Gone is the time when PowerPoint was the most impressive communication technology in the lecture hall. These days, students and professors enjoy the power of Twitter, a tool that allows for digital discussions to supplement and even guide lecture sessions. So how exactly is Twitter changing the college lecture as we know it? Read on to find out about 10 different ways.
Not long ago, cell phones were met with intense hatred in the lecture hall, villainized as noisy distractions. But using Twitter in the college lecture hall has turned these mobile distractions into a learning tool, offering students a way to use their cell phones productively in class.
Without Twitter, lectures are often a one-way street, with professors lecturing for about an hour, mostly uninterrupted. It’s difficult to get students to speak up in a huge lecture format, but not so with Twitter. With Twitter in the lecture hall, more students tend to not only participate in the primary discussion with the professor, but even spin off into their own intellectual conversations with classmates. This turns the one-sided lecture into a multifaceted conversation for the class.
Thanks to Twitter, students who might be afraid to raise their hands and speak up in a large lecture hall are given a less socially intimidating way to contribute. Students who would have remained quiet can now share their ideas, explore the conversation, and become more engaged in class without feeling intimidated.
In a large lecture hall, chances are good that most students don’t know who all of their classmates are. They might recognize them, but it’s not likely they know their names or have connected with them in any way. But using Twitter in the lecture hall, students can connect with classmates without regard to distance and unfamiliarity. This allows students to enjoy a better conversation, and even get to know more of their classmates.
Lecturers like David Parry, a professor of emerging media at UT-Dallas, find that using Twitter in the lecture hall helps them to stay connected with students long after class time is over. As students follow professors like Parry on Twitter, they are able to further engage outside of class time, alerting them to world events, issues, and interesting articles that are relevant to class.
In decades past, students would gather in dorms to discuss and share ideas, but now that many students are moving out of dorms, and working jobs, there’s not much opportunity for these discussions anymore. But with Twitter, the dorm discussions go online, allowing even remote students to participate in idea sharing with their peers. Students can get answers not just from their professors but from their peers, as well.
Students once had to furiously scribble notes in class, but in lectures where there’s a Twitter backchannel, much of this information is now stored online. Using classroom hashtags creates an archive of each class meeting that students can reference in the future. Of course, students do still need to take notes, but now they might do so through their own Twitter feeds, or simply note keywords that they can use to search through archived tweets later.
As professors use Twitter and lecture-specific hashtags, students are able to stay in the loop on class wherever they are. Any time students log in to Twitter and see these tweets, they’re able to keep their class in mind.
When it comes to review and test prep, students have historically been on their own, or, with particularly accommodating professors, enjoyed in-class review sessions or take-home sheets. But with Twitter in the lecture hall, professors can share test-prep questions to reinforce key points throughout the semester. They can even assign a hashtag to these questions so that come review time, students can go back to check them out.
Although some worry that Twitter in the lecture hall can be a major distraction from the task at hand, the fact is that Twitter often saves lecture time. Review questions or confusions from a single student no longer take up valuable class time; instead, these tasks can be taken care of on Twitter, often by TAs. And due to the short format of Twitter, question and answer sessions happen more quickly. As professor Karl Gude points out, "students can only ask a short question and I can only give a short answer."
“AH, you’re a professor. You must learn so much from your students.”
This line, which I’ve heard in various forms, always makes me cringe. Do people think that lawyers learn a lot about the law from their clients? That patients teach doctors much of what they know about medicine?
Yet latent in the sentiment that our students are our teachers is an important truth. We do in fact need to learn from them, but not about the history of the Roman Empire or the politics of “Paradise Lost.” Understanding what it is that students have to teach teachers can help us to deal with one of the most vexing issues now facing colleges and universities: online education. At my school, the University of Virginia, that issue did more than vex us; it came close to tearing the university apart.
A few weeks ago our president, Teresa A. Sullivan, was summarily dismissed and then summarily reinstated by the university’s board of visitors. One reason for her dismissal was the perception that she was not moving forward fast enough on Internet learning. Stanford was doing it, Harvard, Yale and M.I.T. too. But Virginia, it seemed, was lagging. Just this week, in fact, it was announced that Virginia, along with a number of other universities, signed on with a company called Coursera to develop and offer online classes.
But can online education ever be education of the very best sort?
It’s here that the notion of students teaching teachers is illuminating. As a friend and fellow professor said to me: “You don’t just teach students, you have to learn ’em too.” It took a minute — it sounded like he was channeling Huck Finn — but I figured it out.
With every class we teach, we need to learn who the people in front of us are. We need to know where they are intellectually, who they are as people and what we can do to help them grow. Teaching, even when you have a group of a hundred students on hand, is a matter of dialogue.
In the summer Shakespeare course I’m teaching now, I’m constantly working to figure out what my students are able to do and how they can develop. Can they grasp the contours of Shakespeare’s plots? If not, it’s worth adding a well-made film version of the next play to the syllabus. Is the language hard for them, line to line? Then we have to spend more time going over individual speeches word by word. Are they adept at understanding the plot and the language? Time to introduce them to the complexities of Shakespeare’s rendering of character.
Every memorable class is a bit like a jazz composition. There is the basic melody that you work with. It is defined by the syllabus. But there is also a considerable measure of improvisation against that disciplining background.
Something similar applies even to larger courses. We tend to think that the spellbinding lecturers we had in college survey classes were gifted actors who could strut and fret 50 amazing minutes on the stage. But I think that the best of those lecturers are highly adept at reading their audiences. They use practical means to do this — tests and quizzes, papers and evaluations. But they also deploy something tantamount to artistry. They are superb at sensing the mood of a room. They have a sort of pedagogical sixth sense. They feel it when the class is engaged and when it slips off. And they do something about it. Their every joke is a sounding. It’s a way of discerning who is out there on a given day.
A large lecture class can also create genuine intellectual community. Students will always be running across others who are also enrolled, and they’ll break the ice with a chat about it and maybe they’ll go on from there. When a teacher hears a student say, “My friends and I are always arguing about your class,” he knows he’s doing something right. From there he folds what he has learned into his teaching, adjusting his course in a fluid and immediate way that the Internet professor cannot easily match.
Online education is a one-size-fits-all endeavor. It tends to be a monologue and not a real dialogue. The Internet teacher, even one who responds to students via e-mail, can never have the immediacy of contact that the teacher on the scene can, with his sensitivity to unspoken moods and enthusiasms. This is particularly true of online courses for which the lectures are already filmed and in the can. It doesn’t matter who is sitting out there on the Internet watching; the course is what it is.
Not long ago I watched a pre-filmed online course from Yale about the New Testament. It was a very good course. The instructor was hyper-intelligent, learned and splendidly articulate. But the course wasn’t great and could never have been. There were Yale students on hand for the filming, but the class seemed addressed to no one in particular. It had an anonymous quality. In fact there was nothing you could get from that course that you couldn’t get from a good book on the subject.
A truly memorable college class, even a large one, is a collaboration between teacher and students. It’s a one-time-only event. Learning at its best is a collective enterprise, something we’ve known since Socrates. You can get knowledge from an Internet course if you’re highly motivated to learn. But in real courses the students and teachers come together and create an immediate and vital community of learning. A real course creates intellectual joy, at least in some. I don’t think an Internet course ever will. Internet learning promises to make intellectual life more sterile and abstract than it already is — and also, for teachers and for students alike, far more lonely.
These days, you don’t need to find a radio to listen in on quality broadcast programming. A laptop, MP3 player, tablet, or even a smartphone will work just as well. Even better, there is a wealth of content out there that’s both educational and entertaining, including some pretty amazing shows on scientific topics that are equally interesting to the layman and the professional. Whether you’re just getting into listening to science podcasts or are looking for a few new shows to add to your weekly collection, we’ve highlighted what we think are some of the best science podcasts out there right now. They’re informative, compelling, and even, at times, pretty darn funny, so make sure to check out one, two, or even all of these great science programs the next time you’re looking for a little edutainment.
Listeners can enjoy five episodes a season of this hip, science-focused news show. What sets it apart from other shows is the often-experimental audio, which uses overlapping audio and other effects to create a unique and engaging show.
Fans of astrophysicist and Nova Science Now host Neil deGrasse Tyson can get access to the popular academic a couple of times a month. Discussions center on astrophysics, but guests are most often actors and comedians.
Comedians Tig Notaro, Kyle Dunnigan, and David Huntsberger host this highly entertaining show. While it rarely features actual scientists, topics are usually science-focused and dealt with in a smart, funny manner.
If you’re looking for a comedic take on science, Probably Science is another good option. Matt Kirshen, Brooks Wheelan, and Andy Wood take on the week’s top science stories, with results that are both hilarious and interesting.
Science Friday is part of NPR’s Talk of the Nation programming block, but you can listen to it separately if you’d prefer to forego the rest of the news to focus on science (plus, at almost two hours long, it is show enough in itself). Host Ira Flatow uses the platform to talk about a handful of science news items from the past week. It’s more serious than some of the previous podcasts we’ve mentioned, but more informative as well.
BBC-based podcast The Infinite Monkey Cage features Brian Vox and Robin Ince who combine typical British comedy with geeky discussions of science topics.
60-Second Science is perfect for those who don’t have the time or the attention span for a longer podcast. The show, produced by Scientific American, touches on a news story from that day, and true to its name, it’s only a minute long.
The SETI Institute’s Seth Shostak and Molly Bently pun, talk, and debate their way through this popular podcast, which covers topics like technological innovation, robotics, and, of course, extraterrestrial life.
British podcast The Naked Scientists is part of a series that also features a range of other “naked” topics. There are no actual naked scientists (not that you’d be able to see them over a podcast anyway), but the show’s name draws from the idea of stripping down science to its core ideas, which makes the discussions easy to understand, fun, and highly accessible.
NPR offers science geeks another listening option through this weekly podcast, which is a great place to hear in-depth reports on a wide range of science issues.
This weekly, one-hour show is hosted by Robyn Williams who explores current events in science through discussions with experts and scientists. Topics have ranged from elephants to earthquakes to cosmic diamonds, meaning there will be something to interest just about every science geek out there.
Listeners can get a chance to hear from the scientists behind the latest discoveries in the physical and natural sciences in this weekly podcast, hosted by Canadian science journalist Bob McDonald.
Those who can’t get enough of news and stories from the natural world really shouldn’t miss out on this excellent weekly podcast from Nature. Listeners will get to hear stories on everything from the latest revelations about DNA to rhino conservation efforts.
There’s a lot of pseudoscience out there, and this podcast takes it on headfirst. Skeptical science nerds will appreciate hearing the real science behind common misconceptions, as well as news on some oddball topics.
Those who like their science to have a British accent will appreciate this BBC-produced show. Weekly episodes focus on particularly interesting news stories related to science, which in recent months have included topics like cancer genes, volcano predictions, and the birthday of the neutron.
Lynn Malcolm hosts this excellent (and award-winning) show that is entirely centered on stories about the human brain, touching on fields like psychology, neurology, and more.
Through this podcast, listeners can learn about the work of the leading professionals in the field of microbiology. While stories are field-specific, they almost always have a broad appeal, touching on issues that affect us all.
Science journalist Quentin Cooper hosts this weekly BBC Radio program that covers an incredibly wide range of scientific topics.
Through this podcast, you can learn a bit more about the history of scientific thought, as well as history, religion, and culture.
The American Museum of Natural History hosts a monthly podcast series. Past guests have included Neil deGrasse Tyson, conservation expert Chris Filardi, and theoretical physicist Dr. S. James Gates Jr.
If you’d like more than just 60 seconds of science discussion, then Scientific American has that covered as well. Hosted by Steve Mirsky, the show touches on the top breakthroughs and controversial issues in science and technology each week.
Slacker Astronomy is the perfect place to find interesting stories, interviews, and discussions on a wide range of astronomical topics.
Need a weekly fix of NASA-related news and research? Then start listening to NASA’s own podcast, focused on sharing the latest space exploration and astronomy research.
Produced in Baton Rouge, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Tokyo, this weekly show is hosted by a rotating group of scientists who take an in-depth look at some of the most interesting recent events in the world of science. While there are serious interviews, there is also humor and a chance to ask a question each week.
Exploration features interviews with scientists who are on the cutting edge of research and development, whether in space travel, biotech, neuroscience, or a whole host of other topics.
Diffusion Science Radio blends science news, humor, history, and more to give listeners a well-rounded and entertaining look into recent scientific discoveries.
With this podcast, you can either listen to or watch a weekly show that explores some of science’s most perplexing mysteries, like how bugs survive harsh winters or why inland lakes aren’t salty.
As its name might lead you to guess, this podcast focuses on all things astronomy. Listeners will get a weekly dose of the show, with topics that change from episode to episode.
Science and environment correspondent for The Guardian Alok Jha also hosts this weekly podcast series. Discussions with guests, often leading researchers in their fields, help illuminate topics like creativity, the relationship between science and government, and even sleep.
How Stuff Works explains, well, exactly that in this weekly podcast that takes on everything from moss to storm chasers.
Learn more about the history of technological progress in this great podcast that highlights some of history’s biggest successes and biggest failures alike.
Who wouldn’t want to know more about viruses, those pesky little things that can make you feel sick or even take your life? Through this podcast, you’ll hear a number of professors from Columbia University’s Medical center take on a range of microbiological, public health, genetics, and virology topics.
Focus magazine provides listeners with interviews and stories on the latest science and technology issues through this podcast.
Australian journalist Robyn Williams also hosts this science-focused show. Much of the content focuses on the ways in which science has an effect on our daily lives, from weather to trauma to environmentalism.
Even if you can’t get in front of your TV, you can still get access to the great stories offered up by NOVA. Simply check out their podcast, which is chock full of interesting, but brief, stories on science.
This award-winning podcast from the Chemical Heritage Foundation is one of the best places to learn about the past, present, and future of chemistry. It isn’t all just lab work, however, as host Meir Rinde touches on issues of chemistry related to everything from baby formula to asbestos.
Fans of Mythbusters Jaime and Adam can get an extra dose of the duo (and a couple of other science geeks, Will and Norm) through their weekly podcast.
The National Academies (including science, engineering, and medicine) put out this research-focused podcast, though fairly irregularly. It covers a wealth of science topics and is largely a more accessible way of getting information found in the Academy’s reports.
These podcasts are super short but they touch on some really amazing cutting-edge projects in science. Produced by the American Chemical Society, the majority are, naturally, in some way related to chemistry.
Dr. Sebastian Seung hosts this show, which as you can guess, is all about the brain. Episodes feature interviews and reviews of new research and cover the full scope of brain sciences.
A few months ago, free online courses from prestigious universities were a rarity. Now, they are the cause for announcements every few weeks, as a field suddenly studded with big-name colleges and competing software platforms evolves with astonishing speed.
In a major development on Tuesday, a dozen highly ranked universities said they had signed on with Coursera, a new venture offering free classes online. They still must overcome some skepticism about the quality of online education and the prospects for having the courses cover the costs of producing them, but their enthusiasm is undimmed.
But at universities that have not yet seized a piece of this action, the response ranges from curiosity to fear of losing a crucial competition. When University of Virginia trustees ousted their president last month — a decision they later reversed — one reason cited was concern about being left behind online. (Virginia was included in Tuesday’s announcement.)
“There’s panic,” said Kevin Carey, director of education policy at the New America Foundation, a nonpartisan research group. “Whether it’s senseless panic is unclear.”
Massive open online courses, or MOOCs, let colleges reach vast audiences at relatively low cost, but they have not yet made money from them. And if it becomes possible in years to come to get a complete college education from an elite institution online, free or at relatively low cost, experts wonder whether some colleges will find it harder to attract students willing to pay $20,000, $40,000 or even $60,000 a year for the traditional on-campus experience.
Online classes have been around for years, with technology evolving to include multimedia features and interaction among students and faculty. What is new is the way top colleges are jumping in with free courses — in effect, throwing open the doors digitally.
So far, most people signing up live in foreign countries. But MOOCs will become more appealing to domestic students when they give course credits toward a degree, something the elite universities have not yet done. The University of Washington says it plans to do so, and it may be just a matter of time before earning credits becomes standard.
“The people who should be worried about this are the large tier of American universities — especially the expensive private schools — that are not elite and don’t have the same reputation” as the big-name universities now creating MOOCs, said Anya Kamenetz, an author who writes on the future of higher education.
Residential colleges already attract far less than half of the higher education market. Most enrollment and nearly all growth in higher education is in less costly options that let students balance classes with work and family: commuter colleges, night schools, online universities.
Most experts say there will always be students who want to live on campus, interacting with professors and fellow students, particularly at prestigious universities. But as a share of the college market, that is likely to be a shrinking niche.
The elite universities will be best able to compete with low-cost alternatives because their large endowments make them less dependent on tuition income, and they can lower their effective prices through generous financial aid, said John Nelson, a managing director at Moody’s Investors Service who analyzes higher education finances.
Analysts say that universities will inevitably try to make money from MOOCs, whether by charging tuition or not. Software companies working with colleges have looked into advertising, or selling information on students to prospective employers.
William E. Kirwan, chancellor of the University System of Maryland, noted that a few public colleges, including his system’s University College, already offer mostly online courses. In the future, he said, the standard class will be a hybrid of in-person and online elements, which Maryland is experimenting with.
“We think this approach can cut costs by about 25 percent,” he said, “enabling each professor to work with more students, while producing a clear improvement in learning outcomes.”
For a decade, Carnegie Mellon University’s Open Learning Initiative has created free online courses. But for many educators, Stanford fired the starting gun last fall, with a free online course in artificial intelligence that drew 160,000 students.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology started a free class project, MITx, in December. The next month, a Stanford professor who helped teach the artificial intelligence class founded Udacity, a company offering free courses in partnership with colleges and professors.
In April, Stanford, Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Michigan joined forces with Coursera to offer free classes. In May, Harvard teamed with M.I.T. to create a similar venture, edX.
In the last week, more universities signed on with Coursera.
“Our participation was finalized literally over the weekend,” said J. Milton Adams, vice provost at the University of Virginia, which listed five free courses. “I’m going to have some unhappy faculty members saying, ‘Why can’t my course be on there?’ ”
As part of a seismic shift in online learning that is reshaping higher education, Coursera, a year-old company founded by two Stanford University computer scientists, will announce on Tuesday that a dozen major research universities are joining the venture. In the fall, Coursera will offer 100 or more free massive open online courses, or MOOCs, that are expected to draw millions of students and adult learners globally.
Even before the expansion, Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng, the founders of Coursera, said it had registered 680,000 students in 43 courses with its original partners, Michigan, Princeton, Stanford and the University of Pennsylvania.
Now, the partners will include the California Institute of Technology; Duke University; the Georgia Institute of Technology; Johns Hopkins University; Rice University; the University of California, San Francisco; the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; the University of Washington; and the University of Virginia, where the debate over online education was cited in last’s month’s ousting — quickly overturned — of its president, Teresa A. Sullivan. Foreign partners include the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, the University of Toronto and EPF Lausanne, a technical university in Switzerland.
And some of them will offer credit.
“This is the tsunami,” said Richard A. DeMillo, the director of the Center for 21st Century Universities at Georgia Tech. “It’s all so new that everyone’s feeling their way around, but the potential upside for this experiment is so big that it’s hard for me to imagine any large research university that wouldn’t want to be involved.”
Because of technological advances — among them, the greatly improved quality of online delivery platforms, the ability to personalize material and the capacity to analyze huge numbers of student experiences to see which approach works best — MOOCs are likely to be a game-changer, opening higher education to hundreds of millions of people.
To date, most MOOCs have covered computer science, math and engineering, but Coursera is expanding into areas like medicine, poetry and history. MOOCs were largely unknown until a wave of publicity last year about Stanford University’s free online artificial intelligence course attracted 160,000 students from 190 countries. Only a small percentage of the students completed the course, but even so, the numbers were staggering.
“The fact that so many people are so curious about these courses shows the yearning for education,” said Molly Corbett Broad, president of the American Council on Education. “There are going to be lots of bumps in the road, but this is a very important experiment at a very substantial scale.”
So far, MOOCs have offered no credit, just a “statement of accomplishment” and a grade. But the University of Washington said it planned to offer credit for its Coursera offerings this fall, and other online ventures are also moving in that direction. David P. Szatmary, the university’s vice provost, said that to earn credit, students would probably have to pay a fee, do extra assignments and work with an instructor.
Experts say it is too soon to predict how MOOCs will play out, or which venture will emerge as the leader. Coursera, with about $22 million in financing, including $3.7 million in equity investment from Caltech and Penn, may currently have the edge. But no one is counting out edX, a joint venture of Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or Udacity, the company founded by Sebastian Thrun of Stanford, who taught the artificial intelligence course last year.
Each company offers online materials broken into manageable chunks, with short video segments, interactive quizzes and other activities — as well as online forums where students answer one another’s questions.
But even Mr. Thrun, a master of MOOCs, cautioned that for all their promise, the courses are still experimental. “I think we are rushing this a little bit,” he said. “I haven’t seen a single study showing that online learning is as good as other learning.”
Worldwide access is Coursera’s goal. “EPF Lausanne, which offers courses in French, opens up access for students in half of Africa,” Ms. Koller said. Each university designs and produces its own courses and decides whether to offer credit.
Coursera does not pay the universities, and the universities do not pay Coursera, but both incur substantial costs. Contracts provide that if a revenue stream emerges, the company and the universities will share it.
Although MOOCs will have to be self-sustaining some day — whether by charging students for credentials or premium services or by charging corporate recruiters for access to the best students — Ms. Koller and university officials said that was not a pressing concern.
About two-thirds of Coursera’s students are from overseas, and most courses attract tens of thousands of students, an irresistible draw for many professors. “Every academic has a little soapbox, and most of the time we have five people listening to us,” said Scott E. Page, a University of Michigan professor who taught Coursera’s model thinking course and was thrilled when 40,000 students downloaded his videos. “By most calculations, I had about 200 years’ worth of students in my class.”
Professors say their in-class students benefit from the online materials. Some have rearranged their courses so that students do the online lesson first, then come to class for interactive projects and help with problem areas.
“The fact that students learn so much from the videos gives me more time to cover the topics I consider more difficult, and to go deeper,” said Dan Boneh, a Stanford professor who taught Coursera’s cryptography course.
The Coursera contracts are not exclusive, so many of its partner universities are also negotiating with several online educational entities.
“I have talked to the provost at M.I.T. and to Udacity and 2Tor,” which provides online graduate programs for several universities, said Peter Lange, the provost of Duke University. “In a field changing this fast, we need flexibility, so it’s very possible that we might have two or three different relationships.”
One looming hurdle is overcoming online cheating.
“I would not want to give credit until somebody figures out how to solve the cheating problem and make sure that the right person, using the right materials, is taking the tests,” said Antonio Rangel, a Caltech professor who will teach Principles of Economics for Scientists in the fall. Udacity recently announced plans to have students pay $80 to take exams at testing centers operated around the world by Pearson, a global education company.
Grading presents some questions, too. Coursera’s humanities courses use peer-to-peer grading, with students first having to show that they can match a professor’s grading of an assignment, and then grade the work of five classmates, in return for which their work is graded by five fellow students. But, Ms. Koller said, what would happen to a student who cannot match the professor’s grading has not been determined.
It will be some time before it is clear how the new MOOCs affect enrollment at profit-making online institutions, and whether they will ultimately cannibalize enrollment at the very universities that produce them. Still, many professors dismiss that threat.
“There’s talk about how online education’s going to wipe out universities, but a lot of what we do on campus is help people transition from 18 to 22, and that is a complicated thing,” said Mr. Page, the Michigan professor, adding that MOOCs would be most helpful to “people 22 to 102, international students and smart retired people.”
Eventually, Ms. Koller said, students may be able to enroll in a set of MOOCs and emerge with something that would serve almost the same function as a traditional diploma.
“We’re not planning to become a higher-education institution that offers degrees,” she said, “but we are interested in what can be done with these informal types of certification.”
The high cost of college tuition is encouraging more and more of today’s high school students to consider alternatives to the traditional college experience. While the old standbys of going into the workforce, volunteering, or traveling still exist, there are new options emerging as well that offer different, but still valuable pathways into a future career and a fulfilling life after high school. These programs may not have yet earned the cachet that traditional college degrees carry, but they’re quickly becoming solid places for students to learn, grow, and find out what their true passion is in life, without shelling out tens of thousands of dollars in tuition in the process. Curious as to what these kinds of college alternatives have to offer? Read on to learn about innovative new programs that can help you learn, get certification, start a business, travel, and make the most of your first few years in the real world.
Udacity grew out of a collection of free computer science classes offered through Stanford in 2011. Over the past year, the site has grown to offer a wider range of technical courses, with plans to enroll up to 500,000 students over the next few semesters. Behind the program are Sebastian Thrun, David Stavens, and Mike Sokolsky, all roboticists and Stanford researchers. Thrun helped to fund the program with his own money, and its first courses enrolled an impressive 160,000 students from 190 different nations. Not only does Udacity make it possible to learn incredibly useful technical skills online, it also does it for free, offering certificates of completion for all students who enroll in the courses and finish the assignments.
Want to take classes at the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Michigan, Stanford, and Princeton? Through Coursera you can, and you won’t pay a dime in tuition. Students can choose from a variety of courses, watch lectures, learn through interactive exercises, and work with other students from around the world. Lectures are broken down into short video segments, which can make concepts easier to grasp and also allow learners more flexibility in when and where they tackle the learning process. While students won’t get diplomas or certification after completing courses, they can be a valuable way to build knowledge and add educational experiences to a resume.
The Minerva Project is ideal for students who do want to head to college, but don’t want to do it in the usual manner. Minerva is essentially an elite university on par with Ivy League institutions, but with a couple of twists that make the education it offers much more relevant in today’s world. First, tuition is a fraction of that charged at top Ivy League schools, coming in at an estimated $20,000 a year, though it could be less for some students, which will help it be much more accessible to middle-class students. Secondly, students are encouraged to take introductory courses for free through online sites like edX and Khan Academy, as Minerva will only offer upper-level courses. Thirdly, and most interestingly, students enrolled with Minerva will take courses online but will live in dorm-style apartments together, often moving from city to city to learn while exploring the world. Minerva is expected to launch fully in 2014, but it’s already attracted a hefty amount of attention from the media and educational experts.
Chairman and CEO of MicroStrategy Michael J. Saylor established the Saylor Foundation in 1999, and since 2008 the organization has been pushing forward its Free Education Initiative which offers more than 241 coursers in the most popular majors in the U.S. free of charge to students around the world. Students can choose from the courses, watch lectures, get access to free and open textbooks, and assess their learning through quizzes and tests. While at present the site doesn’t offer any form of credentialing, changes are on the horizon, as plans to use badges to represent knowledge learned are in progress, allowing students to showcase the knowledge they’ve gained on resumes and on the web. Free courses, free textbooks, and the ability to show proof that courses were completed may just change the way the next generation of workers learns and prepares for their careers.
Entrepreneur, founder of PayPal, and venture capitalist Peter Thiel believes that students who want to start their own business ventures don’t need a college education to do so, and he’s willing to put his money where his mouth is. Thiel created a fellowship which offers $100,000 to 20 students under 20 if they will quit college and start their own companies. While rolling the dice on a business venture is always risky, Thiel believes that college is as well, often not delivering the payoff that it promises and requiring hefty investments in tuition to boot. As the education bubble looks set to burst, Thiel may have a point (though he has been criticized for his hypocritical views on the matter) and he may not be alone in the coming years in helping to encourage bright young entrepreneurs to set out sans college degree.
The solution to finding enough workers to fill STEM jobs could lie in programs like those being pioneered by Zoho founder Sridhar Vembu. Vembu took 100 kids with no college education, trained them through hands-on programs that didn’t emphasize theory or math, and produced a group of effective and creative IT employees for his budding company. While currently programs like this don’t exist in the U.S., his success with building an impressive IT team quickly and efficiently is something that’s drawing a lot of attention and may become common practice in startups that want to train workers from the ground up.
One of the biggest and perhaps most just criticisms of free online courses is that students have no way to record what courses they’ve taken or that they’ve completed them satisfactorily. That may be changing. Mozilla, the company behind the popular web browser Firefox, is working on the Open Badges project, which is designed to let people display their achievements in online learning, job training, or after-school programs on their website, blog, Facebook, LinkedIn profile, or online resume. Mozilla isn’t alone in working on digital badges, however, as the MacArthur Foundation has partnered with them, putting millions of dollars in funding on the line to encourage people to compete to come up with a new way to build, authenticate, and display these badges on the web. It’s only a matter of time before digital badges become a widespread and standardized way of showing off online learning, completely free of charge.
Students who have great business ideas and the motivation to start them without heading to college first, may want to check out this entrepreneurial resource. The site is the brainchild of MBA Nillie Goldman and is designed to help individuals of all ages and levels of experience build and expand a business. Visitors to the site will find comprehensive lists of accelerator programs, resources to get in touch with investors, lessons on contacts, social media, and privacy, as well as a whole host of tips and tools that are essential to any startup. It links to just about any resource a young entrepreneur could need, the majority of them free to access and use throughout the startup process. While there is never a guarantee that a business will be successful with the help of guides like these, students can certainly improve their chances.
In years past, it would have been nearly impossible to score free courses from MIT and Harvard. Yet today, students can simply head to edX and take high-quality classes from these two prestigious institutions right from the web. edX is the product of a partnership between the two schools, which works to offer free educational resources to people around the world. Starting in the fall of 2012, students can enroll in a wide range of courses from the two institutions, and it is expected that over time other colleges and universities will offer their own course content through the program as well.
The combination of high college tuition, low starting salaries, and few entry-level jobs has left many college-age young adults feeling pretty frustrated. The UnCollege site was the product of that frustration. Lead by Thiel Fellowship choice and education expert Dale J. Stephens, the site aims to show young people that college isn’t the only path to success and that those with talent, motivation, and determination can actually become quite successful on their own. Stephens gives talks on the movement around the country and the site offers a reading list for any individuals hoping to learn why college may not be the best option for them. This year, UnCollege is also hosting a Hackdemic Camp, which aims to inform young people about alternatives to college, starting a business, and getting by without a degree.
Through P2PU, prospective students will not only get the chance to learn, they’ll also get the chance to share what they know with others. The grassroots site was designed with the goal of helping people engage in lifelong learning outside of the sphere of traditional formal higher education. At present, there is no accreditation process in place, but the site is working on developing a way to allow users to display digital badges marking that they’ve completed a course. P2PU is just one of the growing number of free, open, higher educational opportunities online that will undoubtedly shape post-secondary education in the coming decade.
Eren Bali and Gagan Biyani launched Udemy in 2010, a site that serves as a platform where instructors can build online courses on topics of their choosing, currently including everything from the arts to fitness to technology. The majority of courses offered through Udemy are free, but some come with a charge, especially those from noted or expert teachers. Because anyone can build a course on Udemy, it offers students a much wider range of educational subject matter than many other similar sites which can be incredibly useful in a host of real world applications. What really sets Udemy apart from other online learning applications is that teaching is done live, through video streams, which much more closely mimics the traditional classroom experience.
It’s hard to find a field that hasn’t been radically changed by technology, and education is no exception. Few classrooms these days operate without digital tools, gadgets, or applications that have made it easier for teachers to track student progress and tailor lessons to student needs and interests. While the tools of today are great, there are even more great technological teaching tools and practices on the horizon, many of which are just starting to be adopted in the classroom or are just making it out of the developmental stages. These tools offer new and often very promising ways to connect with students and improve the quality of education offered in schools. Read on to learn about just a few of the websites, programs, and amazing technologies of the future teachers and students alike will soon be using.
ClassConnect is a startup founded by teen entrepreneur Eric Simons (who spent months living on AOL’s campus while he worked on the project). Inspired by his own difficulties finding interesting lessons in high school, Simons wanted to create a place where teachers could more easily mix up their instruction. ClassConnect does just that, making it easy for teachers to build, store, and share lessons with colleagues, students, or parents, which may just help teachers grab the interest of bright young minds like Simons.
19Pencils is another great up-and-coming tool for teachers that allows them to more easily manage and share class content. Through the site, which is still in beta testing, teachers can build a class website to which they can post lessons, links to other class sites, quizzes, and even fun educational content for students.
Some laughed when Google announced it was working on a pair of augmented reality smart glasses, hopefully for release in 2013. Yet the device is incredibly impressive and could eventually become a common sight in classrooms, just like the once much maligned iPad. The glasses have incredible potential as a learning tool, and it’s only a matter of time before teachers are using the cutting-edge gadget in classrooms around the nation.
Educational publisher Pearson is taking the future of educational content development into their own hands, through amazing resources like the Online Learning Exchange. The site is still in its first stages but has already been part of pilot programs in states like Texas, where teachers can use resources offered by Pearson to build, share, and discuss their lesson plans. Even better, it’s easy for teachers to enrich lessons with videos, documents, and even games.
Writing coach is another pilot program by Pearson, which is also getting a lot of use in Texas classrooms. With writing being a skill that many students need to hone, the timing couldn’t be better for an educational tool like this to emerge. The PHWC is an online curriculum that guides teachers and students through a series of activities and projects designed to bolster writing skills in grades six through 12. It’s flexible, personalizable, and will likely inspire many similar programs in the coming years.
More and more modern classroom interactions are taking place online, and programs like Three Ring can help to make that process a whole lot more streamlined. Through Three Ring, teachers can easily digitize student work, create online portfolios, and even assess student progress. Even better, it can all be done right from a smart phone.
Recently launched education startup ClassDojo is a really great tool for teachers who need a little help with behavior management. Through the site, teachers can offer students real-time feedback on their behavior and can print out daily reports for students and parents. It could quickly become a popular way for teachers to spend less time on classroom management and more time on actually teaching lessons.
While many of the tools on this list are already pretty accessible to teachers, those like Virginia Tech’s CAVE facility aren’t. CAVE, or Computer Augmented Virtual Environments, allows students to strap on VR glasses and enter a 3-D, immersive, multi-person environment, where students can quite literally become immersed in their lessons. So far, the school has developed a virtual Jamestown, entomology projects, and a virtual dandelion. While the technology isn’t widespread now, with so many amazing and highly futuristic applications, more schools, museums, and science centers could be building their own CAVE tools in the future.
Another amazing high-tech tool for education being developed by a top university is cognitive tutoring. Programmers and educators at Carnegie Mellon have teamed to build customizable software that adapts to student needs and abilities, increasing or decreasing difficulty as the student needs it. This sort of AI-based educational program offers some great possibilities for students who are struggling or those who just want to test their skills, and could prove to be a valuable educational tool for any school willing to develop their own versions of the software.
One of the best benefits about future teaching tools is their ability to help students who have learning disabilities. Fast ForWord is one example of a new product, designed around neuroscience research on dyslexia, that helps students with difficulty reading and writing improve their skills and reach grade-level standards. Even better, the new program is designed to mesh with No Child Left Behind mandates, which can make it easier on teachers to incorporate it into the classroom.
While you might think of EEGs as something you only use in a hospital, in the future they might become a more common sight in the classroom as well. EEG is short for electroencephalography, and is a method of recording electrical activity along the scalp to measure brain activity. Currently, there are only a few educational companies working with EEGs for educational purposes, like NeuroSky, the company we’ve linked to here. Yet EEG technology offers teachers unprecedented insights into the minds of students, and as neuroscience research exerts greater influence over classroom practices, teachers could find themselves administering their own brain wave analysis to check student learning.
Blackboard not working for you? Startup program Lore makes it simple to manage your course, using a social media-like format to help students turn in assignments, have discussions, and share ideas. While it could work for any type of class, Lore and other sites like it could be a big help for teachers working in distance learning.
GlobalScholar isn’t new, the company has been around since 2006 and is a division of the education giant Scantron. But it is part of a growing number of tools designed to help teachers meet district standards, organize records, develop lessons, and even engage in professional development. Used in 1,000 school districts nationwide, GlobalScholar’s Pinnacle Suite and other similar software are fast becoming requirements in the modern teacher’s repertoire, which may not be a bad thing as districts tighten belts and demand bigger and better increases in test scores from teachers.
Pearson isn’t the only educational publisher looking to think outside the usual textbook box. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is also working on their own high-tech educational tools, one of which is the very impressive pilot program HMH Fuse. Fuse isn’t computer-based, instead operating exclusively on the iPad. The platform offers Common Core lessons in interactive form for Algebra and Geometry, though others may be rolled out in the coming months. It’s designed to help keep students motivated and to raise their test scores, boasting in-app homework help for students and tracking capabilities for teachers as well.
A pilot program in Arkansas that blends a custom-curriculum with iPad applications is one among many such programs being developed in the United States for use in the K-12 classroom. Educational applications are increasingly playing a major role in teaching, and as new programs are developed and refined, few teachers can expect to stay untouched by the growing trend. Students in the Arkansas classroom got a chance to read iPad based books, Skype with the author in class, and design and built their own adventure stories, an experience that will undoubtedly become more common in the future.
While many schools still ban YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, the reality is that social media offers so many opportunities for learning that it will be increasingly difficult to justify prohibiting students from using it for educational purposes. Already, many students are using sites like Evernote, Skitch, Blogger, and YouTube to develop amazing projects, even in early elementary school. While many social media tools for learning already exist, there will likely be an explosion of new sites in the coming years and new ways for teachers to use existing sites that will make social media an indispensable tool in the classroom.
K-12 classrooms aren’t the only places getting a boost from educational startups. Top Hat Monocle is working to bring disruptive technologies into the college classroom as well, bringing polls, quizzes, and interactive features to students and professors on their laptops and mobile devices. While the site first launched in 2009, it hasn’t seen widespread use until fairly recently, as more teachers look for ways to shake up the traditional university model of education. Results are promising, as professors report an average increase of 3% to 5% in grades.
These days, it isn’t enough to reach out to students just over a laptop. Tools like Socrative understand that, engaging students through educational games and exercises via smartphones, laptops, and tablets. Teachers simply choose activities for students that relate to their lessons, students interact with the content, and teachers can then measure how much students are taking away from a lesson. It’s simple and could be a quick and easy way for teachers to gauge student progress.
With school districts around the nation fretting about STEM education, tools like Late Nite Labs could become an ever more important asset in a teacher’s arsenal. Schools that cannot afford lab equipment or who just want to give students extra practice can use the program to complete virtual labs, enhancing STEM education in chemistry and biology without substantial increasing school budgets or requiring a large amount of new resources.
From middle school frog dissections to medical school surgical practice, simulation technology is helping to give students at all levels a better biological education. While tools like these have been in use for almost a decade, new, more advanced versions of simulation software are being produced that more adequately replicate real-life scenarios for learners. These kinds of programs can be useful in teaching a wide range of subjects, from medicine, like we mentioned, to driver’s ed to engineering.
On June 11, Apple showed its next operating system for iPhones and iPads. It offered maps and speech recognition, plus music and movies on iTunes, all tied via the Internet to Apple’s “cloud” of servers.
A week later, Microsoft, known better for software, demonstrated the Surface tablet, its answer to the iPad. The Surface interacts with both the Web and Microsoft’s cloud, called Windows Azure. And, last Wednesday, Google introduced its newest cloud-connected phone and tablet, as well as a media player called Nexus Q. The player works with the devices, the Internet and the Google cloud.
Remarkably fast, a multibillion-dollar industry is moving away from personal computers made mostly with Microsoft Windows software and Intel semiconductor chips. The combined revenue from these largely so-called Wintel desktops and laptops last year was about $70 billion at Dell and Hewlett-Packard. But these companies played virtually no part in the June shows from Apple, Microsoft and Google.
Asked what part it hoped to play in the cloud-dominated future, Dell declined to comment. An H.P. spokesman said in a statement that his company had computer servers and software in “eight of 10 of the world’s most trafficked sites, four out of five of the world’s largest search engines, the three most popular social media properties in the U.S.” He said nothing about PCs.
The tech future also poses challenges for Intel, which has been diversifying. Its chips are now in Apple computers and a host of other devices. Intel still has a significant place in the market, but often with lower-margin chips, and increased competition. Another chip company, Nvidia, got a shout from Google’s stage.
We are seeing a new business ecosystem with all sorts of mobile and cloud-connected devices. Each is a powerful computer, with connections to a nearly infinite amount of data storage and processing in the cloud.
“We’re entering this era where consumer electronics is the hardware, and the software and the cloud,” said Matt Hershenson, Google’s hardware director. His view increasingly holds for business computing, too.
Coincidentally, Friday was the fifth anniversary of the iPhone’s introduction. Next week, cloud-based software applications for the iPhone from outside developers will have their fourth anniversary. And, already, cloud devices that Google called experimental last year are now almost mainstream.
People now use their iPhones and tablets in their jobs. More than five million businesses write documents and swap spreadsheets in Google’s cloud-based applications. Microsoft, with arguably the most at risk in this transition, has 273 business and finance applications for sale in its cloud store, Azure Marketplace.
In the new ecosystem, many rules are still being worked out. Amazon, with its Kindle tablet and a successful online computing cloud and software store, may yet be a significant player. So may Barnes & Noble, which has a decent tablet and apps in the Nook reader but lacks a big cloud data center.
A few things are already clear. Power now centers on controlling millions of computers tied together in the cloud, with a complementary marketplace where people can find, sell and manage applications. Few physical stores sell software anymore, but sales channels still matter. Even the iPhone did not really take off until it had apps, sold through Apple’s store.
Those apps were written mostly by outside software developers. Developers have been important to the industry for decades. If you keep thousands of them happy with decent software-making tools and a big potential audience, as Microsoft learned, they will build products that make you essential. When the PC came along, these were games like Flight Simulator and productivity software like Lotus; now we have Angry Birds and modifications of Google Apps.
In the Wintel world, new versions of Microsoft Windows came out every few years, with major software projects tied to desktops and laptops. By contrast, in less than five years Apple has announced six versions of its mobile operating system. Google’s operating system for cloud-connected laptops, called Chrome, is updated every six weeks. The June meetings were intended to get developers working on consumer products that would be out by Christmas.
“Urgency has a whole new meaning now; you can’t slip,” said Andy Peterson, a senior software engineer at L4 Mobile, which makes mobile applications for companies like Sony and MTV. He was one of 5,500 developers at Google’s I/O conference last week. “I started at the company last September,” he said, “and I’m on my fourth application.”
Still, he says, the pace and the ability to get a creation into so many hands is exciting.
Dell and H.P. might not be joyful, but should they be glum? With so many devices, the consistent experience may be guided by centrally managed cloud software, but hardware is where the experience lives. That is why Steve Jobs was so long adamant that Apple control both hardware and software, and why even now Apple is picky about which independently produced apps are allowed in its store.
Microsoft apparently showed off the Surface without much notice to longtime hardware partners but could now bring them in to build it. Google’s strongest outside relationship with a hardware maker seems to be with Samsung. Google’s new tablet was made by Asustek of Taiwan.
Google says it is open to working with the incumbents — but these companies have to completely reimagine themselves, centering on using their esoteric knowledge of how business uses technology, rather than how to make a cheaper PC.
“What H.P. and Dell can do is understand the needs of the enterprise,” said Sundar Pichai, senior vice president for Chrome at Google. “They can say, ‘Here is our tablet, we have phones, here is how it will work across your company.’ We don’t have a sales force that can do that.”
That may mean giving up on the consumer market, more or less. But it beats being a relic of the old world.
Entradas
Comentarios
