World-Shaker

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15 Free Learning Tools You’ve Probably Never Heard Of

Here are three:

1. THE FACULTY PROJECT

   Through The Faculty Project, learners can get access to professors from prestigious schools like Dartmouth, Vassar, Duke, and Northwestern, to name just a few. There are dozens of courses and lectures to choose from, covering a broad spectrum of topics. Launched just this year, the site is slowly building up a great collection of resources that can help students learn through video, PDF, PowerPoint, discussion boards, and educational articles.

2. TEXTBOOK REVOLUTION

   There are a growing number of sites out there that are dedicated to providing users with access to free textbooks. Textbook Revolution is among them, and while it hasn’t received as much attention as some others, it’s still a solid place to look for free educational resources. Currently, the site offers up access to dozens of textbooks, ranging in topic from accounting to chemistry.

3. LEARNTHAT

   Learnthat is an excellent place to explore tutorials that cover business, technology, and finance. Visitors to the site can learn how to improve their skills in Excel, digital marketing, or even management, through hundreds of helpful articles, videos, and photos.

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Blended Learning: A Disruptive Innovation [INFOGRAPHIC]

Infographic Created by Knewton and Column Five Media

Learn to Code with Harvard’s Intro to Computer Science Course And Other Free Tech Classes

Harvard has made this course available free to anyone—via YouTube, iTunes, and the course page—with a series of lectures filmed during the Fall 2011 semester. The class is led by David J. Malan, an enthusiastic young professor and Senior Lecturer on Computer Science at Harvard, and himself a product of Harvard’s Computer Science program. Professor Malan has also offered Harvard’s CS50 as a MOOC through edX. In the introductory lecture to CS50 (above), Malan promises that “this is one of those rare courses that actually squeezes your brain so much and your schedule so much that by the end of the semester you actually feel smarter.”

"Digital instruction faces limits. Online, you will never smell a burning resistor or get your hands wet in a biology lab. Yet the economics of distributing instruction over the Web are so favorable that they seem to threaten anyone building a campus or hiring teachers. At edX, Agarwal says, the same three-person team of a professor plus assistants that used to teach analog circuit design to 400 students at MIT now handles 10,000 online and could take a hundred times more."

— Coursera, edX, and MOOCs Are Changing the Online Education Business

"Udacity may or may not survive, but as with Napster, there’s no containing the story it tells: “It’s possible to educate a thousand people at a time, in a single class, all around the world, for free.” To a traditional academic, this sounds like crazy talk."

—

More Clay. More truth.

» Napster, Udacity, and the Academy Clay Shirky

(via fred-wilson)

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Udemy’s new iPad app turns idle time into a learning opportunity

With this iPad app, the content will be even more accessible to students who can learn anytime, anywhere (assuming they have an iPad, that is). Features include:

● Watch on the go: Access to all video and audio lectures, presentations, and any other course materials right from the app.

● View offline: Save courses and watch them wherever you go. Learning is no longer confined to the classroom or students’ desktop computers.

● Engage from anywhere: Ask questions or start a conversation with instructors and other students while working within the app.

● Discover new courses: Enroll in any course from Udemy’s entire course catalog of more than 5,000 courses published by experts from around the world.

Before We Flip Classrooms, Let's Rethink What We're Flipping To →

A refreshing and challenging take on the Flipped Classroom Model. I’d recommend a read regardless of where your thoughts fall. Here’s an excerpt:

Instructionism vs. Constructionism

It seems to me that some recent MOOCs and start-up ideas — which at the outset appear exciting and promising — are basically indifferent to what we know about what constitutes good learning. All of a sudden, John Dewey, Jean Piaget, Lev Vygotsky, Maria Montessori, Seymour Papert, Jerome Bruner, Howard Gardner, Allan Collins, John Seely Brown — more than 100 years of theory about cognition and learning-by-doing — are being forgotten.

Branded instructional online channels playing speaker-centered videos and tutorials on a range of themes and topics, such as TED and Khan Academy, claim to break new ground with the ability to teach you anything, including physics and programming fundamentals.

But think about it: they are using rather traditional instructional methods. Instructional TV (ITV) is half a century old. While this medium is compelling when produced well, isn’t it time to make use of new technology to move beyond streaming impersonal frontal teaching, instructional video tutorials or filmed lectures aimed at mass audiences?

Free Online Education is Now Illegal in Minnesota →

That wasn’t an earthquake. Just the sound of an entire state taking one big step backward.

Pearson Moves Deeper Into Online Education With $650-Million Purchase →

infoneer-pulse:

Pearson, a publishing and education company whose products include books, newspapers, and online services, announced a major acquisition on Tuesday that will deepen its commitment to becoming a major player in online education.

The company, which owns the Financial Times and the Penguin Group book publisher, shelled out $650-million in cash to buy EmbanetCompass, a business that provides support services to colleges and universities that are moving their programs online.

The announcement came on the heels of Pearson’s move last year to start a free, cloud-based learning-management system called OpenClass.

zc» via The Chronicle of Higher Education (Subscription may be required for some content)

Rules of Engagement; or, How to Build Better Online Discussion →

Here are three of the ideas:

• Divide students into staged groups that rotate with different assignments. Make one group the “first responders,” the second group the “arguers,” and the third group the “consensus builders,” to insure that students engage with their peers.
• Teach and model “social citation.” Rather than include “I saw that one of you explained how condensation affects a steam engine,” try this: “Check out Beth’s explanation of the effects of condensation on the steam engine for a good model.” On some assignments, require that students cite posts from their peers that they support or take issue with.
• Seed a discussion by requiring some students to summarize exclusively. Obviously this responsibility will have to rotate as well, but it’s a good way to assist readers in quickly understanding the differences between positions in a discussion.

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Students and Technology 2012 [INFOGRAPHIC]

Read the accompanying article (and download the PDF version of the infographic) here: http://www.jasonrhode.com/ecar2012

emergentfutures:

Google Launches Free Tool To Let You Run Your Own Online Courses

Sensing the excitement from online education tools like edX, Google has just unveiled a (very beta) version of its own course building software. If you’ve ever wanted to run your own online courses, this might be worth your time.

Full Story: edudemic

A) This is very exciting stuff.

B) They offer course design advice, which I’m not too sure I trust. Especially since they think you can write the course level objectives in 30 minutes.

The 4 Types Of Students Who Should Consider Online Learning →

Here’s one:

• Students who get good grades and are bored with school: If a student consistently brings home perfect report cards, it could be a sign that they are not being challenged by the traditional school curriculum. If this is the case, parents should schedule a parent-teacher conference to discuss what options there are for enhancement. Some schools will allow advanced students to move up to the next grade. If that is not a choice, adding a few extra higher level online courses to a student’s schedule may be a great way to enrich their education.

Graphics Tips from an Instructional Designer →

Some interesting advice.

• Use job related graphics as they help the learners to relate to their jobs and thus promote easy analysis of content.
• Simple graphics like line diagrams help the learner more than the 2D or 3D graphics.
• Using illustrations, we can effectively explain the internal parts of any machinery or the anatomy of the human body, which is NOT easy using real photographs.
• Show an overview of the entire process, and then go deep into the details of each step, thus giving the complete picture to the learner.

5 Tips On Developing a Quality Elearning Course →

Yup.

TIP 2: Quality is meeting mutual expectations – The [student] should be educated about what to expect from an eLearning course, and also on the key features of a good eLearning course. For example:

• The course should have ’What’s In It For Me (WIFM)’, so that the learner is motivated to take the course.
• Learning objectives should be clearly defined and achieved.
• Course navigation should be easy and user friendly, with a help page to guide the learner.
• Depending on the various types of content, appropriate learning strategies should be used.
• Audio, video, visual and text should be balanced for easy learning.
• Each learning object should have a formative assessment to reinforce learning.