Online Educational Delivery Models: A Descriptive View
"Although there has been a long history of distance education, the creation of online education occurred just over a decade and a half ago - a relatively short time in academic terms. Early course delivery via the web had started by 1994, soon followed by a more structured approach using the new category of course management systems.1 Since that time, online education has slowly but steadily grown in popularity, to the point that in the fall of 2010, almost one-third of U.S. postsecondary students were taking at least one course online. Fast forward to 2012: a new concept called Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) is generating widespread interest in higher education circles. Most significantly, it has opened up strategic discussions in higher education cabinets and boardrooms about online education. Stanford, MIT, Harvard, the University of California–Berkeley, and others have thrown their support - in terms of investment, resources, and presidential backing - behind the transformative power of MOOCs and online education. National media outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and The Atlantic are touting what David Brooks has called "the campus tsunami" of online education.
Unfortunately, a natural side effect of this new interest in education and educational technology is an increase in hype and in shallow descriptions of the potential for new educational models to replace the established system. All too often, the public discussion has become stuck in a false dichotomy of traditional vs. online - a dichotomy that treats all online models as similar and that ignores blended or hybrid approaches. This false dichotomy is even more evident now that discussions are spilling into national media forums. But in fact, as my colleague Molly Langstaff has described, educational technology is interacting with innovative educational courses and programs to create not only new language but also multiple models for delivering education."
(Phil Hill, 1 November 2012, Educause Quarterly)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
edX: free courses from leading universities
"EdX is a not-for-profit enterprise of its founding partners Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that features learning designed specifically for interactive study via the web. Based on a long history of collaboration and their shared educational missions, the founders are creating a new online-learning experience with online courses that reflect their disciplinary breadth. Along with offering online courses, the institutions will use edX to research how students learn and how technology can transform learning–both on-campus and worldwide. Anant Agarwal, former Director of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, serves as the first president of edX. EdX's goals combine the desire to reach out to students of all ages, means, and nations, and to deliver these teachings from a faculty who reflect the diversity of its audience. EdX is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts and is governed by MIT and Harvard."
(edX, 2012)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Sherry Turkle: Alone Together (I share therefore I am)
"Sherry Turkle is a professor, author, consultant, researcher, and licensed clinical psychologist who has spent the last 30 years researching the psychology of people's relationships with technology. She is the Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT. Her many books include a trilogy on digital technology and human relationships: 'The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit,' 'Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet,' and most recently, 'Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other.' Her investigations show that technology doesn't just catalyze changes in what we do -- it affects how we think."
(Sherry Turkle, 2011)
Fig.1 "TEDxUIUC - Sherry Turkle - Alone Together", Uploaded by TEDxTalks on 25 Mar 2011.
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Women in technology: Limor Fried
"Limor Fried was the sort of third-grader who took apart VCRs for fun. Gradually, she discovered that a hobby could become a degree -- a bachelor's and then a master's in electrical engineering and computer science at MIT. Finally, she discovered it could become a business. During her student years, Fried would post photographs and detailed instructions of her latest experiments in hardware hacking. First, she built an audience, and then a company, Adafruit Industries. ...
Fried's approach is sometimes called 'open-source hardware' -- similar to open-source software, but instead of the source code being open and malleable, the source materials are. Is there something anti-corporate in the way that she likes to encourage the hacking of consumer products?
'Absolutely not, I'm totally a staunch capitalist,' she says. She just thinks hardware hacking is good business. Adafruit has become something of a business incubator itself, inspiring others to start similar businesses."
(David Zax, Fast Company)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Video for Wikipedia: Guide to Best Practices
"This new effort takes advantage of a movement toward open video - a movement that has its roots in the free software movement that is largely powering the web today and which, through companies such as Apache, IBM, Mozilla, Oracle and Red Hat, has resulted in trillions of dollars of value creation for the stakeholders involved. The open or open-source video movement recognizes the contributions from, but also the limitations inherent in, the video work of industry leaders such as Adobe, Apple, and Microsoft. Flash, Quicktime, Windows Media and Silverlight are handsome technologies. But they have been developed and controlled by commercial companies that often protect themselves against innovations by outside coders, designers, developers, programmers - technologists, lawyers, producers, and educators keen to move away from proprietary solutions that are delivered for the benefit of shareholders first and the billions of everyday people who connect via the web a pale second.
The open video movement recognizes the importance of rights and licensing strategies designed to create profit or serve national interests, but it is critical of systems that prohibit access to film and sound assets becoming part of our collective audiovisual canon. Many film and sound resources digitized for preservation, for example, do not appear online because of dated copyright rules; and some of the great investments (millions of dollars in fact) by, for example, the U.K. government in film and sound resource digitization result in materials being put online only behind educational and national paywalls that keep students in Nairobi and Nashville from using London-based resources in their work.
Enabling video to catch up to the open-source movement on the web goes to the heart of our efforts to improve our understanding of the world. The central technologies of the web - HTML, HTTP, and TCP/IP - are open for all to build upon and improve, and video’s future should be similarly unobstructed."
(Peter B. Kaufman, 2010)
Fig.1 Kid Kameleon, CC BY SA NC
2). Video for Wikipedia and the Open Web October 2010 An Intelligent Television White Paper PETER B. KAUFMAN INTELLIGENT TELEVISION WWW.INTELLIGENTTELEVISION.COM THE OPEN VIDEO ALLIANCE Version 1.0
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
