billion years ago when the universe was very young. Dr. Milne has discovered that type 1a supernovae are not all the same but fall into two categories of different brightness. Furthermore, the supernovae from the early universe are, on average, less bright than those in the more recent universe.
The lower brightness of the distant supernovae may well be due to less inherent brightness instead of greater distance. This finding destroys a fair piece of that Nobel Prize discovery. Dr. Milne still attests that the universe’s expansion is accelerating, just not so fast, but the vast number of recalculations being done to account for this new discovery will take some time. Continue reading →
Bill Would Limit Use of Student Data by Natasha Singer in the New York Times, 22 Mar. 2015
Singer looks at some of the issues raised by the Student Digital Privacy and Parental Rights Act, a bill to place limits on how “companies that operate school services — like online homework portals, digital grade books for teachers or student email programs —” can use or disclose “students’ personal information to tailor advertisements to them” and “bar them from collecting or using student data to create marketing profiles.”
Digital curriculum targets ELL learning gap from eSchool News, 19 Mar. 2015
Middlebury Interactive Languages has developed English Language Learner programs which “are modeled after Middlebury Interactive’s world language courses and, like those programs, integrate research-based learning techniques, cultural awareness and project-based activities into blended learning classrooms.”
Increased Smartphone Use Equals Lower GPA Among College Students by Brian Heaton from from Government Technology, 17 Mar. 2015
This study from Kent State University about the effects of smartphone use on grades is sure to cause a stir. Even controlling for certain “known predictors, the group still found the relationship between cellphone use and GPA was ‘statistically significant and negative.’”
Artificial intelligence has appeared in a great many movies over the years, often as robots. The latest is Chappie, a movie that has been panned by a majority of critics but apparently enjoyed by quite a few movie goers.
Robots (or AI) have been good and bad. The first that I recall was Robby in the first science fiction (SF) movie to adhere to scientific ideas (of the time), Forbidden Planet. This 1956 movie starred Leslie Nielsen when he was still doing romantic leading roles. The character of Robby created quite a stir at the time. He was definitely a benevolent robot who was unable to harm humans. An immense computer system, the hidden evil element of the movie, served as a foil.
Most people remember HAL, the AI embedded in the spaceship of 2001, a Space Odyssey. This movie debuted twelve years later and showed how AI could be a force of evil. Few who saw it will forget the creepy voice of HAL (notably one letter apiece short of IBM alphabetically).
I probably will not see Chappie for several reasons based on the reviews and my viewing of the trailers. The concept of artificial intelligence rising to the level of human consciousness bothers me, not for religious but for scientific reasons. However, many students probably will see it if only because of its themes involving street gangs and defiance of authority. Continue reading →
On 18 March 2015, Education Week recognized 16 exceptional district-level leaders at an exclusive event in Washington, D.C., featuring presentations and discussions on leadership and education policy. Featured speakers included Assistant Secretary, U.S. Department of Education Deborah S. Delisle and Adviser to the Premier and Minister of Education in Ontario, Canada Michael Fullan. Watch the videos from the event.
Recognition Presentation: Meet the Leaders To Learn From (Part I)
Recognition Presentation: Meet the Leaders To Learn From (Part II)
In The Profession section of its April 2015 (v48, 02) issue, PS: Political Science & Politics (PS)1 scrutinizes the peer review system, a core value in the research community. Some question whether or not peer review is sustainable given the increased and unequal burdens placed on reviewers. In “Peer Reviewing in Political Science: New Survey Results”, Paul Djupe of Denison University argues that the common perception that reviewers are overburdened with requests has never been tested through reliable data collection. He finds, contrary to the conventional wisdom, that most scholars appreciate peer review, and that most peer review requests by journals are accepted. The only common complaint is that peer review is not considered as part of the tenure and promotion process.
Also in The Profession, the right time for associate professors to go for promotion is considered by Kurt Weyland of the University of Texas in “The Logic of the Promotion Decision: In Dubio Pro Patientia”. Weyland argues that it is in the associate professor’s own interest to establish a convincing case before they bid for the rank of full professor and efforts to ‘force’ a promotion prematurely can leave a bad impression and damage the career. Accumulating a strong record in research and publication is the best way to assure a smooth path to tenure.
In the Profession Symposium, see the articles on “Reinventing the Scholarly Conference: Reflections from the Field.”
In The Teacher , Matthew Woessner of Penn State shows how computer games like SimCity can be used to engage young people to think about politics, governance, and the challenges of managing cities in the real world. Continue reading →
You may have seen the headlines already. “What is dark matter made of? Galaxy cluster collisions offer clues,” shouts the Christian Science Monitor.1
Here you have a great moment to engage students in something exciting and to use critical thinking. Dark matter is a hypothesis to explain why stars in galaxies circle around their centers faster than the observable matter says that they should, as well as other more sophisticated reasons. It’s called “dark” because it does not emit light and because you cannot see it. You might also have called it “invisible” matter, but much matter seems invisible. Besides, “dark” implies spooky, and this stuff is definitely spooky because ordinary matter moves right through it as though it isn’t there, except for gravitational effects.
The new finding just reported tell us that dark matter behaves just the same way with itself. One patch of dark matter moves right through another as though it’s not there at all (again, except for gravitational effects). This result pushes back against the most popular idea about the identity of dark matter, that it’s WIMPs — weakly interacting massive particles — because particles don’t just pass right through each other.
Dark matter is invisible. Based on the effect of gravitational lensing, a ring of dark matter has been detected in this image of a galaxy cluster (CL0024+17) and has been represented in blue. Image from NASA, ESA, M.J. Jee and H. Ford (Johns Hopkins University).
Two explanations come to mind. Some physicists doing the work still are seeking particles, but these other explanations could help get around that barrier. There are some truly exotic explanations going around as well, such as the existence of a “mirror universe.” It’s best to stick with the simplest ones, though. Occam’s Razor tells us so.
One explanation is that gravity just doesn’t work exactly as we expect it to, especially when dealing with very large masses spanning very large volumes of space. This is not a very popular explanation. The other is that dark matter is really energy. Because of the equivalence of energy and matter demonstrated by Einstein and captured in his famous equation, E=mc2, energy is affected by and causes gravity. Continue reading →
Northrop Grumman Foundation today announced it is launching an online contest to encourage today’s students to become tomorrow’s innovators by creating classrooms and science labs that inspire. The Fab School Labs contest is open to public middle schools and will make five grants of up to $100,000 available to five winning schools to fund a school lab makeover.
Northrop Grumman Foundation Launches Middle School Contest to Promote STEM Innovation
Beginning May 4 and continuing through June 12, 2015, teachers, principals and school administrators can enter their eligible school by visiting www.FabSchoolLabs.com, where they can learn about the contest and submit their application, along with photos and video to help tell their story. Semi-finalist schools will be chosen and their videos will receive online votes of support to assist with the final selection process. The winning schools will team up with Fab School Labs contest partner Flinn Scientific Inc. to design a state-of-the-art lab complete with all of the tools, resources and furnishings needed.
Fab School Labs contest gives schools funding to create a first-class STEM learning environment
The contest is designed to drive students’ interest in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) by giving public middle school teachers and school administrators the chance to create the STEM lab of their dreams and give students access to the latest learning tools and technologies that will stimulate as well as teach. Continue reading →
Inside Higher Ed’s 2015 Survey of College and University Presidents was conducted in conjunction with researchers from Gallup. Highlights of the survey findings include:
A majority of presidents give the Obama administration’s ratings proposal a grade of D or F, and a third of presidents say they view the plan more negatively than they did before the administration released a detailed framework about the plan in December.
Presidents are skeptical that the proposed rating system would accurately reflect their institutions’ quality, and are least supportive of the possible use of graduate income level and federal graduation rates as ratings criteria. Campus CEOs offer more support for using as criteria the percentage of first-generation and Pell Grant eligible students enrolled, and degree completion rates.
Presidents of two-year colleges are likelier than their peers at four-year public and private institutions to support the president’s plan to encourage states to offer free community college tuition.
More than half of the presidents are confident about the sustainability of their institution’s financial model over the next 5 years, but only 39 percent feel that way over 10 years.
About one-third of college presidents say that sexual assault is prevalent at U.S. colleges. But only a small percentage believe it is an issue at their institution.
A large majority of presidents (81 percent) say that the state of race relations on their campus is excellent or good.
The majority of those surveyed say presidents should play a more active role in decisions about tenure and hiring faculty members.
Nearly half of presidents agree that university leaders should speak out on issues beyond education.
Join Inside Higher Ed editors Scott Jaschik and Doug Lederman for a lively discussion of these and other findings of the 2015 Survey of College and University Presidents in a free webinar on April 14 at 2 p.m. Eastern. Can’t attend the live event? You should still register – all registrants will receive the slide deck and recording shortly after the event.
The Inside Higher Ed 2015 Survey of College and University Presidents was made possible in part by the generous financial support of Pearson, Jenzabar and Academic Partnerships. Your registration information will be shared with these companies.
Captioning for the deaf and hard of hearing is provided by CaptionAccess for all Inside Higher Ed webinars. Transcripts available upon request.
The difference between SAT scores of students from the lowest (<$20K) and highest (>$200K) income brackets is approximately 400 points. This point difference is mirrored in comparisons between the lowest (<high school) and highest (graduate degree) parental education levels.1
Battushig Myanganbayar
This correlation seems immutable. Parental education and income levels impact SAT scores and determine who gets into the most selective colleges. Then along came Battushig — Battushig Myanganbayar of Mongolia, that is, “The Boy Genius of Ulan Bator” — who, in June 2012, at 15, “became one of 340 students out of 150,000 to earn a perfect score in Circuits and Electronics, a sophomore-level class at M.I.T. and the first Massive Open Online Course, or MOOC.”2 His accomplishment didn’t go unnoticed, and he is now a research student at the MIT Media Lab.
Battushig is, of course, a rare exception, but his success adds to the already enormous potential of MOOCs and raises the possibility that they could become a factor in college admissions. In an editorial yesterday, Pitt News broaches this very idea: “Universities sometimes directly accept a student that excels in one of their MOOCs…. If not, the student may still choose to list the MOOC on his or her resumé under skills or relevant education. A completed MOOC is a valuable asset, comparable to a week-long leadership conference.”3
MOOC numbers from Seb Murray1 that are hard to ignore:
“About 50% [of] Coursera’s 12 million users are utilizing its courses to advance their careers, says Julia [Stiglitz, head of business development at Coursera]. ‘Helping people accelerate their career[s] by learning new skills is a major way that we hope to impact the lives of our learners.’”
“A recent survey of 400 US employers by Duke University and research group RTI International found that 57% said they could see their organization using Moocs for recruitment. And three-quarters said job applicants taking relevant Moocs would be perceived positively in hiring decisions.”
“In a poll of 1,000 UK employers last year by distance learning specialist the Open University[,] nearly half said additional education is the number-one reason they would offer salary increase or promotion – and gaining education with free online courses was the third most common thing the employers looked for.”
“Recent research by the Career Advisory Board found that 87% of 500 US hiring managers are likely to consider non-traditional ‘micro-credentials’, or specialized certificates awarded by reputable educational institutions, as proof of skill mastery.”
“Close to 95% of edX courses offer a verified certificate, [Nancy Moss, director of communications at edX] says, with many of its users looking for new jobs. ”
“While universities have faced the ignominy of budget cuts, tech groups have harvested massive war chests to expand. EdX last year had been funded with $90 million; Coursera has raised a total of $85 million; Udacity has raised $58 million.”
“Alison’s [Mike Feerick, CEO and founder of the Ireland-based Mooc provider,] offered a view that is widely shared in the education community: ‘…[Universities] are the necessary middle-men selling a product that is past its sell-by date.’”
The article below is from a dear friend, Joyce Malyn-Smith. Please send her names and interests. We are trying to get funding for programs and grants for more minorities.
A Network for Under-served Populations
By J. Malyn-Smith
Joyce Malyn-Smith
I want to expand my own professional network in order to share information and opportunities I come across in my work to build the next generation of technology enabled citizens and workers. As someone who has spent many years working with under-served populations I am particularly concerned that persons of color, Hispanics and Native Americans may not be aware of many of these opportunities, or may learn of them too late to participate. For example, I am working with NSF’s Cyberlearning and ITEST resource centers, both hosting workshops in June aimed at helping people, who have not received Cyberlearning or ITEST funding, to develop strong NSF proposals.
The first goal for the expansion of my own professional network is to do what I can to ensure that these workshops are accessible to persons of color, Hispanics and Native Americans. To that end, I am asking you to help me expand my network so that I can forward relevant information, answer questions they might have about the events, and make sure a diverse group of potential participants are aware of when applications open so that these types of events are more accessible to them. Continue reading →
Amersfoort, 19th March 2015 – Mars One recently published a video in which Bas Lansdorp, CEO and Co-founder of Mars One, replies to recent criticism concerning the feasibility of Mars One’s human mission to Mars.
Question: What do you think of the recent news articles that doubt the feasibility of Mars One?
BL: At Mars One we really value good criticism because it helps us to improve our mission. We get a lot of criticism from our advisors, and that is also exactly what we want from them. The recent bad press about Mars One was largely caused by an article on medium.com, which contains a lot of things that are not true. For example, the suggestion was made that our candidates were selected on the basis of how much money they donate to Mars One. That is simply not true, and it is very easy to find that on our website. There are a lot of current Round Three candidates that did not make any donations to Mars One, and there are also lots of people that did not make it to the third round that contributed a lot to Mars One. The two things are not related at all, and to say that they are is simply a lie. The article also states that there were only 2,700 applications for Mars One, which is not true. We offered the reporter, the first journalist ever, access to our list of 200,000 applications, but she was not interested in that. It seems that she is more interested in writing a sensational article about Mars One than in the truth.
We will have to delay the first unmanned mission to 2020. Delaying our first unmanned mission by two years also means that all the other missions will move by the same period of time, with our first human landing now planned for 2027. -B.L.
Question: Concerns have been voiced about the thoroughness of the astronaut selection process. What is your response to that?
BL: We started our astronaut selection with over 200,000 applications that were submitted online. The application included a video and a lot of psychological questions for our candidates. We used that to narrow down the candidates to about 1000 that had to do a medical check, which was very similar to the check for NASA astronauts. All the remaining candidates then underwent an interview. The interview and all other parts of the selection process were led by Norbert Kraft, our Chief Medical Officer. He has worked on astronaut selection for 5 years at the Japanese Space Agency, and at NASA he researched crew composition for long duration space missions. Continue reading →
One of the craziest schemes to garner worldwide publicity and lots of contributions is having some new problems. Mars One has lost one of its final hundred to misgivings about the process by which he was chosen. Will more come out with similar stories? Is this the beginning of the end for Mars One?
The Mars One stray is Joseph Roche, an assistant professor at Trinity College Dublin with a PhD in, wait for it, physics and astrophysics. With this education and background, he’s not just a scientist well equipped with Carl Sagan’s famous “baloney detection kit,” he’s also a specialist in getting around the universe.
Mars One is a reach too far. Until I see plenty of funding and until I see that water mission and then see the first supply mission land successfully, I will remain cautiously skeptical. -H.K.
I have written plenty about Mars One and its challenges. In the end, I stated that its biggest challenge is not radiation or water or air or food but money. It’s not just the money to send that first expedition to Mars but also the money to keep sending more until the colony is self-sufficient. The first expedition requires several preparatory flights to deliver lots of habitat modules, freeze-dried food, solar panels, machinery, rovers, and more. Each of those unmanned preparatory flights will cost very large sums of money, likely a billion or more dollars apiece. Continue reading →
The challenges of digital equity and social justice were recurrent themes in two recent meetings looking at ways to leverage technology to improve education.
“Digital equity” is shorthand for the bundle of problems that prevent many from accessing online resources, in particular the Internet.
Some would-be users live in areas that do not have broadband access. Other users, even in areas where there is high-speed broadband, cannot afford it. Yet more people have simply not gotten around to getting online.
As Dr. Louis Gomez of UCLA put it, we are facing “epic inequality.” The U.S. education system, Dr. Gomez maintained, “is marked by racial and class inequality.” He added that poor educational performance “has persisted for decades for large swaths of the U.S. population.”
Dr. Gomez was speaking at this year’s Cyberlearning 2015 conference, organised by the Center for Innovative Research in Cyberlearning (CIRCL) and held in Arlington, VA, on 27-28 January. Continue reading →
By Jim Shimabukuro
Educational Technology and Change Journal 
